Michel Serres

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Michel Serres (born September 1, 1930 in Agen) is a French philosopher and author with an unusual career.

Born the son of a barge man, Serres entered the Ecole Navale in 1949 and the École Normale Supérieure in 1952. He agregated in 1955 after 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. He studied mathematics and science in the shadow of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These formative experiences led him to consistently 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 known so reliant on the sonorities of French that it is 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 one account of science is privileged and 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 back and forth between domains.

In 1990, Serres was appointed to the Académie Française, a sign of his position as one of France's most prominent intellectuals. In the English-speaking world, Serres is perhaps best known for teaching at Stanford University and for influencing younger intellectuals such as Bruno Latour and Steven Connor.


[edit] Bibliography

  • 1968 Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques, 2 vol. (PUF)
  • 1969 Hermès I. La communication (Minuit)
  • 1972 Hermès II. L’interférence (Minuit)
  • 1974 Hermès III. La traduction (Minuit)
  • 1974 Jouvences. Sur Jules Verne (Minuit)
  • 1975 Auguste Comte. Leçons de philosophie positive, vol. I (Hermann)
  • 1975 Feux et signaux de brume. Zola (Grasset)
  • 1975 Esthétiques. Sur Carpaccio (Hermann)
  • 1977 Hermès IV. La distribution (Minuit)
  • 1977 La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce. Fleuves et turbulences (Minuit) (tr. Jack Hawkes The Birth of Physics, 2000)
  • 1980 Hermès V. Le passage du Nord-Ouest (Minuit)
  • 1980 Le Parasite (Grasset)
  • 1982 Genèse (Grasset)
  • 1983 Détachement (Flammarion)
  • 1983 Rome. Le livre des fondations (Grasset)
  • 1985 Les Cinq Sens, Médicis de l’Essai Prize (Grasset)
  • 1987 L’Hermaphrodite. Sarrasine sculpteur (Flammarion)
  • 1987 Statues (François Bourin)
  • 1989 Éléments d’histoire des sciences (in collaboration) (Bordas)
  • 1990 Le Contrat naturel, Blaise Pascal Prize (François Bourin )
  • 1991 Le Tiers-Instruit (François Bourin) (published in English as The Troubadour of Knowledge, 1997)
  • 1992 Éclaircissements (François Bourin)
  • 1993 Les Origines de la géométrie (Flammarion)
  • 1993 La Légende des Anges (Flammarion)
  • 1994 Atlas (Julliard)
  • 1995 Éloge de la philosophie en langue française (Fayard)
  • 1997 Nouvelles du monde (Flammarion)
  • 1997 Le Trésor. Dictionnaire des sciences (coll.) (Flammarion)
  • 1997 À visage différent (coll.) (Hermann)
  • 1998 Paysages des sciences (Le Pommier)
  • 1999 Variations sur le corps (Le Pommier)
  • 2000 Hergé mon ami (Éd. Moulinsart)
  • 2001 Le Livre de la médecine (coll.) (Le Pommier)
  • 2001 Hominescence (Le Pommier)
  • 2002 En amour, sommes-nous des bêtes ? (Le Pommier)
  • 2002 Jules Verne : la science (Le Pommier)
  • 2002 L'Homme contemporain (Le Pommier)
  • 2003 L'Incandescent (Le Pommier)
  • 2003 Qu'est-ce que l'humain ? (coll.) (Le Pommier)
  • 2004 Rameaux (Le Pommier)
  • 2006 Récits d'Humanisme (Le Pommier)


[edit] External links

Preceded by:
Edgar Faure		 Seat 18
Académie française
1990-		 Succeeded by:
Incumbent
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