An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought [Paperback]

French philosophy changed dramatically in the second quarter of the twentieth century. In the wake of World War I and, later, the Nazi and Soviet disasters, major philosophers such as Koj?ve, Levinas, Heidegger, Koyr?, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hyppolite argued that man could no longer fill the void left by the death of God without also calling up the worst in human history and denigrating the dignity of the human subject. In response, they contributed to a new belief that man should no longer be viewed as the basis for existence, thought, and ethics; rather, human nature became dependent on other concepts and structures, including Being, language, thought, and culture. This argument, which was to be paramount for existentialism and structuralism, came to dominate postwar thought. This intellectual history of these developments argues that at their heart lay a new atheism that rejected humanism as insufficient and ultimately violent. This book introduces a terrifically learned new intellectual historian who has provided a strikingly novel and philosophically interesting genealogy of the antihumanism that most observers associate with too recent an era of thought. Of interest to anyone concerned with the the rich traditions of Continental philosophy, Stefanos Geroulanos's investigation gives the French scene in the 1930s its due, with neglected figures, new departures, and influential breakthroughs that still challenge the temptation to make the humanity of man the basis of reflection. The tradition of humanism, so long an affront to religious faith, has more recently been challenged from non-religious perspectives, perhaps nowhere as fiercely as in 20th-century France. With incisive readings of many of the masters of French thought, Stefanos Geroulanos unearths the tangled roots of post-structuralist anti-humanism, and in so doing, raises fundamental questions about what it means to be human in the 21st century. This book seeks to explain the critiques of humanilCÔ