Vladimir Jankélévitch

Vladimir Jankélévitch was a French philosopher and musicologist.

Biography

Jankélévitch was the son of Ukrainian Jewish parents, who had emigrated to France.
In 1922 he started studying philosophy at the École normale supérieure in Paris, under Professor Bergson. In 1924 he completed his DES thesis on Le Traité : la dialectique. Ennéade I 3 de Plotin under the direction of Émile Bréhier.
From 1927 to 1932 he taught at the, where he wrote his doctorate on Schelling. He returned to France in 1933, where he taught at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon and at many universities, including Toulouse and Lille. In 1941 he joined the French Resistance. After the war, in 1951, he was appointed to the chair of Moral Philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he taught until 1978. He was life long friends with phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas, although Jankélévitch is not generally considered to be in the phenomenological tradition himself, but rather a bergsonian and continuing the French spiritualist traditions going back to Rousseau and Maine de Biran.While Bergson's philosophy was a recurring theme throughout his life, Jankélévitch is considered an original thinker, especially in moral philosophy and the areas of musicology and philosophy of music. Bergson's book on morality, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion came out one year before Jankelevitch's first book on "bad conscience", which can be seen as an original growth that says something new while remaining complimentary to Bergson's views.
In May 1968, he was among the few French professors to participate in the student protests.
The extreme subtlety of his thought is apparent throughout his works where the very slightest gradations are assigned great importance.