Russian exiles, new scientific movements, and phenomenology: A history of philosophical immigrations in 1930s France

This essay, a history of multiple receptions, assesses three interdependent innovations in French thought during the 1930s: the ascendancy of several Russian émigré intellectuals, especially the historian of religion and science Alexandre Koyré; the introduction of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics and Gestalt theory; and the rise of phenomenology. It argues that German-educated Russian émigrés were central to transforming French thought, in particular a new kind of phenomenological and antifoundational realism and a new understanding of the body, undermining the then-dominant neo-Kantian idealism and its understanding of the place and role of science in philosophy and modernity.