Works

#446 · 1949-50 (Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen)

A plague outbreak in the Algerian city of Oran — allegory of Nazi occupation, meditation on solidarity under absurdity. "There are more things to admire in men than to despise"

French Catholic philosophy of physics 1

#663 · 1906

The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (La Théorie physique: son objet, sa structure) (Late)

Pierre Duhem

Duhem's 1906 foundational philosophy of physics — Duhem-Quine underdetermination thesis

French Christian existentialism 1

The Mystery of Being (Late)

Gabriel Marcel

Marcel's 1949-50 Gifford Lectures on his Christian-existentialist metaphysics — being as mystery, not problem

French conventionalist philosophy of science 1

#664 · 1902

Science and Hypothesis (La Science et l'hypothèse) (Late)

Henri Poincaré

Poincaré's 1902 foundational text — conventionalism in geometry, intuitionism in arithmetic

French cultural sociology 1

#692 · 1979

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (La Distinction) (Mid)

Pierre Bourdieu

Bourdieu's 1979 foundational cultural sociology — taste as marker of class distinction

French empirical political economy 1

#715 · 2013 (French); 2014 (English)

Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Le Capital au XXIe siècle) (Late)

Thomas Piketty

Piketty's 2013/14 foundational text — when r > g, capital concentrations grow without limit

French Enlightenment 3

#543 · 1734

Philosophical Letters (Lettres Philosophiques / Lettres Anglaises) (Mid)

#970 · 1763 (Traité sur la tolérance à l'occasion de la mort de Jean Calas)

Voltaire's 1734 Philosophical Letters — foundational text of French Anglophilic Enlightenment

Traité sur la tolérance (Late (the campaign-treatise of the Ferney period))

#969 · 1764 (Dictionnaire philosophique portatif, Geneva; greatly expanded through 1769)

Religious tolerance is not a courtesy to be granted by the majority but the natural right of every human being — the Calas case shows what its denial costs

Dictionnaire philosophique (Late (composed during the Ferney years))

#976 · 1750 (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, Geneva)

A portable Enlightenment — short, witty, polemical entries assaulting religious fanaticism and defending tolerance, reason, and natural rights

French Enlightenment / counter-Enlightenment 1

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (Early (the work that launched Rousseau's career))

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The progress of the sciences and arts has not improved morals — it has corrupted them, and the simplicity of pre-civilised humanity is the measure against which our progress fails

French Enlightenment / Newtonian natural philosophy 1

#971 · 1738 (Éléments de la philosophie de Newton, Amsterdam; revised 1741)

Éléments de la philosophie de Newton (Mid (the work that established Voltaire as a public intellectual of European reach))

#978 · 1776-78 (unfinished at Rousseau's death; published posthumously 1782)

Newton's natural philosophy — gravitation, optics, the calculus, the empirical method — explained for the educated French-reading public, against the entrenched Cartesianism of the Sorbonne

French Enlightenment / pre-Romantic introspection 1

Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Last (composed in Rousseau's final two years, after he had retreated from public life))

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Ten meditations from solitary walks — the last and most introspective of Rousseau's autobiographical works, written when he had given up hope of public reconciliation

French Enlightenment literature / pre-Romantic sensibility 1

#977 · 1761 (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse: Lettres de deux amants, habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes, Amsterdam)

Julie (Mature (the literary high-point of Rousseau's career, between Social Contract and Émile))

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Natural feeling against social artifice — the love of Julie and Saint-Preux, frustrated by the order of society, retains its truth at the level of the heart

French Enlightenment political theory 1

#541 · 1748

The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois) (Late)

Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

Montesquieu's 1748 foundational comparative political-legal theory — separation of powers and types of government

French Enlightenment satire 1

#542 · 1759

Candide (Candide, ou l'Optimisme) (Late)

#136 · 29 October 1945 (Paris lecture); 1946 (published)

Voltaire's 1759 foundational philosophical novel — biting satire of Leibnizian optimism

French existentialism 1

Existentialism Is a Humanism

#27 · 1942 (Paris, under German occupation)

Existence precedes essence — we are nothing until we make ourselves; man is condemned to be free

French existentialism / absurdism 2

The Myth of Sisyphus

There is only one really serious philosophical problem — suicide. The answer is to imagine Sisyphus happy.

#155 · 1951

The Rebel (Late)

I rebel — therefore we exist. The metaphysical and historical analysis of rebellion as the proper response to absurdity, drawing the limits against totalitarian revolution

French existentialism / absurdism / abolitionism 1

#1588 · 1957

Reflections on the Guillotine (Late)

#1589 · c. 1958-1960 (incomplete); 1994 posthumous publication

Camus's 1957 'Réflexions sur la guillotine' — the most-cited literary argument against capital punishment

French existentialism / absurdism / autobiographical fiction 1

The First Man (Final (unfinished))

#1608 · 1963-64 (published 1964)

Camus's posthumous 1994 'The First Man' — unfinished autobiographical novel found in the wreckage of his fatal 1960 car crash

French existentialism / autobiography / mid-century European memoir 1

The Words (Late)

#1607 · 1945-1949 (three published volumes)

Sartre's 1964 'Les Mots' — autobiographical reckoning with bookishness and bourgeois childhood

French existentialism / committed-literature / mid-century European novel 1

The Roads to Freedom (Middle)

Sartre's 1945-49 trilogy 'Les Chemins de la liberté' — Mathieu Delarue from the late 1930s to the 1940 fall of France

French existentialism / existentialist ethics 1

#153 · 1947

The Ethics of Ambiguity (Early)

#28 · 1943 (Paris, under German occupation)

The ambiguity of the human condition — radically free yet always situated, oriented to its own freedom yet realised only through commitment to the freedom of others

French existentialism / phenomenological ontology 1

Being and Nothingness

Being-for-itself is the freedom that always precedes essence — we are condemned to be free, and bad faith is the flight from this freedom

French existentialism / phenomenological-literary 1

#237 · 1938

Nausea (Early (Sartre's first novel, before Being and Nothingness))

Antoine Roquentin's diary in Bouville — the contingency of existence revealed through the famous chestnut-tree scene, the literary embodiment of early Sartrean existentialism

French existentialism / philosophical ethics / phenomenology 1

#1669 · 1944

Pyrrhus and Cineas (Early)

#41 · 1949 (French two-vol. ed.)

Beauvoir's 1944 'Pyrrhus et Cinéas' — first major philosophical essay on the ethics of existential freedom and project

French existentialism / philosophical feminism 1

The Second Sex

#1668 · 1937-41 composition; 1943 publication

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman — the founding text of philosophical feminism, applying existentialist freedom to the situation of women

French existentialism / philosophical fiction / phenomenology 1

She Came to Stay (Early)

Beauvoir's 1943 first novel 'L'Invitée' — phenomenological-existentialist treatment of the ménage à trois

French existentialist literature 1

#244 · 1956

The Fall (Late (Camus's last completed novel; the Nobel followed in 1957))

#238 · 1944 (first performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944)

Jean-Baptiste Clamence's confession-monologue in an Amsterdam bar — Camus's 1956 dissection of bourgeois moral self-deception

French existentialist theatre 1

No Exit (Mid (alongside Being and Nothingness))

#239 · 1960 (vol. I); vol. II unfinished, published posthumously 1985

"Hell is other people" — Sartre's most famous play, three characters in a hotel-room hell, the dramatic embodiment of his analysis of being-for-others

French existentialist-Marxism 1

Critique of Dialectical Reason (Late (Sartre's major late philosophical work))

#539 · 1697 (2nd expanded edn 1702)

Existentialism integrated with Marxism — Sartre's major late philosophical attempt to ground historical-materialist analysis in existentialist phenomenology

French feminist poststructuralism 1

#574 · 1974

Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum, de l'autre femme) (Mid)

Luce Irigaray

Irigaray's 1974 foundational feminist critique — Western philosophy as phallocentric specularization

French Huguenot Enlightenment scepticism 1

Historical and Critical Dictionary (Dictionnaire Historique et Critique) (Late)

Pierre Bayle

Bayle's 1697 foundational sceptical-critical reference work — major proto-Enlightenment text

French humanism / Querelle des femmes / proto-feminist literature 1

#1744 · 1405

The Book of the City of Ladies

Christine de Pizan

An allegorical city built of the lives of exemplary women — against the misogynist tradition from Ovid to Jean de Meun

French Jansenist theology 1

#319 · 1656-57

Provincial Letters (Late)

Blaise Pascal

Pascal's 1656-57 defence of Jansenist theology against Jesuit casuistry — the founding text of modern French prose

French liberal political thought / sociology before sociology 1

#102 · Volume I 1835; Volume II 1840 (based on Tocqueville's 1831–32 American journey)

Democracy in America

Alexis de Tocqueville

Equality of conditions is the providential fact of the modern age — and democracy's greatest danger is the tyranny of the majority

French modernist literature 1

#671 · 1913

Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) (Mid)

Marcel Proust

Proust's 1913 Swann's Way — first volume of In Search of Lost Time — involuntary memory and the madeleine

French phenomenology 3

#372 · 1950 (French; English 1966)

Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (Early)

#439 · 1964 (posthumous; composed 1959-61)

Ricoeur's 1950 phenomenological study of the voluntary and the involuntary — volume I of Philosophy of the Will

The Visible and the Invisible (Late)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty's unfinished 1964 late ontology of the "flesh of the world"

#440 · composed 1950-52; published 1969 (posthumous)

The Prose of the World (Mid)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty's unfinished posthumous study of language and expression — between Phenomenology of Perception and the late ontology

French phenomenology / embodied cognition 1

#109 · 1945

Phenomenology of Perception

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The body is the medium of perception — neither pure consciousness nor pure object, but the lived body engaged with the world

French phenomenology / hermeneutics 4

#371 · 1960 (French; English 1967)

The Symbolism of Evil (Early)

#373 · 1983-85 (3 vols; English 1984-88)

Ricoeur's 1960 phenomenological-hermeneutic study of evil through myth and symbol

Time and Narrative (Late)

#374 · 1990 (French; English 1992)

Ricoeur's 1983-85 three-volume hermeneutic study of time and narrative

Oneself as Another (Late)

#375 · 2000 (French; English 2004)

Ricoeur's 1990 Gifford Lectures on selfhood, identity, and the ethics of the other

Memory, History, Forgetting (Late)

#262 · 1935-46 (largely composed in a German prisoner-of-war camp); published 1947

Ricoeur's 2000 late masterwork on memory, history, and forgetting

French phenomenology / Jewish religious philosophy 3

Existence and Existents (Early (the first major book, before Time and the Other))

Emmanuel Levinas

The phenomenology of existence as such — Levinas's 1947 first major book, developing the categories of fatigue, indolence, insomnia, and the il y a

#261 · 1946-47 (delivered as four lectures at Collège philosophique); published 1948

Time and the Other (Early (the breakthrough early work, before Totality and Infinity))

Emmanuel Levinas

Time, the Other, the asymmetry of the ethical relation — Levinas's 1948 lectures developing the foundational categories of his mature phenomenology

#203 · 1974

Otherwise than Being (Late (the more radical successor to Totality and Infinity, 1961))

Emmanuel Levinas

Beyond being — substitution, the trace, the saying and the said. Levinas's 1974 attempt to articulate ethical responsibility in a register beyond ontology

French phenomenology / philosophy of mind 1

#265 · 1940

The Imaginary (Early (preceding Being and Nothingness))

#441 · 1997 (French; English 2002)

The phenomenological psychology of imagination — Sartre's 1940 analysis of imaginative consciousness as the unique mode of consciousness

French phenomenology / theological turn 1

Being Given (Late)

Jean-Luc Marion

Marion's 1997 major phenomenology of givenness — the "saturated phenomenon"

French phenomenology of life 1

#442 · 1963 (French; English 1973)

The Essence of Manifestation (Early)

Michel Henry

Henry's 1963 foundational phenomenology of immanent life — auto-affection

French post-structuralism / archaeology of knowledge 1

#110 · 1966

The Order of Things

Man is an invention of recent date — and one perhaps nearing its end

French post-structuralism / deconstruction 1

#111 · 1967

Of Grammatology

Jacques Derrida

There is no outside-text — and the metaphysics of presence that privileges speech over writing is undone by writing's own structure

French post-structuralism / genealogical method 1

#130 · 1975

Discipline and Punish (Late)

#250 · 1961 (Foucault's doctoral dissertation)

The body of the condemned moves from spectacular torture to disciplinary surveillance — and the panopticon's gaze becomes the modern soul

French postmodernism 1

#572 · 1979

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (La condition postmoderne) (Late)

Jean-François Lyotard

Lyotard's 1979 foundational text — postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives

French postmodernism / Foucauldian archaeology 2

Madness and Civilization (Early (Foucault's breakthrough work, his doctoral dissertation))

The history of madness in the classical age — Foucault's 1961 doctoral dissertation that opened his career-long project

#251 · 1963

The Birth of the Clinic (Early-mid (between Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things))

#175 · 1976 (vol. 1); 1984 (vols. 2-3, shortly before Foucault's death); vol. 4 (Confessions of the Flesh) published posthumously 2018

The emergence of modern medical perception — Foucault's 1963 archaeology of the "medical gaze" and the modern clinic

French postmodernism / Foucauldian genealogy 1

The History of Sexuality (Late (his last major project))

The "repressive hypothesis" inverted: sexuality is not what power represses but what power produces — and the genealogy of the modern sexual subject through Greek, Roman, and early Christian practices of the self

French postmodernism / philosophy of historical method 1

#252 · 1969

The Archaeology of Knowledge (Mid (methodological transition between archaeological and genealogical phases))