Vladimir Jankélévitch was a French philosopher

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 and musicologist.

Biography

Jankélévitch was the son of Russian Jewish parents, who had emigrated to France.
In 1922 he started studying philosophy at the École normale supérieure

École normale supérieure

An école normale supérieure or ENS is a type of publicly funded higher education in France. A portion of the student body who are French civil servants are called Normaliens....

 in Paris, under Professor Bergson

Henri Bergson

Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize...

. From 1927 to 1932 he taught at the Institut Français in Prague

Prague

Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...

, where he wrote his doctorate on Schelling. He returned to France in 1933, where he taught at the Lycée du Parc

Lycée du Parc

The Lycée du Parc is a public secondary school located in the sixth arrondissement of Lyon, France. Its name comes from the Parc de la Tête d'Or, one of Europe's largest urban parks, which is situated nearby....

 in Lyon

Lyon

Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....

 and at many universities, including Toulouse

Toulouse

Toulouse is a city in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern FranceIt lies on the banks of the River Garonne, 590 km away from Paris and half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea...

 and Lille

Université Lille Nord de France

The University of Lille -Nord de France , located in Lille, France, is a center for higher education, academic research and doctoral studies located over multiple campuses in the Academie de Lille....

. In 1941 he joined the French Resistance

French Resistance

The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...

. After the war, in 1951, he was appointed to the chair of Moral Philosophy at the Sorbonne

Sorbonne

The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...

, where he taught until 1978.

The extreme subtlety of his thought is apparent throughout his works where the very slightest gradations are assigned great importance. Jankelevitch, who drew on Platonist, Neoplatonist and Greek

Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

 Patristic sources in establishing his essentially agnostic thought, was resolute in his opposition to German philosophical

German philosophy

German philosophy, here taken to mean either philosophy in the German language or philosophy by Germans, has been extremely diverse, and central to both the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy for centuries, from Leibniz through Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger...

influence.