Alexandre Kojeve 1902 – 1968
Alexandre Kojeve was a Russian-born French philosopher whose lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes from 1933 to 1939 shaped a generation of French intellectuals, including Sartre, Beauvoir, Bataille, Lacan, and Merleau-Ponty. His reading made the master-slave dialectic the center of Hegel's thought and presented history as the progressive realization of mutual recognition in a universal homogeneous state. After the war he served as an architect of postwar European trade policy, while continuing to write on philosophy, religion, and art.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Russian-French
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:
“Man is desire, and human desire is the desire of another desire.”
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Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:
“History is the dialectic of master and slave.”
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Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:
“The end of history is the universal recognition of the dignity of every human being.”
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Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:
“Philosophy is the wisdom of the wise man at the end of history.”
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Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:
“Wisdom is the consciousness that we are at the end of the journey of consciousness.”