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Lettres Françaises • Questioning Absolute Freedom • Communication Communications • Identity Issues • Patent Absurdities • Being Both There & Here • Refutable Wisdom • Personality-Free God • Spotting Spock

Lettres Françaises

Dear Editor: I appreciated your special issue on contemporary French philosophy (107). Yet it seems to me one might have expected an additional article that would have provided a comprehensive overview and an attempt to set French philosophy in context. Why didn’t you mention the Sokal affair, that seems to me to be rather central to the whole issue? Why didn’t you mention Jacques Bouveresse, one of the leading philosophers in France today, not a public philosopher, but the only French philosopher who is highly respected outside of France, as far as I know? Finally, is it not the case that the French tradition in philosophy after Descartes is a tradition of essayists, of moralists, or of what English-speaking people call philosophes – that is to say, intellectuals who have very little to do with philosophy? You acknowledge that French philosophy is part of public life, yet it is not part of international academic philosophy. Didn’t Crane Brinton write in his history of Western ideas that what characterises French philosophy throughout history is that it lacks depth? The putative limits of French philosophy stem from the fact that philosophy is taught in the Faculty of Letters and not in an independent School of Philosophy, and consequently, French philosophers have no particular scientific education, and no education in contemporary logic. When they do make use of it, as did Kristeva and Lacan, it appears they do not have a clear understanding of what it’s about – as shown by Sokal and Bricmont (Fashionable Nonsense) as well as Jacques Bouveresse (Prodiges et Vertiges de l’Analogie).

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