French philosophy changed dramatically in the second quarter of the twentieth century.
About the Author: Stefanos Geroulanos is Assistant Professor of Modern European Intellectual History at New York University..
This intellectual history of these developments argues That at their heart lay a new Atheism That rejected humanism as insufficient and ultimately violent.
This argument, which was to be paramount for existentialism and structuralism, came to dominate postwar thought.
In response, they contributed to a new belief That man should no longer be viewed as the basis for existence, thought, and ethics; rather, human nature became dependent on other concepts and structures, including Being, language, thought, and culture.
In the wake of World War I and, later, the Nazi and Soviet disasters, major philosophers such as Koj ve, Levinas, Heidegger, Koyr , Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hyppolite argued That man could no longer fill the void left by the "death of God" without also calling up the worst in human history and denigrating the dignity of the human subject.
French philosophy changed dramatically in the second quarter of the twentieth century
