Jean Hyppolite
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Jean Hyppolite (Jonzac 1907 - Paris 1968) was a French philosopher known for championing the work of Hegel, and other German philosophers, and educating some of France's most prominent post-war thinkers.
Hyppolite was a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure at roughly the same time as Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1939 he published the first French translation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. After the war he became a professor at the University of Strasbourg, where he wrote The Genesis and Structure of Phenomenology (1947) before moving to the Sorbonne in 1949. In 1954 he became the director of the École Normale Supérieure and in 1955 produced a fine study of Karl Marx's earlier, more Hegelian period. In 1963 he was elected to the Collège de France and given a chair in The History of Systems.
While philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre were known for producing new works influenced by German philosophy, Hyppolite is remembered as an expositor, teacher, and translator. He influenced a number of thinkers, including Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan.