Twentieth-Century French Philosophy

20th-century French philosophy is a strand of contemporary philosophy generally associated with post-World War II French thinkers, although it is directly influenced by previous philosophical movements.

The work of Henri Bergson (1859–1941) is often considered the division point between nineteenth- and twentieth-century French philosophy. Essentially, despite his respect for mathematics and science, he pioneered the French movement of scepticism towards the use of scientific methods to understand human nature and metaphysical reality. Positivism, of which, for example, the French sociologist Durkheim was interested in at the time, was not appropriate, he argued. Unlike later philosophers, Bergson was highly influenced by biology, particularly Darwin's Origin of Species, which was released the year of Bergson's birth. This led Bergson to discuss the 'Body' and 'Self' in detail, arguably prompting the fundamental ontological and epistemological questions to be raised later in the 20th century. Bergson's work was a major influence on Gilles Deleuze, who wrote a monograph on him (Bergsonism) and whose philosophical analyses of cinema (Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image) develop his ideas.

Following debates concerning the foundation of mathematics around the mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), who opposed Bertrand Russell and Frege, various French philosophers started working on philosophy of science, among them Gaston Bachelard, who developed a discontinuist view of science, Jean Cavaillès (1903–1944), Jules Vuillemin (1920-2001), or Georges Canguilhem, who would be a strong influence of Michel Foucault ; in his introduction to Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological, Foucault wrote:

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