Jean-Toussaint Desanti

Jean-Toussaint Desanti (October 8, 1914 – January 20, 2002) was a French educator and philosopher known for his work on both the philosophy of mathematics and phenomenology.

The son of Jean-François Desanti and Marie-Paule Colonna, he was born in Ajaccio and studied the philosophy of mathematics with Jean Cavaillès. During World War II, he was a member of the French Resistance, associating with Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux. He joined the French Communist Party in 1943 with his wife Dominique, remaining a member until 1956. Also in 1956, he published his Introduction à l'histoire de la philosophie.

Desanti taught philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, at the Lycée Lakanal, at the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud and at the Sorbonne. His students included Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. In 1968, he published Les Idéalités mathématiques, recherches épistémologiques sur le développement de la théorie des fonctions de variables réelles.

According to Etienne Balibar, Desanti's originality is to be found in his choice to set aside the traditional problems of the criteria or the status of mathematical truth, whether in their Platonic (characterized by the demarcation between the certitude proper to ideal objects and the incertitude of sensible objects) or transcendental (characterized by the definition of the a priori forms of consciousness) forms, in order to attend to another question, that of the "mediations" according to which a "naive" or elementary mathematical theory comes to open itself towards its own generalization and consequent re-foundation in more abstract terms.

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