Luc Brisson | |
---|---|
Born | Saint-Esprit, Quebec, Canada | March 10, 1946
Occupation | Historian of philosophy |
Awards | CNRS Bronze medal |
Honors | Fellow of Lincean Academy and Royal Society of Canada |
Luc Brisson (born 10 March 1946 in Saint-Esprit, Quebec) is a Canadian (and from 1986 also French) historian of philosophy and anthropologist of antiquity. He is emeritus director of research at the CNRS in France, [1] and is considered by some of his colleagues and students to be the greatest contemporary scholar on Platonism. [2]
Brisson was born in a small agricultural village in Québec in 1946. All his education was received in the ecclesiastically administered and staffed schools, seminaries, and universities of Québec. At the end of the sixties he joined the general movement of Québec students to Paris, where he undertook a thesis on the Timaeus of Plato, under the direction of Clémence Ramnoux at Paris X Nanterre. During 1971-1972 he was a visiting scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. His studies include several years of Sanskrit. Upon the completion of his Ph.D. thesis, and through the support of Jean Pépin, who shared his interest in the ancient treatment of myth, Brisson was attached to the CNRS in 1974. In 1975 he was awarded the Zographos Prize for his systematic commentary on Timaeus, Le Même et l’Autre dans la structure ontologique du Timée de Platon. [3]
Despite his wider philosophical interests, he says that “I can be defined as ‘an historian of philosophy’ whose domain of research is Plato and Platonism.” His historical work includes several studies of Neoplatonism including new French translations of Plotinus. [4]
Brisson’s range and quantity of publications has been very large, but the topic of the relation between myth and reason has dominated. At home neither in Québec nor in France, Brisson feels himself to be a kind of Platonic “nomad.” For him, as for Pierre Hadot, philosophy is “a spiritual exercise destined to transform the life of the individual who gives himself up to it.” [5]
See the French Wikipedia article for a comprehensive list.
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William of Conches was a French scholastic philosopher who sought to expand the bounds of Christian humanism by studying secular works of the classics and fostering empirical science. He was a prominent member of the School of Chartres. John of Salisbury, a bishop of Chartres and former student of William's, refers to William as the most talented grammarian after Bernard of Chartres.
Calcidius was a 4th-century philosopher who translated the first part of Plato's Timaeus from Greek into Latin around the year 321 and provided with it an extensive commentary. This was likely done for Bishop Hosius of Córdoba. Very little is otherwise known of him.
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David Neil Sedley FBA is a British philosopher and historian of philosophy. He was the seventh Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University.
Dominique Lecourt was a French philosopher. He is known in the Anglophone world primarily for his work developing a materialist interpretation of the philosophy of science of Gaston Bachelard.
The Liber de causis is a philosophical work composed in the 9th century that was once attributed to Aristotle and that became popular in the Middle Ages, first in Arabic and Islamic countries and later in the Latin West. The real authorship remains a mystery, but most of the content is taken from a work by the Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus called Elements of Theology. This was first noticed by Thomas Aquinas, following William of Moerbeke's translation of Proclus' work into Latin. As such it is now attributed to a pseudo-Aristotle.
Michel Tardieu is a French scholar working on religious currents in Late Antiquity and in the Near and Far East.
Monique Canto-Sperber is a French philosopher. Her works, translated in several languages, are focused on ethics and contemporary political issues. A former Director of the École normale supérieure from 2005 to 2012, she has been President of Paris Sciences et Lettres – Quartier latin, a French higher education and research institution, since 2012.
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Jean Varenne was a French Indologist and a prominent figure of the Nouvelle Droite. He taught Sanskrit at the Aix-Marseille University, then at Jean Moulin University Lyon 3, where he was eventually nominated professor emeritus. Varenne has also been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, and at other universities in India, Cambodia and Mexico.
Victor Goldschmidt was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy.
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Christian Jambet is a French philosopher and Islamologist.
Michel Malherbe is a French translator and philosopher. A specialist of Anglo-Saxon empiricism, he has translated Bacon, Locke and Hume. He is director of the series "Analyse et philosophie" and "Bibliothèque des philosophies" by Vrin.
Pierre Cassou-Noguès is a French philosopher and writer.
Ilsetraut Hadot in Berlin, is a philosopher and historian of philosophy who specialised in Stoicism, Neoplatonism and more generally in Ancient Philosophy.
Plato the Myth Maker is a book by the Canadian historian and anthropologist Luc Brisson, published in 1982. An English translation was published in 1998.