To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Guern §467
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Diogenese of Sinope, oil on canvas, 1860 (Walters Arts Museum).
Last book published
Lettres d'ailleurs
Vertiges d'une âme au bord d'elle-même
Cet ouvrage exprime un cri de stupeur devant ce à quoi nous, Occidentaux contemporains, avons réduit la dimension spirituelle de notre condition. Un évêque en enfer y prend la parole pour dire avec quelle banalité il s’est installé dans l’abîme. Une athée écrit au pape. Elle se désole que ceux qui se disent religieux ne soient pas à la hauteur de leur message. Un homme, jadis empressé, se repent de ses brouilles avec le temps. Il fait de sa vie une image de l’éternité. Une âme, enfin, s’avance de derrière la mort pour nous dire ce qu’elle n’est pas.
Book Trailer
“The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.”
Joseph Joubert, Carnets
My work
“The core of my academic work lies in intellectual history, primarily medieval metaphysics in both Latin and Arabic contexts.
My research centers on individual identity, where I develop the notion of whoness in contrast to the traditional paradigm of whatness (quidditas in Latin and māhiyyah/ ماهية in Arabic) through which individuation is usually approached. This conceptual shift allows me to articulate some distinctive features of what I describe as a formative age, namely, a period of creativity and re-invention situated between late Antiquity and the classical scholasticism of the Christian Middle Ages and the classical Islamic tradition. My dissertation on this topic includes chapters on John Scottus Eriugena, Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, and Peter Abelard.
I also work and publish on continental philosophy, particularly enjoying the French Moralists, whom I consider a school of philosophy in their own right, shaped by their distinctive use of what I call brief forms (formes brèves), such as aphorisms. For example, I have developed a reading of Emil Cioran as a clandestine Platonist – a thinker whose fragmentary style masks a deeply coherent and nearly systematic metaphysical vision.
Beyond strictly academic work, I write literary texts that reflect on religion in the contemporary West.
Lucas Depierre”
Retrieving Premodern Individual Identities
Collective-Evolutive Paradigms in the Hellenism of Proclus and the Christianity of Eriugena
Exploring the notion of individual identity in premodern times necessitates confronting a spectrum of philosophico-theological interrogations that emerge from the fundamental question: what distinguishes one human being from another? I propose a collective-evolutive model to retrieve Proclus’ and Eriugena’s views on individual identity. Within this paradigm, this investigation sheds light on two crucial facets (collective and evolutive) of individual identity during this stage of European intellectual history: the individual identity of the human being was not consistently qualified as immutable, singularly bestowed at birth. Instead, it was perceived as a character with a propensity to evolve, increase or decrease, received within and through a harmonious collective whole.
