Jean Wahl 1888 – 1974

Jean Andre Wahl was a French philosopher and poet and the principal channel by which Hegel, Kierkegaard, and the wider current of existentialism reached French philosophical education in the years before and after the Second World War. After early work on the pluralist tradition in American philosophy, he produced his celebrated The Unhappy Consciousness in the Philosophy of Hegel, which gave his students Sartre, Beauvoir, Levinas, and Hyppolite their first sustained encounter with a Kierkegaardian Hegel. Toward the Concrete and Short History of Existentialism shaped postwar French philosophical culture. Of Jewish origin, he survived imprisonment at Drancy and sought refuge in the United States during the Occupation.