Tran Duc Thao facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Trần Đức Thảo
Born	26 September 1917 Từ Sơn, Bắc Ninh, Vietnam
Died	24 April 1993 Paris, France

Trần Đức Thảo (born September 26, 1917, in Từ Sơn, Bắc Ninh, Vietnam – died April 24, 1993, in Paris, France) was an important Vietnamese philosopher. He wrote mostly in French. His main goal was to combine two big ideas in philosophy: phenomenology and Marxist philosophy.

Phenomenology is about how we experience the world and what our minds do. Marxist philosophy looks at how society and work shape our lives. Trần Đức Thảo believed that understanding how people think and see the world could be made better by also looking at how society and work affect us. His ideas were quite popular in France during the 1950s and 1960s. Other famous thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser even mentioned his work in a good way.

Life Story of a Philosopher

Early Life and Studies in France

Trần Đức Thảo was born in Hanoi, which was then part of French Indochina. He went to school there and finished his high school studies when he was 17.

In 1936, he moved to France to continue his education. He studied at a famous school called the École Normale Supérieure. There, he was a student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, another well-known philosopher. Trần Đức Thảo wrote a special paper about the ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Later, in 1943, he finished another important paper about the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. He did so well that he was ranked first, tied with another student named Jules Vuillemin.

During the 1940s, Trần Đức Thảo worked on his first major book. It was called Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. In this book, he argued that to truly understand how our minds work, we needed to also understand how society and labor (work) influence us. He thought that Marxist ideas about society could help fix the gaps in the phenomenological view of the mind.

At the same time, he became very active in fighting against colonialism. This was when European countries controlled other parts of the world. Trần Đức Thảo wrote articles about the problems in Indochina for a famous French magazine. These articles were read by other anti-colonial thinkers, like Frantz Fanon. Because of his strong views, the French government even put him in jail for a few months in 1945. They saw him as a threat to their control.

Return to Vietnam in 1951

Trần Đức Thảo's first book, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, was published in 1951. In the same year, he decided to return to Vietnam. He wanted to support the Communist Party there.

By 1956, he became the Dean of History at Vietnam's first national university. This was a very important position. However, he soon started to disagree with the Party. He was concerned about their land reforms, which had caused many deaths.

Because of his criticisms, Trần Đức Thảo became involved in something called the Nhan Van-Giai Pham affair. This was a time when intellectuals who spoke out against the government were criticized or punished. Even though Trần Đức Thảo was never jailed, he lost favor with the ruling Party. He had to write two public apologies and left his important job in 1958. For many years, from 1965 to 1987, none of his work was published in Vietnam.

Later Work and Final Years

For the next thirty years, Trần Đức Thảo kept a lower profile. He worked in rural areas, translating philosophy books into Vietnamese. He also spent this time writing his next big book. This book was called Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness.

This second book, published in France in 1973, looked at how language and consciousness developed. It combined scientific ideas about biology and the mind with his earlier Marxist ideas.

In the 1980s, the political situation in Vietnam became more open. This allowed Trần Đức Thảo to return to France for medical treatment. There, he met many of his old philosopher friends again. He lived simply in an apartment at the Vietnamese embassy. Trần Đức Thảo passed away in Paris in 1993. He was cremated at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Key Works

• Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique (1951) - This book was later translated into English as Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism.
• “The Phenomenology of Mind and its Real Content” (1971) - An article published in the journal Telos.
• Recherches sur l'origine du langage et de la conscience (1973) - This book was also translated into English as Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness.

Images for kids

• 

  Trần Đức Thảo