John West wrote:

And where is our glorious Frenchman? I've studied under French professors, so I have an idea of the kind of rubbish you probably have to deal with whenever philosophy comes up. (Anglos have to contend with lots of naturalists, but at least they're still objectively-minded. The French have to contend with rampant postmodernism.) How does someone surrounded by all that get to Thomism?

It's a bit out of place, and maybe too much personal, but I'm curious: on what circumstances did you study under French professors?
Apart from that, even if I'm not sctricto sensu from France, only a francophone, I wouldn't say that they got a big problem with postmodernism: maybe the academics aren't very much "analytics", but on public matters, I would say that the USA are ahead on this level.

John West wrote:

What about you, Calhoun? I know you've read a lot of analytic literature.

Well It seem have read a lot more than I understood, haha.

I would say Edward Feser, Alex Pruss and WLC. Their work probably made me interested in the literature.

These days I am trying to read and understand some Phil. of Science literature , focus on Ontic Structural realism. 

Haha. Don't worry about being off-topic in this thread.

A lot of Canadian universities insist on having both French and English versions of courses. (Or if not, they at least prefer bilingual professors.) The end result is that their faculties end up with lots of Frenchmen and Quebecois, who are often the only ones who speak both languages at an academic level.

Contemporary continental philosophy is heavily influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger, and the French seem to have been hit by the postmodern side of that particularly hard—Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida. They also seem to have had more influence on the art, architecture, and film worlds than most other countries' philosophers. You're right that I was thinking mainly of the French intellectual world. (I think Nietzsche, Heidegger, and some of the others are worth studying, but that isn't my point.)

Anglo philosophers, by comparison, are more often influenced by the objectively-minded analytic tradition.

Calhoun wrote:

These days I am trying to read and understand some Phil. of Science literature , focus on Ontic Structural realism.

Is this Ladyman's view? There are some interesting papers on it in The Metaphysics of Relations (eds. Marmodoro and Yates).

(Also, since Nietzsche has come up, I found this paper by a Matthew Meyer while trying to find a PDF of Ladyman's The Metaphysics of Relations paper to post. Based on the first couple pages, he argues that Nietzsche might have been a proto ontic structural realist.)

I see. Well, don't let some bad interactions with students and laymen, who probably aren't actually that versed in Kant, spoil him for you. Kant does tend to focus on proof and apodicticity a lot. (I was going after all circular justification in part of the most recent Kant-related thread, which is a bit different.) But he's doing so because he's trying to deal with problems prominent in the early modern tradition, and his work is meant to make sense within that context. If you don't recognize the problems (or don't recognize them as problems), then you're going to wonder why anybody bothers to take him seriously.

I do think that the French tend to overstate his case a little. (I once wrote to a friend, "Kant is like God to the French".)