Lucien Levy-Bruhl 1857 – 1939

Lucien Levy-Bruhl was a French philosopher and ethnologist and one of the most influential and most controversial of the early twentieth-century students of comparative thought. Long-time professor at the Sorbonne, he produced a series of major works including How Natives Think, Primitive Mentality, and The Soul of the Primitive, in which he argued that what he called the primitive mentality is governed by a logic of mystical participation rather than by the law of non-contradiction. In his late Notebooks he substantially revised the sharp contrast between primitive and civilized thought for which his earlier work was famous, an honest second thought that has shaped subsequent anthropological philosophy.