Victor Delbos

Étienne Marie Justin Victor Delbos (26 September 1862 – 16 June 1916) was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy.

Victor Delbos
Born	Étienne Marie Justin Victor Delbos (1862-09-26)September 26, 1862 Figeac, France
Died	June 16, 1916(1916-06-16) (aged 53) Paris, France
Relatives	Claire Delbos (daughter)
Academic background
Alma mater	École normale supérieure Faculté des lettres de Paris
Doctoral advisor	Émile Boutroux[1]
Other advisors	Léon Ollé-Laprune
Academic work
Discipline	Philosophy
Doctoral students	Étienne Gilson[2]

Biogrsphy

Delbos was born on 26 September 1862, in Figeac. He 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 on 16 June 1916, aged 53, in Paris, 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.^[3]

Delbos was the father of the violinist and composer Claire Delbos. In turn, he was the father-in-law of Olivier Messiaen.

Work

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.^[4]

Works

• Le problème moral dans la philosophie de Spinoza et dans l'histoire du spinozisme, Paris: Alcan, 1893
• La Philosophie pratique de Kant, 1905
• Le spinozisme : cours professé à la Sorbonne en 1912-1913, 1916
• La philosophie française, 1919
• Étude de la philosophie de Malebranche, 1924
• De Kant aux postkantiens, 1942