Gaston Berger

Who was Gaston Berger?

Gaston Berger was a French futurist but also an industrialist, a philosopher and a state manager. He is mainly known for his remarkably lucid analysis of Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology and for his studies on the character structure.

Berger was born in Saint-Louis, Senegal. He received his primary and part of his secondary education in Perpignan, France, and had to take up a position in an industrial firm . After having performed his military duties in world war I, he became an associate of the owner of the firm. Berger decided to continue his studies. He worked with Rene Le Senne and passed his baccalaureat. He then enrolled in the university of Aix-en-Provence where he studied philosophy under Maurice Blondel. Having passed his licence, he obtained a diploma d’Etudes Superieures with a thesis on the ‘Relations between the conditions of intelligibility on the one hand and the problem of contingency on the other hand’. In 1926 Berger founded with some friends the Societe de Philosophie du Sud-est and its periodical Les Etudes Philosophiques. In 1938 he organized the first Congress of French Language Societies of Philosophy.