Biography
Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and member of the Archives Husserl at Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris. He was educated at several universities in Paris, where he received successively his M.D. in 1980, his Ph.D. in Physics in 1985, and his “Habilitation” in Philosophy in 1997.
He worked as a research scientist from 1978 to 1990, specializing in biophysics. From 1990 onwards, he turned to the philosophy of physics. He edited texts of general philosophy and of quantum mechanics by Erwin Schrödinger, and published a book entitled Schrödinger’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics (Kluwer, 1996). He also published two books in French on a neo-Kantian interpretation of quantum mechanics and on quasi-realism and anti-realism in science, in 1996 and 1998 respectively. In 1997 he was the recipient of an award from the Academie des sciences morales et politiques for his work in the philosophy of quantum mechanics.
Later on, he focused on the much-debated connections between the philosophy of quantum mechanics and the philosophy of mind. He published a book on that topic in French in 2000, and worked in close collaboration with Francisco Varela in the wake of this work. He is presently pursuing this line of research by developing a conception of consciousness inspired from neurophenomenology, and an epistemology of first-person knowledge. Besides, he also learnt some Sanskrit in order to get a better understanding of basic texts by Nagarjuna and Candrakirti, and recently published a book (De l’intérieur du monde : pour une philosophie et une science des relations, 2010) in which he draws a parallel between Buddhist Interdependence and non-supervenient relations in quantum physics and the theory of knowledge.