Background
Brunschvicg, Léon was born on November 10, 1869 in Paris.
historian philosopher university professor writer
Brunschvicg, Léon was born on November 10, 1869 in Paris.
In 1987 he completed his thesis under thte title Louisiana Modalité du jugement (The Modalities of Judgement).
He co-founded the Revue de métaphysique et de morale with Xavier Leon and Élie Halévy in 1893. From 1895–1900 he taught at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen. In 1909 he became professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne.
Forced to leave his position at the Sorbonne by the Nazis, Brunschvicg fled to the south of France, where he died at the age of 74.
While in hiding, he wrote studies of Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal that were printed in Switzerland. Brunschvicg defined philosophy as "the mind"s methodical self-reflection" and gave a central role to judgement.
The publication of Brunschvicg"s oeuvre has been recently completed after unpublished materials held in Russia were returned to his family in 2001.
A radically anti-realist idealist rationalist who took something from both Spinoza and Pascal. His final position had something of the Hegelian in it—he held that consciousness tended in history towards a final unity, but in his commitment to individual freedom and spontaneity he rejected the determinism in Hegel’s position. Rejecting imputations of atheism advanced by Blondel and Le Roy, he nevertheless looked for a religion free of anthropomorphic conceptions of God. He maintained a historicist approach according to which the metaphysics of any one period flowed from the science of that period, thus giving a high value to the history of science. He was joint founder in 1893 of the influential Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, and also of the Société Française de Philosophie in 1903. A very influential figure in French academie life in the first half of the century, there now seems to be little interest in his work. Sources: BDF 7 (1956): 566b-567a: Edwards; Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1419a—b.
Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.