Léon Brunschvicg
Template:Short description Template:Infobox philosopher Léon Brunschvicg ({{#invoke:IPA|main}}; 10 November 1869 – 18 January 1944) was a French Idealist philosopher. He co-founded the Revue de métaphysique et de morale with Xavier Léon and Élie Halévy in 1893.
Life
He was born into a Jewish family.<ref>Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, University of Nebraska Press (1999), p. 10</ref><ref>Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France, SUNY Press (1999), p. 96</ref>
From 1895 to 1900 he taught at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen.<ref name="LyCo6">Lycée Pierre Corneille de Rouen - History</ref> In 1897 he completed his thesis under the title {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (The Modalities of Judgement). In 1909 he became professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. He was married to Cécile Kahn,<ref>Visages du féminisme réformiste - C. Brunschvicg Template:Webarchive at bu.univ-angers.fr</ref> a major campaigner for women's suffrage in France, with whom he had four children.
While at the Sorbonne, Brunschvicg was the supervisor for Simone de Beauvoir's master's thesis.
Forced to leave his position at the Sorbonne by the Nazis, Brunschvicg fled to the south of France, where he died at the age of 74. While in hiding, he wrote studies of Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal that were printed in Switzerland. He composed a manual of philosophy dedicated to his teenage granddaughter entitled Héritage de Mots, Héritage d'Idées (Legacy of Words, Legacy of Ideas) which was published posthumously after the liberation of France. His reinterpretation of Descartes has become the foundation for a new idealism.
Brunschvicg defined philosophy as "the mind's methodical self-reflection" and gave a central role to judgement.
The publication of Brunschvicg's oeuvre has been recently completed after unpublished materials held in Russia were returned to his family in 2001.
Works (selected)
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris, Alcan, 1897.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris, Alcan, 1923.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris, Alcan, 1905.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris, Alcan, 1912.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris, Alcan, 1922.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris, Alcan, 1927.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris, Hermann, 1939.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris, Alcan, 1939.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris, La Baconnière, 1942.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris, PUF, 1945.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, 1892–1942, Paris, Minuit, 1948.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris, PUF, 1949.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris, PUF, 1950.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris: PUF, 1951.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris: PUF, 1954.
- {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Paris: PUF, 1958.
- English translations
- Lafrance, Jean-David: "Physics and Metaphysics" and "On the Relations of Intellectual Consciousness and Moral Consciousness" in The Philosophical Forum, 2006, Volume 37, Issue 1, pages 53–74.
Notes
Further reading
- René Boirel, Brunschvicg. Sa vie, son œuvre avec un exposé de sa philosophie, Paris, PUF, 1964.
- Marcel Deschoux, La philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg, Paris, PUF, 1949.
- Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
- Pietro Terzi. Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg's critical idealism : philosophy, history, and science in the third republic (2022)
External links
- 1869 births
- 1944 deaths
- French Jews
- Jewish philosophers
- Writers from Paris
- École Normale Supérieure alumni
- Academic staff of the University of Paris
- French historians of philosophy
- French epistemologists
- Continental philosophers
- 19th-century French writers
- 19th-century French philosophers
- 20th-century French philosophers
- Members of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques
- French male writers
- 19th-century French male writers
- Spinoza scholars