Victor Delbos

Étienne Marie Justin Victor Delbos (; 26 September 1862 – 16 June 1916) was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy.

Biography Delbos was born on 26 September 1862 in Figeac. He was appointed a lecturer at the Sorbonne in 1902. In 1911, he became a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. He died on 16 June 1916, aged 53, in Paris, as a result of an infectious myocarditis brought on by pleurisy. Maurice Blondel, a close friend, wrote an obituary account of Delbos and saw various posthumous publications through the press.

Delbos was the father of the violinist and composer Claire Delbos. In turn, he was the father-in-law of Olivier Messiaen.

Work He wrote on Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche and Kant. A series of lectures on post-Kantian philosophy, which Delbos viewed as shaped by contingent psychological and social factors rather than through the unfolding of some internal logic, were published posthumously and later (1942) collected in a single volume.

Works Le problème moral dans la philosophie de Spinoza et dans l'histoire du spinozisme, Paris: Alcan, 1893 La Philosophie pratique de Kant, 1905 Le spinozisme : cours professé à la Sorbonne en 1912-1913, 1916 La philosophie française, 1919 Étude de la philosophie de Malebranche, 1924 De Kant aux postkantiens, 1942