The Idea of the Instant in Descartes's Philosophy

Long underappreciated, Jean Wahl's influence on existentialism and other movements in twentieth-century France is finally receiving its due thanks to Alan Schrift's keen editorial eye and his brilliant intellectual-historical work. Here, he works in partnership with Frédéric Worms—so eminently conscious of the twentieth century's intellectual legacies, and just as generous, precise, and elegant an original thinker—and the two offer readers a way of thinking Wahl in his time and today. This book offers a remarkable interdisciplinary recovery of the questions that animated two generations of philosophers—and now, hopefully, a third. -- Stefanos Geroulanos, New York University
Alan Schrift’s edition and translation of Jean Wahl’s thesis (together with Frédéric Worms’s insightful essays) constitutes an essential contribution to English-language scholarship on twentieth-century French philosophy, the fraught history of modern Cartesianism, the philosophy of time, and contemporary attempts to think through the disruptive, the discontinuous, and the fragmentary. -- Daniel Selcer, Duquesne University
The English publication of Wahl’s important essay on Descartes is a major event. Taking the Cartesian Cogito as “an argument grasped in an instant,” Wahl opens new dimensions and vistas from out of the foundations of rationalism. The excellent accompanying essays by Frédéric Worms make clear the stakes and accomplishments of Wahl’s work. -- Russell Ford, Elmhurst University