Jean Wahl

Jean Wahl (Marseille, 1888 – Paris, 1974) was a French philosopher of Jewish origin who held a central place in intellectual life in France during the first half of the twentieth century. Trained at the École Normale Supérieure, he began as a follower of Henri Bergson and took an interest in the American and British pluralists, but his name is mainly tied to the reception of Hegel and Kierkegaard in France.

He taught at the Sorbonne in two periods, from 1936 to 1940 and again from 1945 to 1967. During the Second World War he was interned at the Drancy camp, from which he managed to escape, and between 1941 and 1945 he lived in the United States, where he taught and helped organise initiatives for French exiled intellectuals. His best-known work, Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, read Hegel's "unhappy consciousness" in a way that anticipated the French interest in Hegel later associated with Kojève. His studies of Kierkegaard and Vers la fin de l'ontologie, a critical reading of Heidegger, developed an anti-systematic thought focused on the concrete and on human existence.

After the war he founded the Collège philosophique in 1947 and edited the Revue de métaphysique et de morale from 1950. His influence reached Levinas, Deleuze and Sartre.