The French spiritualist philosopher and art historian Jean Gaspard Félix Ravaisson-Mollien was born in Namur, Belgium. He received his philosophical training in Munich under Friedrich von Schelling and took a degree in Paris in 1838 under Victor Cousin. His philosophical work began with his prize essay, Essai sur la métaphysique d'Aristote, and a short teaching career at Rennes in 1838. In 1840 he was appointed inspector general of libraries, a post that he held until 1860, when he became inspector general in the department of higher education. Meanwhile, as a semiprofessional painter he had become interested in classical antiquities, and in 1870 he was made curator in the department of antiquities in the Louvre. The fruit of this was his well-known set of reconstructions of the Venus de Milo.

The most influential of Ravaisson's publications was his...