This book was born of a refusal, the refusal of the very philosophy from which it has sprung. After the war, when it had become apparent that the classical tradition, and particularly neo-Kantianism, was breathing its last, French thought looked to Germany for its inspiration and renewal. Jean Hyppolite and Kojeve reintroduced Hegel and the "existentialists" and phenomenologists drew the attention of a curious public to the fundamental investigations of Husserl and Heidegger. If only by being understood as a phenomenological ontology, this books speaks eloquently enough of the debt it owes to...

THE SEEMING CONTINGENCY OF THE QUESTION CONCERNING THE BODY AND THE NECESSITY FOR AN ONTOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE BODY When we disclose and bring forth, within ontological investigations aimed at making possible the elaboration of a phenomenology of the ego, a prob lematic concerning the body, we may well seem, with respect to the general direction of our analysis, to elaborate only a contingent and accidental specification of such an analysis and to forget its true goal. Up to the present, we pursued the clarification of the being of the ego 2] on the level of absolute subjectivity and in...