Organized by the Institute of Philosophy (Department of Contemporary Continental Philosophy) of the Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic, an international conference will deal with  the French Tradition of Philosophy of Body and Life. The conference seeks to shed light on its history: from its birth in Descartes’s and Maine de Biran’s works, to its many variations in the philosophy of Bergson, Canguilhem, Ruyer, and Merleau-Ponty, and to its revival within phenomenology and its main critics, such as Deleuze, Ricoeur and Foucauld, who helped shifting the core question from body to life. Gathering several–mostly French and Czech–specialists, the conference thus aims at revealing through what path philosophy of body turned into a “tradition”, if not an obsession of French philosophy, leading to a specific questioning of sciences, ethics, power, and gender studies.