Michel Serres

Michel Serres

Michel Serres in Rennes, February 2011
Born (1930-09-01) 1 September 1930
Agen, Lot-et-Garonne, France
Alma mater École Navale
École Normale Supérieure
Era 20th-century philosophy
21st-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Continental philosophy
French epistemology[1]
Institutions Stanford University
Main interests
 Epistemology
Philosophy of science
Notable ideas
 Hermes, the messenger of the gods, as standing for the communication that takes place between science and the arts[2]

Michel Serres (born 1 September 1930) is a French philosopher and author.

Life and career

The son of a barge man, Serres entered France's naval academy, the École Navale, in 1949 and the École Normale Supérieure ("rue d'Ulm") in 1952. He aggregated in 1955, having studied philosophy. He spent the next few years as a naval officer before finally receiving his doctorate in 1968, and began teaching in Paris.

As a child, Serres witnessed firsthand the violence and devastation of war. "I was six for my first dead bodies," he told Bruno Latour.[5] These formative experiences led him consistently to eschew scholarship based upon models of war, suspicion, and criticism.

Over the next twenty years, Serres earned a reputation as a spell-binding lecturer and as the author of remarkably beautiful and enigmatic prose so reliant on the sonorities of French that it is considered practically untranslatable. He took as his subjects such diverse topics as the mythical Northwest Passage, the concept of the parasite, and the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. More generally Serres is interested in developing a philosophy of science which does not rely on a metalanguage in which a single account of science is privileged and regarded as accurate. To do this he relies on the concept of translation between accounts rather than settling on one as authoritative. For this reason Serres has relied on the figure of Hermes (in his earlier works) and angels (in more recent studies) as messengers who translate (or map) back and forth between domains (i.e., between maps).

In 1990, Serres was elected to the Académie française, in recognition of his position as one of France's most prominent intellectuals. He is an influence on intellectuals such as Bruno Latour and Steven Connor. He currently serves as a Professor of French at Stanford University.[6][7]

In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serres expressed interest in the emergence of a new political philosophy that addresses the digital context of the 21st century, "I think that out of this place of no law that is the Internet there will soon emerge a new law, completely different from that which organized our old metric space."[8]

Serres is a vocal enthusiast for freely accessible knowledge, especially Wikipedia.[9]

In 2012, Serres was awarded the Meister Eckhart Prize.

Publications

Notes

  1. ↑ Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres Interviewed by Bruno Latour, University of Michigan Press, 1995, p. 8.
  2. ↑ Schrift (2006), p. 181.
  3. ↑ M. Serres, "La réforme et les sept péchés," L'Arc, 42: "Bachelard special issue" (1970).
  4. ↑ Schrift (2006), p. 180.
  5. ↑ Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres Interviewed by Bruno Latour, University of Michigan Press, 1995, p. 2.
  6. ↑ Stanford faculty
  7. ↑ Stanford faculty webpage
  8. ↑ 032c.com. "MICHEL SERRES". Retrieved 17 July 2014.
  9. ↑ Quand l'académicien Michel Serres valide Wikipédia - Framablog
  10. ↑ "The Natural Contract". University of Michigan Press. Retrieved 6 March 2015.

References

External links

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