The Idea of the Instant in Descartes’s Philosophy-Wow! eBook

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The Idea of the Instant in Descartes's Philosophy

Author(s): Jean Wahl (Author), Alan D. Schrift (Translator)

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publication Date: May 31, 2026
Language: English
Print length: 192 pages
ISBN-10: 1399559559
ISBN-13: 9781399559553

Book Description

The Idea of the Instant in Descartes’s Philosophy is the first English translation of a major and influential interpretation of Descartes’s philosophy by one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century French philosophy. While discussing the role of the instant within Descartes’s philosophy, Jean Wahl develops an original account of temporality that is central to Wahl’s entire and extensive oeuvre and that has influenced a variety of 20th -century French thinkers, most notably Gilles Deleuze.

In addition to including the original French text, the volume contains an introduction to Jean Wahl by Alan D. Schrift and English translations of three essays, one written exclusively for this book, by Frédéric Worms, Director of the École Normale Supérieure, Wahl’s most important French interpreter, and one of the most influential philosophers working in France today.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Long underappreciated, Jean Wahl’s influence on existentialism and other movements in twentieth-century France is finally receiving its due thanks to Alan Schrift’s keen editorial eye and his brilliant intellectual-historical work. Here, he works in partnership with Frédéric Worms―so eminently conscious of the twentieth century’s intellectual legacies, and just as generous, precise, and elegant an original thinker―and the two offer readers a way of thinking Wahl in his time and today. This book offers a remarkable interdisciplinary recovery of the questions that animated two generations of philosophers―and now, hopefully, a third. — Stefanos Geroulanos, New York University

Alan Schrift’s edition and translation of Jean Wahl’s thesis (together with Frédéric Worms’s insightful essays) constitutes an essential contribution to English-language scholarship on twentieth-century French philosophy, the fraught history of modern Cartesianism, the philosophy of time, and contemporary attempts to think through the disruptive, the discontinuous, and the fragmentary. — Daniel Selcer, Duquesne University

The English publication of Wahl’s important essay on Descartes is a major event. Taking the Cartesian Cogito as “an argument grasped in an instant,” Wahl opens new dimensions and vistas from out of the foundations of rationalism. The excellent accompanying essays by Frédéric Worms make clear the stakes and accomplishments of Wahl’s work. — Russell Ford, Elmhurst University

About the Author

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 D. 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).

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The Idea of the Instant in Descartes's Philosophy

Book Description

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

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