French philosophers

Frédéric Paulhan (21 April 1856, Nîmes – 14 March 1931) was a French philosopher. He came from a family of merchants of Huguenot ancestry, and was a brilliant student at school in Nîmes. He left without graduating, and spent a few years without a recognised profession, studying and writing and developing an interest in philosophy and Republican political movements. In 1877 Paulhan contributed to the Revue Philosophique of Théodule Ribot. Paulhan became liable for military service when his assigned number was drawn in a lottery, but he was released from serving because of his stutter, which also made it difficult for him to teach.
After a political upset in the Nîmes city administration, which favoured Republicans, Paulhan was appointed librarian in 1881. During the years he held this post, Paulhan applied positivist methods to the institution, modernising it. He married Jeanne Thérond in 1884, and that same year their son was born, the future writer and editor Jean Paulhan. Frédéric Paulhan resigned his post in December 1896, affected by political instability in the municipality, and he moved to Paris. Here he continued to write, and he also built up an art collection of etchings, drawings, pastels along with a few paintings, purchased at auction. This collection was sold in 1934.
Paulhan entered the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1902, sponsored by Ribot. He was awarded the Prix Jean-Reynaud in 1928. Paulhan was a freethinker, a Dreyfusard and possibly a Freemason; his work has importance in the current of French psychology. Among his books are Les caractères (1894), Les mensonges du caractère (1905), Le mensonge dans l'art (1907) and Le mensonge du monde (1921).
Frédéric Paulhan died on 14 March 1931. He is buried in the cemetery at Bagneux under a headstone carved with Masonic symbols.

Octave Hamelin (22 July 1856 in Montpellier – 11 September 1907 in Prades, Pyrénées-Orientales) was a French philosopher. He taught as a professor at the University of Bordeaux (1884-) and the University of Sorbonne (1905-). Hamelin was a close friend of the sociologist Émile Durkheim, with whom he shared an interest in the French philosopher Charles Renouvier. He is also known as a translator of classical Greek philosophers.Hamelin drowned in 1907, attempting to save two young women.

Bernard d'Espagnat (22 August 1921 – 1 August 2015) was a French theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, and author, best known for his work on the nature of reality. Wigner-d'Espagnat inequality is partially named after him.
Quote: "The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment."

Victor Charles Louis Brochard (French: [bʁɔʃaʁ]; 29 June 1848 – 25 November 1907) was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy.

Judith Miller (French: [milɛʁ]; 3 July 1941 – 6 December 2017) was a French psychoanalyst, born in Antibes. She was the daughter of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and Sylvia Bataille. Her spouse was Lacanian Jacques-Alain Miller.

François Cusset (French: [kysɛ]; born 9 March 1969) is a writer, intellectual historian, and Professor of American Civilisation at the University of Nanterre.
Cusset was a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Saint-Cloud. He has been an associate researcher at The National Center of Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique or CNRS), teacher of contemporary French culture at Reid Hall, and professor at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. He is the brother of the writer Catherine Cusset.

Dominique Lecourt (French: [ləkuʁ]; 5 February 1944 – 1 May 2022) was a French philosopher. He is known in the Anglophone world primarily for his work developing a materialist interpretation of the philosophy of science of Gaston Bachelard.

René Tavernier (21 May 1915 – 16 December 1989) was a French poet and philosopher.
Tavernier published his first poems before World War II in the New French Review, and was immediately noticed by Jean Wahl. In turn, this brought him recognition by Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. A friend of Vladimir Jankélévitch, he was held at Drancy internment camp. After escaping, he fled to the United States.
Joining writers and journalists during the war led him to Lyon in the neighborhood where he directed Montchat Confluences - A journal on "Literature and Arts" - founded by Jacques Aubenque between July 1941 and 1943. It is in this review, which included as the "original purpose" to "bring together writers and ideas from diverse backgrounds in the service of humanism" that he published the poems of Pierre Emmanuel, Max Jacob, Henri Michaux, Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, one of whose poems was also the cause of the suspension of the magazine for a few months. Firmly committed to the Resistance, René Tavernier organized clandestine meetings at his home until the end of 1943 with Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon.
His son was the film director Bertrand Tavernier.

Gaston Milhaud (10 August 1858, Nîmes – 1 October 1918, Paris) was a French philosopher and historian of science.
Gaston Milhaud studied mathematics with Gaston Darboux at the École Normale Supérieure. In 1881 he took a teaching post at the University of Le Havre. In 1891 he became professor of mathematics at Montpellier University, and in 1895 became professor of philosophy there. In 1909 a chair in the history of philosophy in its relationship to the sciences was created for him at the Sorbonne. Milhaud's successor in the chair was Abel Rey.

Clémence Royer (21 April 1830 – 6 February 1902) was a self-taught French scholar who lectured and wrote on economics, philosophy, science and feminism. She is best known for her controversial 1862 French translation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.