The last twenty years of French philosophy have been more a matter of assessing and reviving the past than of breaking out in new directions. A particularly striking illustration is the fact that the two most prominent figures during the period have been philosophers who were contemporaries of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty: Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur. Indeed, both Levinas and Ricoeur were important figures in the history of existential phenomenology. But they were also, though in quite different ways, outsiders to the Parisian mainstream dominated by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and eventually went considerably beyond their existential origins. Their recent popularity reflects not only a renewed interest in the subject-centered philosophy of the 1940s and 1950s but also a rehabilitation of themes and emphases that had been long repressed in French thought. After discussing these two major voices from the past, I will conclude with a brief overview of other recent currents.

LEVINAS

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) was literally an outsider; born in Lithuania, he lived there and in the Ukraine before moving to France in 1923, where he received his philosophical training at the University of Strasbourg. After a year of study in Freiburg with Husserl and Heidegger, he lived in Paris without a university position, teaching at and eventually heading the École Normale Israélite Orientale.