Tran Duc Thao

Trần Đức Thảo (Từ Sơn, Bắc Ninh, 26 September 1917 – Paris, 24 April 1993) was a Vietnamese philosopher. His work (written primarily in French) attempted to unite phenomenology with Marxist philosophy. His work had some currency in France in the 1950s and 1960s, and was cited favorably by Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Louis Althusser.

Born in Hanoi, French Indochina, he was educated there, completing his baccalaureate at 17. In 1936, he continued his studies in France, becoming a student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the École Normale Supérieure where he wrote a dissertation for a diplôme d’études supérieures on Hegel. In 1943, he completed his agrégation with a thesis on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, being received premier ex aequo alongside Jules Vuillemin. Through the 1940s, he worked on his first book, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. The book argued that the defects of the phenomenological account of consciousness could only be remedied by the Marxist account of labor and society. In the 1940s and 50s, Trần Đức Thảo’s ideas achieved some currency among the elite philosophical circles of France. At the same time, he became an active anti-colonialist, publishing articles in Jean-Paul Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s journal Les Temps modernes about colonialism in Indochina; these articles were read by Frantz Fanon and other anticolonialists. From October to December 1945, Trần Đức Thảo was jailed by the French government as a threat to its security.

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