New Philosophers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The New Philosophers (French nouveaux philosophes) were a group of French philosophers (for example, André Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard Henri-Lévy) who appeared in the early 1970s, as critics of the previously-fashionable philosophers, which would include the post-structuralists, and their own former ideas, which in most cases were Maoist.
The mark of the new philosophers was to cast a general doubt on the tendency to argue from 'the left', by attributing too much inherent power-worship in the whole tradition, or at least what it borrowed from Hegel and Marx. They thus challenged the (French) stereotype that an intellectual was necessary a left-wing intellectual, such as illustrated by Jean-Paul Sartre or, in a completely differerent stance, Michel Foucault.
Their soubriquet possibly is a reference to the philosophers of the future that Nietzsche anticipated in his work Beyond Good and Evil [citation needed]. The movement was harshly criticized by Gilles Deleuze, who spoke of a return to the "big concepts" using dualist oppositions, something which his generation had struggled against - see pseudophilosophy.
