Philosopher Who Challenged Postmodern Radicalism Is France’s New Education Minister: ‘(Luc) Ferry is sometimes identified as one of the “New Philosophers” — a group of young thinkers who, in the late 1970s, challenged the hold of Marxism and other radical currents on the French intelligentsia. In 1986, in a collaboration with Alain Renaut, Mr. Ferry published an influential critique of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Lacan, treating them as manifestations of what the book’s title called “68 thought.” (The reference to the mass protests by students and workers in May 1968 is unfortunately lost in the volume’s English translation as French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, published by the University of Massachusetts in 1990.).’ Chronicle of Higher Education