Transcendence and the Concrete ─ Selected Writings

Jean Wahl (1888-1974), once considered by the likes of Bataille, Deleuze, Levinas, and Marcel to be among the greatest philosophers in France, has today nearly been forgotten outside France. Yet his influence on French philosophical thought can hardly be overestimated. About him, Emmanuel Levinas wrote that "during over a half century of teaching and research, [Jean Wahl] was the life force of the academic, extra-academic, and even, to a degree anti-academic philosophy necessary to a great culture." And Gilles 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." As professor at the Sorbonne for over three decades, president of the Société Française de Philosophie (1960-74), editor of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale(1950-74), and founder and director of the Collège Philosophique, Wahl was in dialogue with some of the most prominent and well-known French philosophers and intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Georges Bataille, Henri Bergson, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Butor, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Maritain, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone Weil, impacting several of them greatly. Wahl also played a significant role, in some cases almost singlehandedly, in introducing French philosophy to movements like phenomenology, existentialism, American pragmatism and literature, and British empiricism. And Wahl was an original philosopher and poet in his own right. The goal of this volume of selections from Jean Wahl's philosophical writings is to reintroduce Wahl to the English-speaking philosophical community, and to show the enormous influence he had through introducing the work of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Jaspers to several generations of French philosophers.

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 an internment camp. His books to appear in English includeThe 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).

Alan Schrift is F. Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy at Grinnell College. He is the author ofTwentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Terms and Thinkers (Oxford, 2006),Nietzsche's French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (Routledge, 1995), andNietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction(Routledge, 1990). He also serves as general editor of Stanford's edition of The Complete Works of Nietzsche.

Ian Alexander Moore is a Ph.D. candidate at DePaul University and Editorial Assistant ofPhilosophy Today. His research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission and the Josephine de Karmen Fellowship Trust. He is the translator or co-translator of three books and over a dozen essays.