French philosophy 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". The general
Thomas Baldwin (philosopher) Thomas Baldwin (philosopher) Thomas R. Baldwin (born 1947) is a British philosopher and has been a professor of philosophy at the University of York since 1995. He has written generally on 20th century Analytic and Continental philosophy, as well as bioethics, the philosophy of language and of mind, particularly with regard to G. E. Moore, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Bertrand Russell. Baldwin studied at Cambridge University, gaining an MA and a PhD before lecturing at Makerere University and Cambridge. He was editor of "Mind" from 2005 to 2015 and has served as the president of the Aristotelian Society (2006-07) and as