Historical and philosophical foundations of A. Koyré’s Neo-Hegelianism

Alexander Koyré was one of the first to be outraged by the lack of Hegel’s legacy in France. In his Report on the State of Hegelian Studies in France (1930), Koyré explicitly stated the need to form a philosophical basis for (rediscovering) the legacy of classical German idealism. In many ways, it was his speech that became the trigger after which the project called «French Neo-Hegelianism» was launched in full force. Based on this, the article attempts to examine the historical and philosophical prerequisites of the intellectual atmosphere in France in the late 1920s – early 1930s, with A. Koyré undoubtedly being its part. To find out what exactly prompted the Russian emigrant to make accusations against the intellectual elite of France of the time, one should analyze the paradigm shift during which the old way of philosophizing was replaced by the generation of the «three N», as the French philosopher Vincent Descombes aptly called this phenomenon. An analysis of the philosophical context in France in the first third of the 20th century brings us several positive conclusions for the history of philosophy. First of all, we can point to «French Neo-Hegelianism» as a paradigmatic phenomenon for its time, whose representatives were, to varying degrees, inspired by Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. Using the example of the intellectual biography of A. Koyré, we will highlight the main interpretative points for the explication of which idea of phenomenology and existential analytics acted as a formative one. The main basis for such perception of A. Koyré’s thought is the fact that it was he who set the trend toward the anthropologization of Hegel, which will reach its climax in the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel by A. Kojeve.