French philosophy a woman. French philosophy French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in the French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, and postmodernism. Peter Abelard (1079 – April 21, 1142) was a scholastic philosopher, theologian and logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary. The "Chambers Biographical Dictionary" describes him as "the keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the 12th Century".
20th-century French philosophy Feminism. Key thinkers include psychoanalytic and cultural theorist Luce Irigaray (born 1930), psychoanalyst and writer Julia Kristeva (born 1941), writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, writer and cultural theorist Helen Cixous and artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger. One suggested way of understanding French philosophy of this period, it has been suggested, is to locate the major influential figures in their current. The major influences were primarily 6 Germans from preceding eras - Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger. For example, Alexander Kojeve's Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit were quite a sensation in Paris in the 1930s. It was attended