THE PLURALIST PHILOSOPHIES OF THE FRENCH AND ANGLO-AMERICAN TRADITION: A GENEALOGY OF ONTOLOGICAL PLURALISM

The aim of our thesis is to construct a genealogy of ontological pluralism in the Twentieth century French and Nineteenth and Twentieth century Anglo-American tradition. The reason which guides our thesis is the growing interest which these two traditions have elicited in some contemporary philosophical debates, especially among the philosophers of the New Materialisms movement. In fact, many new materialists have expressed a keen interest in the pluralism upheld by both the French and Anglo-American tradition and they have often made use of the historical intertwinement of these two schools of thought. Nonetheless, said intertwinement has been sorely understudied making it both a relevant and yet overlooked field of inquiry. Our thesis starts with a survey of the most relevant figures of the New Materialisms movement and their interest in the French and Anglo-American tradition. Secondly, it moves on to the actual genealogy itself, concentrating specifically on three key figures in the French tradition, whose reading of the Anglo-American tradition, we believed, shaped the way in which the question is approached in our contemporary debates: Henri Bergson, Jean Wahl and Gilles Deleuze. The three thinkers are analysed in order to probe their respective relationship with the Anglo-American tradition. Lastly, in the conclusion we tied the contemporary debates and the historical genealogy together, showing how the French reading of the Anglo-American tradition foreshadowed the current state of the New Materialisms debate. The end-goal of our thesis is, overall, to argue both for the relevance of these two traditions and to bring to light the untapped potentials they could still bring to our current philosophical debates. The main objective is, in other words, to analyse what has already been done by the New Materialists and, at the same time, re-actualize the problems which still linger at the heart of these two often overlooked schools of thought.