The Development of Maine de Biran’s Philosophy and the French Spiritualist Tradition: A Timeline

1746

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac publishes his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines.

1754

Condillac publishes his Traité des Sensations. In these texts, Condillac developed a bold empiricist philosophy, the principles of which were the basis for the sensualist and ideological tradition of philosophy. Maine de Biran’s first philosophical writings are works of this tradition.

1755

Charles Bonnet publishes his Essai de psychologie.

1766

Maine de Biran is born in Bergerac on 29 November.

1785

Biran joins the Garde du Corps.

1789

The French Revolution begins. Biran is wounded defending Versailles.

1792

Biran moves to Grateloup to escape from the Revolutionary Wars.

1795

Biran becomes a member of the Council of the Five Hundred in April until the Coup d’État, after which Napoleon Bonaparte closed it down. Biran continues to play an active role in politics throughout his life.

1796

The first reading of Pierre Jean George Cabanis’s Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (published in 1802) in front of the Institut de France.

1800

Xavier Bichat publishes his Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort.

1801

Destutt de Tracy publishes his Idéologie proprement dite, the first volume of his Elémens d’idéologie (1801–1815).

1801

Charles Viller publishes his Philosophie de Kant ou Principes fondamentaux de la philosophie transcendental. This was Maine de Biran’s main source for his knowledge of Kant.

1802

Maine de Biran’s Influence de l’habitude was awarded the Institut de France prize. The Mémoire was judged by Cabanis and de Tracy, and it is a work representative of their ideological tradition.

1804

Joseph Marie Degérando publishes Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophe. According to Maine de Biran, it is this text that convinces him of the fruitfulness of combining philosophical history with psychological enquiry.

1805

Maine de Biran is awarded the Institut de France prize for his Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée. It is in this text that Biran starts to develop his own unique philosophical position.

1810

Germaine de Staël publishes her De l’Allemagne. This text played a crucial role in the introduction of classical German philosophy to France.

1811

Biran starts work on his Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie. Although this is the most important of all of Biran’s works, he abandoned the project. It was first published, albeit in a much mutilated form, in 1859. A critical edition of this text was published in 2001.

1812

Biran receives the prize from the Academy of Copenhagen for his mémoire ‘Sur les rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme’.

1817–1818

Victor Cousin gives his lectures on metaphysics and the history of philosophy at the École normale. This course was revised and published several times, first in his 1826 Fragmens philosophiques, and most famously as his 1854 Du vrai, du beau, et du bien. The principles presented in these lectures formed the basis for his ‘eclectic philosophy’ and these are the founding texts of the eclectic movement.

1819

Maine de Biran publishes his Exposition de la doctrine philosophique de Leibniz anonymously. The work is representative of the deeper concern that Biran had for metaphysics towards the end of his life.

1824

Maine de Biran dies on 20 July.

1830

Victor Cousin is made a Full Professor in the Sorbonne, a member of the French Academy, and State Councillor Extraordinaire.

1832

Cousin is made a member of the Royal Council, member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, and the supreme head of the École normale.

1833

Cousin is made a peer of France. This quick succession of promotions gives Cousin almost complete control over the teaching of philosophy in France.

1834

After ten years of having delayed the publication of Maine de Biran’s works, Cousin publishes a single-volume collection of his philosophy and claims that it contains all of his important writings.

1838

Pierre Leroux publishes his Réfutation de l’éclecticisme, which contains both a critique of Cousin’s philosophy and a defence of Biran against Cousin’s critiques.

1838

Félix Ravaisson defends Biran’s philosophical method in his De l’habitude.

1840

Félix Ravaisson publishes an explicit critique of Cousin and a plea for Biranian philosophy in his Philosophie contemporaine.

1841

Victor Cousin publishes three further volumes of Maine de Biran’s works. Pierre Leroux accuses Cousin of purposely delaying the publication of Biran’s work so as not to lose the glory of being the first French philosopher to overcome ‘sensualism’.

1841

Jules Simon, a disciple of Cousin, publishes an important critical article on Biran’s thought in the Revue des deux mondes.

1848

The February Revolution and the end of the Orleans monarchy means that Cousin loses much of his power, although the eclectic school remains dominant in France.

1852

Ravaisson is made Inspector General of Higher Education.

1852

Napoleon III orders the suspension of the agrégation for history and philosophy.

1859

Ernst Naville publishes the Oeuvres inédites de Maine de Biran in collaboration with Marc Debrit. Although this collection is far from perfect, it provides the reader with a much greater idea of the depth and scope of Biran’s thought than any of Cousin’s earlier editions.

1863

Victor Duruy reinstates the agrégation and appoints Ravaisson as the chair of the committee in charge of setting the examination.

1867

Félix Ravaisson publishes his Rapport sur la philosophie en France au XIXème siècle. The text is published in the same year as Cousin dies and is seen to represent the death knell for Cousin’s eclectic school and the beginning of the flourishing of the French spiritualist tradition in its Biranian form. Ravaisson becomes the leader of the spiritualist school of which Fouillé, Lachelier and Boutroux are among the most important members. This school obtains many of the most important positions in French philosophy and it maintains powers comparable to Cousin’s during the July Monarchy for half a century.

1872

Alfred Jules Émile Fouillée publishes La Liberté et le déterminisme.

1874

Émile Boutroux publishes his De la contingence des lois de nature.

1876

Gabriel Tarde presents his Maine de Biran et l’évolutionnisme en psychologie.

1885

Jules Lachelier publishes his ‘Psychologie et métaphysique’.

1888

Henri Bergson publishes his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience.

1888

Boutroux takes the Chair of the History of Modern Philosophy at the Sorbonne.

1888

Lachelier takes over from Ravaisson as the Inspector General of Higher Education.

1890

Alfred Jules Émile Fouillée publishes L’Evolutionnisme des idées-forces.

1899

Tarde takes the Chair of Modern Philosophy at the Collège de France.

1900

Bergson takes the Chair of Ancient Philosophy at the Collège de France.

1900

Ravaisson dies and Lachelier is appointed the chair of the committee in charge of setting the examination.

1903

Bergson publishes ‘Introduction à la métaphysique’.

1903–1905

Émile Boutroux presents his Gifford lecture series Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

1907

Bergson publishes l’Évolution creatrice. The text is translated into English in 1911 and this marks the beginning of the ‘Bergson Boom’ in England and America.

1910

Boutroux gives the Hyde Lectures at Harvard.

1929

English translation of Influence de l’habitude published as The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, translated by Margaret Donaldson Boehm with an introduction by George Boas (Baltimore, The Williams & Wilkins company).

1943

Jean-Paul Sartre Publishes L’Être et le neant. Sartre critiques Maine de Biran’s ‘famous sensation of effort’ in the first section on the ‘Body as being-for-itself: facticity’.

1947–1948

Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on Malebranche, Maine de Biran, Bergson and the union of the soul and the body.

1949

Michel Henry completes his work on his Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps. From 1945, Henry’s thinking and development of a philosophy of immanence is in large part guided by his reflections on Maine de Biran.

1950

Paul Ricoeur publishes Le Volontaire et l’involontaire, the first volume of his La Philosphie de la volonte.

1963

Michel Henry publishes L’essence de la manifestation.

1970

F.C.T. Moore publishes The Psychology of Maine de Biran (Clarendon).

1984–2001

Publication of the complete works of Maine de Biran under the direction of François Azouvi.

1995

Gilles Deleuze writes ‘L’immanence: une vie…’