Michel Serres
| Michel Serres | |
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Michel Serres in Rennes, February 2011
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| Born |
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 |
| Institutions | Stanford University |
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Main interests
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Epistemology Philosophy of science |
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Notable ideas
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Hermes, the messenger of the gods, as standing for the communication that takes place between science and the arts |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Michel Serres (born 1 September 1930) is a French philosopher and author.
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. 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.
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