Overview

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).

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Emmanuel Levinas likened the thought of Jean Wahl to 'a child's question coming from the lips of the wisest of philosophers,' with the potential to disrupt and reorient thanks to its unexpected combination of innocence and intelligence. One of the most interesting and original thinkers of his time, Wahl helped invent existentialism and exerted influence on a host of canonical French philosophers of the twentieth century. Thanks to the marvelous editorial work of Ian Moore and Alan Schift, this collection of Wahl's writings recovers him for a new generation of readers. -Samuel Moyn, Harvard University, author of Origins of the Other

Emmanuel Levinas likened the thought of Jean Wahl to 'a child's question coming from the lips of the wisest of philosophers, ' with the potential to disrupt and reorient thanks to its unexpected combination of innocence and intelligence. One of the most interesting and original thinkers of his time, Wahl helped invent existentialism and exerted influence on a host of canonical French philosophers of the twentieth century. Thanks to the marvelous editorial work of Ian Moore and Alan Schrift, this collection of Wahl's writings recovers him for a new generation of readers. -Samuel Moyn, Harvard University, author of Origins of the Other

Emmanuel Levinas likened the thought of Jean Wahl to 'a child's question coming from the lips of the wisest of philosophers, ' with the potential to disrupt and reorient thanks to its unexpected combination of innocence and intelligence. One of the most interesting and original thinkers of his time, Wahl helped invent existentialism and exerted influence on a host of canonical French philosophers of the twentieth century. Thanks to the marvelous editorial work of Ian Moore and Alan Schift, this collection of Wahl's writings recovers him for a new generation of readers. -Samuel Moyn, Harvard University, author of Origins of the Other

Author Information

Ian Alexander Moore is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and a faculty member at St. John’s College. He is the author of Dialogue on the Threshold: Heidegger and Trakl (SUNY Press, 2022) and Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement (SUNY Press, 2019/2020); editor of Reiner Schürmann’s Neo-Aristotelianism and the Medieval Renaissance (Diaphanes, 2020); coeditor of Jean Wahl’s Transcendence and the Concrete (Fordham University Press, 2017); and translator of texts by Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, Nancy, and Hamacher, among others.

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