Ferdinand Alquié

Ferdinand Alquié (18 December 1906 – 28 February 1985) was a French philosopher and a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques from 1978. His academic career spanned from 1931 to 1979, during which he held professorships at various provincial and Parisian lycees, as well as at the University of Montpellier and the Sorbonne. Alquié's philosophical work was largely defined by his staunch Cartesian stance and his prolonged intellectual dispute with Martial Gueroult's Spinozian perspective. He was a vocal critic of philosophical monism, advocating instead for a view of human existence shaped by various forms of dualism. His political leanings were anti-totalitarian and anti-Marxist. Alquié maintained a close friendship with the artist André Breton and was associated with the surrealist movement, which he explored in his book "Philosophy of Surrealism." He also authored significant works on Descartes, Kant, and Spinoza, contributing substantially to the scholarship on these major figures in Western philosophy. He notably influenced his student Gilles Deleuze, though their intellectual approaches sometimes diverged.