Philosophy in an Age of Power

What keeps philosophy alive in a world enthralled by science and technology? Émile Bréhier—one of France’s most luminous historians of thought—answered that question in 1950 with a series of radio talks that startled his audience by their clarity and scope. Gathered here as Current Themes in Philosophy, these talks reveal a thinker who refused to consign philosophy to obscurity.

Bréhier’s originality lies in his insistence that philosophy is not a relic but a safeguard. Where science supplies power without ends, philosophy restores meaning. Against the reduction of life to mechanics and abstractions, he maps the new intellectual landscapes of his century—phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism—and uncovers their hidden unity. All, he shows, turn away from fragments and theories toward structure, relation, and the irreducible wholeness of human existence.

At once lucid and daring, Bréhier’s book is less a textbook than a philosophical travelogue: a chronicle of how modern thought rediscovered man not as an abstraction but as a being woven into history, society, morality, and transcendence. In an era haunted by power without purpose, his voice reminds us why philosophy matters—and why it endures.