20th-century French philosophers

Roland Gérard Barthes (; French: [ʁɔlɑ̃ baʁt]; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.
Barthes is perhaps best known for his 1957 essay collection Mythologies, which contained reflections on popular culture, and the 1967/1968 essay "The Death of the Author," which critiqued traditional approaches in literary criticism. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Collège de France.

Maurice Blondel (French: [blɔ̃dɛl]; 2 November 1861 – 4 June 1949) was a French philosopher, whose most influential works, notably L'Action, aimed at establishing the correct relationship between autonomous philosophical reasoning and Christian belief.

Louis Pierre Althusser (UK: , US: ; French: [altysɛʁ]; 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.
Althusser was a long-time member and sometimes a strong critic of the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, PCF). His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism. These included both the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and humanist and reformist socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European communist parties, as well as the problem of the cult of personality and of ideology. Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he was critical of many aspects of structuralism. He later described himself as a social anarchist.Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. In 1980, he killed his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, by strangling her. He was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years. He did little further academic work, dying in 1990.

René Jean-Marie-Joseph Guénon (15 November 1886 – 7 January 1951), also known as Abdalwahid Yahia (Arabic: عبد الـوٰاحد يحيیٰ; ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Yaḥiā), was a French-Egyptian intellectual who remains an influential figure in the domain of metaphysics, having written on topics ranging from esotericism, "sacred science" and "traditional studies" to symbolism and initiation.
In his writings, he claims to hand down eastern religious traditions and adapt them to western readers "while keeping strictly faithful to their spirit".Initiated into Islamic esotericism from as early as 1910 when he was 24, he mainly wrote and published in French, and his works have been translated into more than twenty languages; he also wrote in Arabic an article for the journal Al Marifah.

Brice Parain (10 March 1897 – 20 March 1971) was a French philosopher and essayist.
He appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's 1962 film Vivre sa vie. In Éric Rohmer's film My Night at Maud's (1969), conversations about Pascal's Wager are directly inspired by a similar debate between Parain and Dominique Dubarle in an episode of the television series En profil dans le texte called l'Entretien sur Pascal ("The Interview on Pascal") in 1965, also produced by Rohmer.

Charles Lalo (24 February 1877, Périgueux – 1 April 1953, Paris) was a French writer on aesthetics.

Jean Hyppolite (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ ipɔlit]; 8 January 1907 – 26 October 1968) was a French philosopher known for championing the work of G.W.F. Hegel, and other German philosophers, and educating some of France's most prominent post-war thinkers. His major works include Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel (1946) and Études sur Marx et Hegel (1955) and the first translation of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit into French in 1939.

Jean-Toussaint Desanti (8 October 1914 – 20 January 2002) was a French educator and philosopher known for his work on both the philosophy of mathematics and phenomenology.

Étienne Marie Justin Victor Delbos (26 September 1862, Figeac – 16 June 1916, Paris) was a Catholic philosopher and historian of philosophy.
Delbos was appointed a lecturer at the Sorbonne in 1902. In 1911 he became a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. He died in July 1916 as a result of an infectious myocarditis brought on by pleurisy. Maurice Blondel, a close friend, wrote an obituary account of Delbos and saw various posthumous publications through the press.He wrote on Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche and Kant. A series of lectures on post-Kantian philosophy, which Delbos viewed as shaped by contingent psychological and social factors rather than through the unfolding of some internal logic, were published posthumously and later (1942) collected in a single volume.Delbos was the father of the violinist and composer Claire Delbos. In turn, he was the father-in-law of Olivier Messiaen.

Pierre Lecomte du Noüy (French pronunciation: [ləkɔ̃t dy nwi]; 20 December 1883, Paris – 22 September 1947, New York City) was a French biophysicist and philosopher. He is probably best remembered by scientists for his work on the surface tension, and other properties, of liquids.