Philosophy the French and the German way: some notes

Abstract

The author enters in polemics with the opinion on the relationship between French and German philosophy expressed by François Vezin, the translator of Heidegger’s "Sein und Zeit" into French. He tries to demonstrate that Vezin, who maintained that Voltaire's satirical onslaught against Leibniz ("Candide", 1759) had been the cause of the alleged backwardness of the French philosophy in respect to the progress of its German peer which was to last for two centuries, gave a distorted and a one-sided rendition of the real story, if not a tendentious one. He further examines the influence that German philosophy had on such thinkers as Mme de Staël (1766–1817) and Gabriel Marcel, which is an indispensable factor in any discussion of the dialogue between the two philosophies.