French philosophy
French philosophy is philosophy in the French language and by French people. It has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, and postmodernism.
Medieval period
defended Gottschalk of Orbais views on double predestination, a controversy throughout Francia in the 9th century.The Benedictine monk of Marmoutier Abbey Gaunilo is well known for his objection to Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument. Anselm of Laon helped to pioneer biblical hermeneutics. Roscellinus defended nominalism.
Chartres
The cathedral school at Chartres promoted scholarship and Platonism. Scholars included Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, and Gilbert of Poitiers. These men were at the forefront of an intellectual climate now known as the twelfth-century Renaissance, pioneering the Scholastic philosophy that came to dominate medieval thinking throughout Europe.Peter Abelard
was a scholastic philosopher, theologian and logician. The Chambers Biographical Dictionary describes him as "the keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the 12th Century". He wrote Sic et Non and fixed more decisively than anyone before him the scholastic manner of philosophizing. Abelard also clashed with his master William of Champeaux. The story of Abelard's affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary.He helped to establish the ascendancy of the philosophical authority of Aristotle. It was at this time that the completed Organon, and gradually all the other works of Aristotle, first came to be available in the schools. Abelard defended conceptualism on the problem of universals. Abelard also showed a great interest in ethics.
Pope Innocent III accepted Abelard's Doctrine of Limbo, which amended Augustine of Hippo's Doctrine of Original Sin. The Vatican accepted the view that unbaptized babies did not, as at first believed, go straight to Hell but to a special area of limbo, "limbus infantium". They would therefore feel no pain but no supernatural happiness either because, it was held, they would not be able to see the deity that created them.
Jean Buridan
The Condemnations of 1210–1277 at the Sorbonne deemed Aristotle's Physics to be heresy, opening the door to modern science. Jean Buridan was a French philosopher most famous for Buridan's ass and developing the theory of impetus. Nicole Oresme studied with him.Nicholas of Autrecourt
The skeptical views of Nicholas of Autrecourt were condemned as heresy in 1347.Raymond Sebond
University of Toulouse professor Raymond Sebond attempted to reconcile reason and faith.16th century
contributed to French philosophy in Gargantua and Pantagruel a belief in man uncorrupted by institutions, and ridiculed Pyrrhonism in the third book. Logician Petrus Ramus criticized Aristotle. The Dialogues of Ramist Guy De Bruès were influential for entertaining skepticism. Henri Estienne was responsible for the first printed Latin translation of the works of Pyrrhonian skeptic Sextus Empiricus in 1562. Ramus was a victim of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572.Montaigne
was famous for skepticism, summed up in his personal motto of Que sais-je? His work consists of essays filled with autobiographical and casual anecdotes. His writing style came to be highly influential upon Shakespeare, Rousseau and Nietzsche. Montaigne's best known skeptical essay is the Apology for Raymond Sebond, which recapitulates much from Sextus Empiricus.Charron
Montaigne's follower was the Parisian Pierre Charron, notable for De la sagesse.Sanches
professor Francisco Sanches published Quod nihil scitur in 1581.17th century
began in France with the philosophy of René Descartes. His Meditations on First Philosophy changed the primary object of philosophical thought from ontology to epistemology and overcame the Aristotelian dogmatism inherited in philosophy from Scholasticism, the dominant form of thought in preceding centuries, while simultaneously raising some of the most fundamental problems for future generations of philosophers.René Descartes
René Descartes was concerned with the uncertainty in the sciences and the spread of skepticism. Descartes desired to find indubitable ground on which all the sciences could be placed and progressively built. Thus he rejected anything which appeared uncertain and decided to only accept apodeictic knowledge as truth.After invoking the possibility of an omnipotent deceiver to reject the external world, the information given to him from his senses, mathematics and logic, Descartes discovered at least one thing could be known apodictically. If he himself was doubting, then he had to exist. Thus Cogito Ergo Sum—I think, therefore I am—became the first principle of Cartesianism.
Descartes then claimed that because he discovered the Cogito through perceiving it clearly and distinctly, anything he can perceive clearly and distinctly must be true. Then he argues that he can conceive of an infinite being, but finite beings cannot produce infinite ideas and hence an infinite being must have put the idea into his mind. He uses this argument, commonly known as an ontological argument, to invoke the existence of an omni-benevolent God as the indubitable foundation that makes all sciences possible. Many people admired Descartes intentions, but were unsatisfied with this solution. Some accused him of circularity, proclaiming his ontological argument uses his definition of truth as a premise, while his proof of his definition of truth uses his ontological argument as a premise. Hence the problems of solipsism, truth and the existence of the external world came to dominate 17th century western thought.
Another famous problem arises from Descartes’ substance dualism. For Descartes, a substance is that which can be conceived independent of everything else and exist independent of anything else. Since Descartes conceived of the mind independent of everything else when doubting everything uncertain, and because if he wanted to God could produce a world in which only the mind existed, he came to define the mind as a different substance from that of body. For Descartes, the mind is defined as an unextended substance and the body as an extended substance. This raised the fundamental question of how it is possible that mind and body interact with one another.
Cartesianism attracted several followers such as Antoine Arnauld who with Pierre Nicole produced the Port-Royal Logic, the "most influential logic book after Aristotle and before the end of the nineteenth century".
Marin Mersenne
The Minim Marin Mersenne joined Descartes in arguing against skepticism. Mersenne was "the center of the world of science and mathematics during the first half of the 1600s" and, because of his ability to make connections between people and ideas, "the post-box of Europe".Blaise Pascal
was a Cartesian and child prodigy who grew increasingly religious, famous for his fideist Pensées and wager. Pascal was also a vacuuist.Nicolas Malebranche
One solution to the mind–body problem came from Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche. Malebranche maintained that created substances of a different kind cannot interact with one another. In fact, he believed substances of the same kind could not interact either because no necessary causation could be perceived. He proposes then that it is God, an uncreated substance, who brings it about that each time one perceives a 'cause', one also perceives an 'effect'. Hence the doctrine is named occasionalism.Malebranche was well-known and celebrated in his own time, but has since become somewhat of an obscure figure in the history of western philosophy. His philosophy had a profound effect on it, however, through its influence upon Spinoza and Hume, whose problem of causation was influenced by Malebranche’s occasionalism. It’s possible that Malebranche also influenced George Berkeley, although he rejects any association with Malebranche beyond superficial similarities.