In this Book

summary
Jean Wahl (1888–1974), once considered by the likes of Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gabriel Marcel to be among the greatest French philosophers, has today nearly been forgotten outside France. Yet his influence on French philosophical thought can hardly be overestimated. Levinas wrote that “during over a half century of teaching and research, [Wahl] was the life force of the academic, extra-academic, and even, to a degree anti-academic philosophy necessary to a great culture.” And Deleuze, for his part, commented that “Apart from Sartre, who remained caught none the less in the trap of the verb to be, the most important philosopher in France was Jean Wahl.” Besides engaging with the likes of Bataille, Bergson, Deleuze, Derrida, Levinas, Maritain, and Sartre, Wahl also played a significant role, in some cases almost singlehandedly, in introducing French philosophy to movements like existentialism, and American pragmatism and literature, and thinkers like Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and Heidegger. Yet Wahl was also an original philosopher and poet in his own right. This volume of selections from Wahl’s philosophical writings makes a selection of his most important work available to the English-speaking philosophical community for the first time. Jean Wahl was Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967, save during World War II, which he spent in the United States, having escaped from the Drancy internment camp. His books to appear in English include The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America (Open Court, 1925), The Philosopher's Way (Oxford UP, 1948), A Short History of Existentialism (Philosophical Library, 1949), and Philosophies of Existence (Schocken, 1969).

Table of Contents

restricted access Download Full Book
  1. Title Page, Copyright Page
  2. pp. i-vi
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Contents
  2. pp. vii-x
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Existence, Experience, and Transcendence: An Introduction to Jean Wahl
  2. Ian Alexander Moore And Alan D. Schrift
  3. pp. 1-31
  4. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Preface to Toward the Concrete
  2. pp. 32-53
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Commentary on a Passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
  2. pp. 54-89
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Hegel and Kierkegaard
  2. pp. 90-106
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Heidegger and Kierkegaard: An Investigation into the Original Elements of Heidegger’s Philosophy
  2. pp. 107-131
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. The Problem of Choice: Existence and Transcendence in Jaspers’s Philosophy
  2. pp. 132-151
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Subjectivity and Transcendence
  2. pp. 152-215
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Nietzsche and the Death of God: A Note on Jaspers’s Nietzsche
  2. pp. 216-219
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Poetry and Metaphysics
  2. pp. 220-236
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Order and Disorder in Nietzsche’s Thought
  2. pp. 237-255
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Experience and Transcendence; or, An Ontological Journey
  2. pp. 256-276
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. 277-278
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. A Bibliography of Works by Jean Wahl
  2. pp. 279-286
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Index of Names
  2. pp. 287-292
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy: John D. Caputo, series editor
  2. pp. 293-294
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
Back To Top

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.