“This is a critical introduction to modern French philosophy, commissioned from one of the liveliest contemporary practitioners and intended for an English-speaking readership. The dominant ‘Anglo-Saxon’ reaction to philosophical development in France has for some decades been one of suspicion, occasionally tempered by curiosity but more often hardening into dismissive rejection. But there are signs now of a more sympathetic interest and an increasing readiness to admit and explore shared concerns, even if these are still expressed in a very different idiom and intellectual context.

Vincent Descombes offers here a personal guide to the main movements and figures of the last forty-five years. He traces over this period the evolution of thought from a generation preoccupied with the ‘three H’s’ – Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, to a generation influenced since about 1960 by the ‘three masters of suspicion’ – Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. In this framework he deals in turn with the thought of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, the early structuralists, Foucault, Althusser, Serres, Derrida, and finally Deleuze and Lyotard. The ‘internal’ intellectual history of the period is related to its institutional setting and the wider cultural and political context which has given French philosophy so much of its distinctive character.” (from the back cover, 1980)

First published in French as Le Même et L’Autre, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1979

English edition

Translated by L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding

With a Foreword by Alan Montefiore

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1980

ISBN 0521296722

192 pages

Review (Robert Young, MLN, 1982)

Review (Alasdair MacIntyre, London Review of Books, 1981)

Interview with the author (Praxis, 2012/2013)

Publisher (EN)

Modern French Philosophy (English, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding, 1980, no OCR)

Lo mismo y lo otro: cuarenta y cinco años de filosofía francesca (1933-1978) (Spanish, trans. Elena Benarroch, 2nd ed., 1982/1988, pp 12-15 missing, no OCR)

Το Ίδιο και το Άλλο: 45 χρόνια γαλλικής φιλοσοφίας 1933-1978 (Greek, trans. Λένα Κασίμη, 1984)

Stejné a jiné: Čtyřicetpět let francouzské filosofie (1933-1978) (Czech, trans. Miroslav Petříček jr, 1995, no OCR)

Sovremennaya frantsuzskaya filosofiya (Russian, trans. M.M. Fedorov, 2000, DJVU)