This is a critical introduction to modern French philosophy, commissioned from one of the liveliest contemporary practitioners and intended for an English-speaking readership. The dominant 'Anglo-Saxon' reaction to philosophical development in France has for some decades been one of suspicion, occasionally tempered by curiosity but more often hardening into dismissive rejection. But there are signs now of a more sympathetic interest and an increasing readiness to admit and explore shared concerns, even if these are still expressed in a very different idiom and intellectual context. Vincent Descombes offers here a personal guide to the main movements and figures of the last forty-five years. He traces over this period the evolution of thought from a generation preoccupied with the 'three H's' - Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, to a generation influenced since about 1960 by the 'three masters of suspicion' - Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. In this framework he deals in turn with the thought of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, the early structuralists, Foucault, Althusser, Serres, Derrida, and finally Deleuze and Lyotard. The 'internal' intellectual history of the period is related to its institutional setting and the wider cultural and political context which has given French philosophy so much of its distinctive character.

文森特•德貢布(Vincent Descombes) 生於1943年。當代法國哲學傢，主要研究語言哲學和心靈哲學。他最引人注目的成就是對他稱作“認知主義”傾嚮的批判，即在心靈哲學中流行的把思想及心理事實最終還原為關於大腦的物理事實來考慮的觀點。另著有《柏拉圖主義》（Le platonisme）、《反對他的無意識》(L'inconscient malgré lui）、《一切類彆的對象：一部哲學語法書》（Objects of All Sorts: A Philosophical Grammar）、《普魯斯特：小說的哲學》（Proust: Philosophy of the Novel）、《現代理性的氣壓計：論時下的哲學體係》（The Barometer of Modern Reason: On the Philosophies of Current Events）、《意識的預設：對認知主義的一個批評》（The Mind's Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism）等。

王寅麗 1974年生。復旦大學哲學博士。現任教於華東師範大學哲學係。