Victor Delbos

Étienne Marie Justin Victor Delbos (26 September 1862, Figeac – 16 June 1916, Paris) was a Catholic philosopher and historian of philosophy.

Delbos was appointed a lecturer at the Sorbonne in 1902. In 1911 he became a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. He died in July 1916 as a result of an infectious myocarditis brought on by pleurisy. Maurice Blondel, a close friend, wrote an obituary account of Delbos and saw various posthumous publications through the press.

He wrote on Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche and Kant. A series of lectures on post-Kantian philosophy, which Delbos viewed as shaped by contingent psychological and social factors rather than through the unfolding of some internal logic, were published posthumously and later (1942) collected in a single volume.

Delbos was the father of the violinist and composer Claire Delbos. In turn, he was the father-in-law of Olivier Messiaen.

Works

 * Le problème moral dans la philosophie de Spinoza et dans l'histoire du spinozisme, Paris: Alcan, 1893
 * La Philosophie pratique de Kant, 1905
 * Le spinozisme : cours professé à la Sorbonne en 1912-1913, 1916
 * La philosophie française, 1919
 * Étude de la philosophie de Malebranche, 1924
 * De Kant aux postkantiens, 1942