Following in Paul Ricœur’s footsteps, Olivier Mongin proposes an interpretation of politics as a tension between state domination at “the top” and living together at “the bottom.” This tension, he argues, contains a potential for reciprocal violence that poses a threat to democracy.
Under the French Third Republic, the gender of “citizenship” and “philosophy” was masculine. Yet women pioneers managed to obtain university degrees and rise to positions of responsibility from which they had been excluded.
In a book that is part history of ideas, part political essay, Camille Dejardin argues that John Stuart Mill’s oeuvre is useful for understanding contemporary issues, notably the ecological crisis and related economic change. Yet she does so while advancing some half-truths.
The complexity of contemporary biology is a source of wonder, fear, and misunderstanding. Thierry Hoquet reviews the major biological theories to help us think through the social implications of a science that is opening up fascinating, though not inevitable, horizons.
Do you really know what intersectionality is? What about the epistemology of positioning? A new collection of introductory essays on feminist philosophy questions the way feminist thought has been relatively overlooked by French philosophy, and brings to light the promise of emancipation that fuels it.
The decolonial movement is diverse and often highly fragmented. Nevertheless, it remains a major theoretical force, one concerned with tracking down all forms of Eurocentrism and showing how knowledge is always necessarily situated.
In a book that is learned and ambitious as well as accessible, Vincent Citot compares the philosophies of eight different civilizations to understand their cyclical evolution from a religious to a scientific stage.
The political construction of the European Union has broken down. Restarting it would require profoundly changing our ways of thinking about sovereignty, the people and democracy – we must find a new way of thinking about our citizenship.
Through his research into little-known aspects of twentieth-century French thought and authors sensitive to the diversity of modes of knowledge, Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos has issued a manifesto for empiricism and a rallying cry against ethnocentrism.
Is another world possible? Answering this question requires us to first ask ourselves what “possible” might mean. We must return to the classics: from Aristotle to Bourdieu, many authors can help us understand what an alternative might look like.
Are we free, or are our actions determined by natural causes? The problem thus posed is a metaphysical construct: From late antiquity onwards, the authentic meaning of freedom as a principle of action has been obscured by the invention of free will and the excessive importance given to the concept of the will.
Vygotsky is a major educational theorist credited with showing how the mind of the child is formed. In this book, Pascal Sévérac explains what Vygotsky’s theory owes to Spinoza’s.
Speech can mislead us just as it can convince us of the truth. Clément Viktorovitch’s salutary book reviews the basic rules of rhetoric along with its pitfalls and persuasive resources.
According to Jean-Fabien Spitz, republicanism’s foundational ideals have been betrayed by the very people who purport to defend them against liberalism. An overemphasis on questions of identity makes it possible to forget that the republic was, from the outset, a principle of social justice.
According to Camille Riquier, the Metaphysical Meditations are the “secret” to understanding Sartrean thought. Yet, can this bold thesis be extended to Sartre’s entire oeuvre?
Aristotle’s ethics is, indeed, a form of naturalism. Yet, according to Pierre-Marie Morel, this is a problematic naturalism in which nature retains a degree of opacity and proves irreducible to any biological determinism.
The latest book by Catherine Colliot-Thèlène, who died in 2022, crowns a vast body of work in the field of political philosophy. She drew inspiration from a meticulous and enlightening reinterpretation of the classics in order to understand the contemporary world.
Why do we make promises? And what motivates us to keep those we make? Are there good reasons for breaking commitments? Promises, the foundation of our social relationships, are an enigma. Vincent Boyer helps us get to the bottom of this.
In a scholarly yet accessible study, Pierre Pellegrin argues that Aristotle is the true founder of biology, contrary to what a distorted perception of his finalism has long led us to believe.
Where do our emotions come from? Are they specific to our sensibility or are they a product of our environment? And how do they become collective? Louis Quéré proposes to revisit these crucial questions.
Jane Mansbridge has made a major contribution to political theory. She has spent her life combining empirical research with a theoretical approach, and has played a vital role in developing the critique of rational choice and the study of democracy as a permanent process continually in flux.
Images are nothing but figurations of our relationship to the world, that is, of our ways of worlding. P. Descola demonstrates this in a monumental study that does justice to the diversity of cultures, time periods, and artworks.
Science fiction and fantasy allow us to think the human from its margins. Through a gallery of twelve fictional characters, Thierry Hoquet uncovers this philosophy as well as the political and ethical issues at stake.
Contrary to popular belief, the Middle Ages did not discard Epicurus. Several thinkers were in constant dialogue with Epicureanism, even as they condemned it. And many quietly rehabilitated it.
We construct ourselves through the models that we choose for ourselves or those that are constantly produced by society. Nassim El Kabli’s book unpacks the various dimensions of the relationship with the other by which the singular self comes into being.
Reparation, Johann Michel explains, is not just a moral principle dictated by our sense of justice. More fundamentally, it is an anthropological constant, through which we try to mitigate our inherent vulnerability.
Accumulation in a world of finite resources: Such is the vortex into which the moderns are thrown. Current ecological concerns, however, should also be viewed as a metamorphosis of the social question.
The Foucauldian analysis of the relations between power and knowledge draws on Nietzschean genealogy. For Jacques Bouveresse, however, Foucault, Deleuze, and their followers have put a left spin on the philosopher at the cost of a misinterpretation that leaves him perplexed.
Through a meditation on what might constitute a Spinozist education, Pascal Sévérac considers the passage from childhood to adulthood as that from one nature to another and organizes the rules of a good education around the notion of affectivity.
Do individuals have absolute rights to the things they have labored on? It would seem to go without saying that the answer is “yes” – and yet, this principle can be called into question. A definition of private property requires us to be in agreement with each other – and therefore to share a set of common values.
Rorty made conversation a philosophical genre in its own right, which led him to reject any distinctions he considered futile: between analytic and continental philosophy, between the Enlightenment and postmodernity, between philosophy and literature.
Even though scientific data give us grounds for pessimism, philosopher Darrel Moellendorf shows that hoping for climate justice is not vain. To mobilize hope, he puts mass mobilization, technological progress and realistic utopia forward.
As literary concepts, “utopia” and “dystopia” have functioned as powerful tools of social and political critique, as they propose alternative visions of the future gone good or wrong. Gregory Claeys explores this dual nature, and its potential for imagining social change, while tracing back the historical roots and uses of utopianism.
Through a phenomenology of plant life, the philosopher Florence Burgat reminds us that plants are defined above all by what they do not have: Lacking an intentional consciousness or a lived world, how could they lead the secret life that certain popular books ascribe to them?
Transhumanism is usually thought of as emerging out of Silicon Valley and the GAFA—but might it be French in origin? This theory, which connects the utopia of artificial intelligence and of man-machine hybridisation to pre-war eugenicist biology, is open to debate.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection focuses on ways to shift our intellectual categories.
The first English translator of Spinoza’s Ethics was a woman, and not any woman: the great novelist George Eliot who, before taking to writing fiction, had translated Feuerbach, David Strauss—and Spinoza. Her beautiful translation had remained unpublished until now. It has nothing to envy of the ones that followed.
The history of philosophy is a discipline in its own right that invented itself as such in the 18th and 19th centuries. But it is also an imperialist practice intended to mark the triumph of European reason. Catherine König-Pralong’s book traces its history.
Modernity has been built on the idea of a fundamental divide between nature and culture, humans and non-humans, the world and the spirit. These distinctions are no longer viable, as shown by an interdisciplinary and collectively authored book.
In the eighteenth century, vegetarianism was viewed as a philosophical question in its own right, at the intersection of debates about animal suffering and good health. It was also a controversial issue that saw anti-Christianism and social criticism produce similar positions.
