Tran Duc Thao, a Vietnamese philosopher who had ties to Jean-Paul Sartre, the French Existentialist thinker, died on April 24 in a hospital in Paris. He was 76 and had returned in 1991 to France, where he had lived as a young man.

The Associated Press reported that Mr. Thao had been in ill health and had been admitted to the hospital after a fall on April 23.

Mr. Thao worked for a time with a journal that Sartre founded in 1945, Les Temps Modernes, publishing a series of conversations with Sartre on the relationship between Marxism and Existentialism.

The French newspaper Le Figaro reported Friday that Mr. Thao aligned himself with Communism in 1945 and that his book "Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism," published in French in 1951, brought him particular acclaim.

He was born in Hanoi, went to Paris when he was 20 and went on to study at the Ecole Normale Superieure, earning a degree in philosophy in 1944.

Mr. Thao later returned to Hanoi, joined anti-French insurgents in 1951, and was named Dean of the Faculty of History at the University of Hanoi in 1954. But he fell from favor and was prevented from teaching and from publishing his writings in his homeland for more than two decades, until 1987.

In reporting his death Friday, the French newspaper Liberation said that shortly before his death he had decided to remain permanently in France.

No information about survivors was available.