Jean Wahl (1886–1974) was one of the most influential academic philosophers in France in the 20th century. He was Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1936-40 and again from 1945-1967 (having spent 1940-45 either prohibited from teaching because of being Jewish or in exile in the United States) and has been called “the most influential French interpreter of contemporary philosophy” (Angèle Kremer-Marietti, “Jean Wahl the Precursor,” Analecta Husserliana 104 [2009]: 335) In addition to his own important works, he is known for having played a significant role, in some cases almost singlehandedly, in introducing French philosophy to movements such as phenomenology, existentialism, American pragmatism and literature, and British empiricism. Among his best known works are his doctoral thesis Les Philosophies pluralistes d’Angleterre et d’Amérique (1920), translated into English as “Pluralist Philosophies in England and America (1925); La Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929; “The Unhappiness of Consciousness in the Philosophy of Hegel”), credited for marking the beginning of the Hegel renaissance in France, as it drew attention away from the Hegel of the System and paid attention instead to the early, more existential Hegel; Vers le concret (1932; “Toward the Concrete”), with its three chapters on William James, Gabriel Marcel’s Metaphysical Journal, and Alfred North Whitehead, was one of the first works to move away from the spiritualism that dominated French philosophy toward the concrete data of human experience that would characterize existentialism; and Études kierkegaardiennes (1938; “Kierkegaardian Studies”), which introduced Kierkegaard’s work to France and was one of the first important works of French existentialism. In addition to his doctoral thesis, several of his other writings have already appeared in English translation: The Philosopher’s Way (1948), A Short History of Existentialism (1949), Philosophies of Existence: An Introduction to the Basic Thought of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, Sartre (1968), Transcendence and the Concrete: Selected Writings of Jean Wahl (2016), and Human Existence and Transcendence (2016), plus a selection of his poetry: Voices in the Dark: Fifteen Poems of the Prison and the Camp (1980). He is well-known in France for having published some of the first French articles addressing the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Jaspers, many of which have also appeared in English translation as journal articles or book chapters. Among the figures upon whom he was a major influence are Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze. Alan Schrift is F. Wenell Miller Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Grinnell College. He is the author of Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Thinkers and Themes (Blackwell, 2006) which was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine, 2006, Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (Routledge, 1995), Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation (Routledge, 1990).
