Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

Born in Paris in 1857, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure and went on to teach at the Sorbonne. Over time, his work moved from moral philosophy and the history of modern thought toward anthropology, where he became widely known for studying belief, myth, and social life in non-Western societies.

He is especially associated with books such as How Natives Think, in which he argued that the mental habits of traditional societies were not simply less developed versions of European reasoning, but were organized differently. That argument made him one of the most discussed—and contested—figures in early anthropology.

In his later years, he reconsidered some of his sharper contrasts between Western and non-Western thought. He died in 1939, but his work remained influential because it pushed scholars to take other systems of belief seriously, even when they disagreed strongly with his conclusions.