User:Grshiplett/Georges Gusdorf

Georges Gusdorf ... Georges Gusdorf was a French philosopher and epistemologist.

He was born near Bordeaux in 1912 into a Jewish family from Germany. He died October 17, 2000, at the age of eighty-eight. He is buried in the cemetery of Arcachon.

Georges Gusdorf was influenced by Søren Kierkegaard and the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth.

A student of Gaston Bachelard at the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) in Paris, where he was prefect of studies, he also studied at the Sorbonne under the direction of Leon Brunschvicg, in the 1930s - the era of André Lalande and Emile Brehier.

He was taken prisoner during the war between 1940 and 1945. Rather like Sartre and some others, during that time he experienced a intense social and intellectual environment of a kind which he missed in his later academic career.

After the war he was appointed professor at the University of Strasbourg, occupying the chair of general philosophy and logic. He had by then published a thesis, self-discovery, the matrix of his future work on memory and written during his long captivity in Lübeck during World War II.

In the 1950s, he took charge as a tutor at the ENS, preparing students for the aggregation in philosophy. He succeeded Merleau-Ponty, and went on to supervise such well-known philosphers as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault.

Gusdorf said that in his prison camp, the mid-career officers favored Vichy, e.g., the arguments put forward by Jean Guitton and passed some time by Paul Ricoeur<1>.

With some of his comrades, he managed to reverse this trend. An officer, a fellow prisoner, later said, "Thanks to you we could go head up,"

His captivity was an opportunity for Georges Gusdorf to interest himself in a genre that usually does not tempt philosophers: autobiography. An admirer of “Geistesgeschichte” and the critical school founded by Wilhelm Dilthey and the History of the autobiography of Georg Misch, the pupil and son-in-law of Dilthey, Gusdorf polemicized in 1975 against the formalist approach which he saw in Philippe Lejeune and his “autobiographical pact” <2>.

In his philosophical anthropology, Gusdorf remains committed to a clear vision of man, which is conditioned by the body and the world in which he lives, but is also able to break away from this determinism and produce works which manifests his freedom and as such are works that cannot be reduced to formal schemes. Such works express a personal being and with it a world we can never fully reveal and which varies with individuals and also with epochs.<3>.

From 1966 to 1988, Payot published his fourteen volumes of extensive research encyclopedias, Humanities and Western thought.

In 1968, outraged by the student revolt, he moved to Laval University in Quebec City, but returned to Strasbourg once the dust had settled. Gusdorf later claimed to have foreseen the Paris student revolt of 1968 in his book "The University in question", published in 1964.