Abstract

This work presents an historical investigation of the early phases in the reception of the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl in France. Chapter 1 argues that Henri Bergson’s insights into lived duration and intuition and Maurice Blondel’s genetic description of action functioned as essential precursors. Chapter 2 details the reception of Husserl and his followers among three successive pairs of French academic philosophers: Léon Noël and Victor Delbos, Lev Shestov and Jean Héring, Bernard Groethuysen and Georges Gurvitch. Chapter 3 addresses the appropriation of Bergsonian and Blondelian phenomenological insights by Catholic theologians Édouard Le Roy and Pierre Rousselot. Chapter 4 examines applications of phenomenology by French religious philosophers and neo-Thomists. The principal finding is that philosophical and theological receptions of phenomenology in France prior to 1939 proceeded independently due to differences in how Bergson and Blondel influenced these respective spheres and to the different orientations of French philosophers and religious thinkers to Cartesian and Aristotelian/Thomist intellectual traditions.