Quora answer: Who are some of the most influential French philosophers?

Easy to list them, but hard to say why they are influential. They are influential because they are exploring the ideas of Heidegger based on those of Husserl, Hegel and Aristotle. They have rediscovered the meta-levels of Being. They have explored this territory discovering

• Pure Being – Husserl
• Process Being — Heidegger
• Hyper Being — Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida
• Wild Being — Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Castoradis
• Ultra Being — Zizek, Badiou

If you can understand these kinds of Being you can understand the nature of the essential nature of the Western worldview.