This book proposes a radical new reading of the development of twentieth-century French philosophy. Henry Somers-Hall argues that the central unifying aspect of works by philosophers including Sartre, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Derrida is their attempt to provide an account of cognition that does not reduce thinking to judgement. Somers-Hall shows that each of these philosophers is in dialogue with the others in a shared project (however differently executed) to overcome their inheritances from the Kantian and post-Kantian traditions. His analysis points up the continuing relevance of German idealism, and Kant in particular, to modern French philosophy, with novel readings of many aspects of the philosophies under consideration that show their deep debts to Kantian thought. The result is an important account of the emergence, and essential coherence, of the modern French philosophical tradition.

‘Somers-Hall is proposing nothing less than a perspicacious reading not only of French philosophy in the twentieth century (Bergson, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze), but also of the fate of post-Kantian philosophy in general, and the legacy of German Idealism in particular. It is an extraordinarily ambitious book, and Somers-Hall’s erudition and familiarity with these traditions is made manifest on every page.’

Daniel Smith - Purdue University

‘In his excellent book, Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy, Henry Somers-Hall takes up and explores a most basic question. ‘At the heart of this enquiry’, Somers-Hall begins, ‘is the question of what it means to think’(1). As he pursues this question, Somers-Hall offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of the French tradition in philosophy. Among the many important claims that are made is that there is a shared philosophical problem among the six French philosophers he discusses in his book (Bergson, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze). In convincingly making his case with respect to this shared problem, Somers-Hall revitalizes the relevance of the work of Bergson, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty to contemporary philosophical concerns and he thus challenges a commonly held assumption, implicit as it may be, that the post-68 generation of philosophers had moved on from the early, phenomenologically inspired tradition.’

Jeffrey A. Bell Source: British Journal for the History of Philosophy

‘Somers-Hall's excellent new book concerns how Modern French Philosophy conceives thought. In Western philosophy in general, thought has been conceived on the model of judgment. The structure of judgment of course is the attribution of a predicate to a subject. For Somers-Hall, modern French philosophy brings to light a different model of thought. Judgment and Sense in Modern French Philosophy: A new Reading of Six Thinkers is a powerful study of the conditions of possibility of judgment, and more ambitiously of sense-making and the possibility of meaning itself, across the philosophies of Bergson, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze.’

Don Beith - University of Maine

‘Somers-Hall has done a remarkable job covering the core components of six major philosophers in the French tradition, and he has done so within the pages of one book. It is a sign of the strength of this book that one comes to the end with questions that leave one wanting to explore the implications further.’

Source: British Journal for the History of Philosophy