Tran Duc Thao, a brilliant student of philosophy at the Ecole Normale
Super- ieure within the post-1935 decade of political disaster, born in
Vietnam shortly after the F ir st World War, recipient of a scholarship
in Paris in 1935 37, was early noted for his independent and originaI
mind_ While the 1930s twisted down to the defeat of the Spanish
Republic, the compromise with German Fascism at Munich, and the start of
the Second World War, and while the 1940s began with hypocritical
stability at the Western Front fol- lowed by the defeat of France, and
the occupation of Paris by the German power together with French
collaborators, and the n ended with liberation and a search for a new
understanding of human situations, the young Thao was deeply immersed in
the classical works of European philosophy. He was al so the attentive
but critical student of a quite special generation of French
metaphysicians and social philosophers: Gaston Berger, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Emile Brehier, Henri Lefebvre, Rene le Senne, Jean-Paul Sartre,
perhaps the young Louis Althusser. They, in their several modes of
response, had been meditating for more than a decade on the philosophy
of Edmund Husserl, which came to France in the thirties as a new
metaphysical enlighten- ment - phenomenology.