France
20 philosophers
Descartes
Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, is the most famous line in philosophy. Invented a...
Sartre
Existence precedes essence: we are born first, then we define ourselves. Turned down the N...
Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus: we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Won the Nobel Prize at 44, the secon...
Rousseau
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. The Social Contract inspired both the Fr...
Montaigne
Invented the essay as a literary form. His tower library is where he wrote and read surrou...
Foucault
Discipline and Punish opens with a graphic description of a drawing and quartering. Power ...
Derrida
Invented deconstruction, a method of reading that reveals hidden contradictions. There is ...
Beauvoir
The Second Sex is the foundational text of modern feminism. One is not born, but rather be...
Merleau-Ponty
The Phenomenology of Perception is the foundational text of embodied cognition. Argued tha...
Simone Weil
Refused to eat more than the rations of the unemployed out of solidarity. Worked in a Rena...
Baudrillard
Simulacra and Simulation argues reality has been replaced by symbols and signs. The Gulf W...
Lacan
The unconscious is structured like a language. His notorious Seminar lasted 27 years. The ...
Peter Abelard
Sic et Non set church authorities against each other to force students to reason. His love...
Blaise Pascal
Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, yet a thinking reed. The wager argues that belie...
Voltaire
Candide razed the optimism of Leibniz with one disaster after another. We must cultivate o...
Denis Diderot
Chief editor of the Encyclopedie, the great project to map all knowledge. Jailed for a ske...
Henri Bergson
Elan vital is the creative impulse driving evolution. Duree, lived time, differs utterly f...
Emmanuel Levinas
Placed ethics before ontology as first philosophy. The face of the other makes an infinite...
Gilles Deleuze
Philosophy is the creation of concepts. Difference and Repetition is his metaphysical summ...
Jean-Francois Lyotard
The Postmodern Condition defined postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives. Grand...