Background
Dunan, Charles was born in 1849 in Nantes.
Dunan, Charles was born in 1849 in Nantes.
Dunan was the son of a grocer who worked in his father’s store and then took up the study of philosophy during his military service. He prepared for the agrégé competition in Philosophy, and eventually submitted two theses required for the doctorate in letters at the University of Paris.
Collège Stanislas and Collège Rollin.
Dunan was an epistemological idealist who insisted that all thought involves ideas, and an ontological idealist in the sense that he believed that ideas and things cannot ultimately be separated. His philosophy is based on the consequences of his conviction that ideas must not be thought of as separate from things. His main interests were in epistemology and the history of philosophy, and he constantly tried to show how a critical understanding of the history of philosophy led naturally to the next steps in its progress. Like Léon Brunschsvieg and other French idealists of the period, he was strongly influenced by Kant but also by the Hegelian critiques of Kant, though not by Hegel’s formal dialectic. Philosophers, he argued, have frequently tried to separate ideas and things and then struggled to synthesize the concept of idea and the concept of thing. He believed that the history of philosophy suggests that we must therefore return to concepts used by Plato and Aristotle which emphasize the relatedness of thought and things. Dunan claims that the split with the ancient philosophers created a whole range of spurious subject matters arising from the separation of the objects of experience, the objects of interpretation and the structure of reality. His career demonstrated that an outsider can breach the intellectual aristocracy of France, and he appears in many standard reference works, but his writings have not attracted extensive study.