Michel Serres

Michel Serres is a french contemporary philosopher. Besides his writing activity, he regularly gives lectures at Stanford University, California, USA. As far as I know his lectures are given in french, and that's a great challenge, isnt'it ?

His earliest works are relevant to the philosophy of science. He was one of the philosophers that introduced the analytical philosophy (Russel, Whitehead, Wittengenstein, etc.) in France, where it was largely ignored. Though, he couldn't be directly attached to that philosophical mainstream.

His corner book, from my point of view, is "Les cinq sens" ("the five senses"), where he invents a very sensual language to speak of the role of senses in our knowledge of the life and of our usual ignorance of that role. I think he tries to reduce the distance between the language and the object that the language tries to capture. Even if such a distance cannot be reduced to null. He has this beautiful sentence : "le nom de la rose n'embaume." (Sorry for non-french speakers, I'm unable to translate it)

In a previous book, "Le passage du Nord-Ouest" ("the NordWest? passage"), he described the countries of knowledge that lie between what he calls the "hard sciences" (mathematics, physics, etc.) and the "soft sciences" (social sciences, philosophy, etc.). He tries to cartography some roads between these two (usually separate) continents.

He is an ardent defender of every kinds of crossbreeding, and particularly in the field of knowledge and philosophy. He also defends crossbreeding in education in his book "Le tiers-instruit".

As my philosophical culture is very thin, I cannot say much more about his books but I invite you to discover them ... and to learn french if you did'nt do it yet ! -- JeanMichelAndre

I've found a very good introduction in english to Michel Serres's writings by Anna Botta at : http://web.sls.ufl.edu/abstracts/botta.html