This course offers a wide-angle introduction to how 20th-century French thinkers reimagined the history of philosophy - not as a static record of past ideas, but as a space for conceptual invention and experimentation. What is often treated as a rigid and remote tradition becomes, in their hands, a resource for creative and critical transformation. Taking a broad perspective, it invites participants to explore key shifts in Continental thought through a series of large brushstrokes.

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We begin with figures often marginalised or overlooked  in English-speaking contexts - such as Émile Bréhier, Jules Vuillemin, Jean Hyppolite, and Jean Wahl - whose reworkings of classical traditions helped to radically reshape the philosophical landscape. Far from emerging in isolation, celebrated thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, and Deleuze were deeply shaped by this earlier generation. Their work unfolded within a context of intense engagement with inherited problems, rather than from a clean break or purely original gesture. By returning to these less familiar voices, we begin to understand the intellectual atmosphere in which later structuralist and post-structuralist thought took shape - where philosophy became not only an academic pursuit, but also an artistic and often avant-garde practice.

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We’ll explore how the reception of Kant and Hegel in French philosophy gave rise to new ways of thinking about what philosophy is - and what it can become. No prior knowledge of Kant or Hegel will be assumed: we’ll take time to introduce their central ideas and explain why they mattered so profoundly to the thinkers we study.  

This engagement opened up a distinctive dialogue between philosophy and fields such as science, music, and literature - domains we will also engage with experimentally. Readings from Foucault, Deleuze and others will allow us to follow this trajectory into some of its most innovative and influential expressions. Across all sessions, we ask how philosophical traditions are not only received by philosophers but reinvented in the act of transmission.

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The course provides a rich and wide-ranging introduction to Continental philosophy, structuralism, and the conceptual transformations that defined 20th-century French thought. It is fully accessible to those new to the field, while also providing the historical depth and interpretive insight sought by more advanced students looking to re-engage these traditions critically.