Vicent Descombes
Modern French Philosophy.
Cambridge University Press, 1980. Translation by L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding of "Le Meme et l'Autre" (Editions de Minuit, 1979).  Foreword by Alan Montefiore. 0521296722 xii/192 pages.
Softcover volume, measuring approximately 5.75" x 8.75", displays moderate external wear, with mild crease to lower outside corner of rear cover and minor abrasion at bottom of the same. Binding is sound. Previous owner's name appears in upper outside corner of initial blank page. Interior is otherwise clean and bright.
"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."