French philosophy for René Descartes' oeuvre. Modern philosophy began in France with the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). His "Meditations on First Philosophy" changed the primary object of philosophical thought from ontology to epistemology and overcame the Aristotelian dogmatism inherited in philosophy from Scholasticism, the dominant form of thought in preceding centuries, while simultaneously raising some of the most fundamental problems for future generations of philosophers. René Descartes was concerned with the uncertainty in the sciences and the radical scepticism which spread across Europe when publications of Sextus Empiricus became available. Descartes desired to find indubitable ground on which all the sciences
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