André Comte-Sponville

About André Comte-Sponville

Rationalist, materialist, and humanist philosopher, André Comte-Sponville offers wisdom for our time. He defines himself as a “non-dogmatic and faithful atheist.” His favorite authors are Epicurus, Montaigne, and Spinoza. Among contemporaries, he feels especially close to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Conche, and Clément Rosset. André Comte-Sponville was born in Paris in 1952. A former student of the École Normale Supérieure on rue d’Ulm, he holds an agrégation in philosophy and a doctorate in the third cycle, Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Mons-Hainaut in Belgium, and was for a long time a Lecturer at the Sorbonne (University Paris I). He has now ceased teaching to devote more time to writing and giving lectures outside the University. He has been a member of the National Consultative Ethics Committee since March 2008. He engages with several associations (the Association for Management Progress, the CJD, the CGPME…) or companies (Crédit Agricole, AGF, Thomson, PSA, Total, EDF, Groupama, Vivendi, Azur GMF, Galeries La Fayette, Sopra, Crédit Mutuel, Crédit coopératif, AXA, DEXIA, Vinci, KPMG, Deloitte, GSK, Renault, Banques Populaires, GDF-SUEZ, Thalès, BNP-Paribas, MAAF, Castorama, OCTO Technology, Allianz, Adidas…). He created a limited liability company with a Montaigne-inspired name: L’Art de Conférer, to manage these lectures. André Comte-Sponville first published a Treatise on Despair and Beatitude, as well as two collections of articles: A Philosophical Education and Value and Truth (Cynical Studies). These three books, which are very successful (the Treatise on Despair and Beatitude, published in 1984, is in its fifteenth edition), are published by Presses Universitaires de France. André Comte-Sponville regularly participates in several conferences or academic publications. He notably directed three issues of the International Journal of Philosophy, dedicated respectively to Montaigne (No. 181, 1992), Pascal (No. 199, 1997), and Alain (No. 215, 2001). This same journal dedicated its No. 258, published in 2011, to him. But André Comte-Sponville also writes in the mainstream press (L’Express, Le Point, Le Nouvel Observateur, L’Événement du Jeudi, L’Expansion, Le Monde, Le Figaro, La Croix, Libération, Le Magazine littéraire, Impact-Médecin Hebdo, Psychologies…). He holds a column in Le Monde des religions and another in Challenges. Finally, he has appeared several times on television, invited notably by Michel Polac, Bernard Pivot, Jean-Marie Cavada, Christine Ockrent, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, Guillaume Durand, Michel Field, Laure Adler, Frédéric Ferney, Serge Moati, and Jean-Marc Sylvestre. His easiest books: Love Solitude and Presentations of Philosophy (both published by Albin Michel, reissued by “Le Livre de Poche”), as well as Happiness, Desperately (Ed. Pleins Feux, reissued by Librio), Impromptus (PUF, 1996), and Human Life (Hermann, 2005). His most famous book: A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, published in January 1995, by PUF (La Bruyère Prize of the French Academy, 300,000 copies sold in France, translated into 24 languages). His most recent books: The Wisdom of the Moderns, with Luc Ferry (Robert Laffont, 1998); Being-Time (PUF, 1999); Philosophical Dictionary (PUF, 2001); Is Capitalism Moral? (Albin Michel, 2004, reissued 2009 with an unpublished afterword); Philosophy (PUF, coll. “Que sais-je?”, 2005); Human Life (with drawings by Sylvie Thybert, Hermann, 2005); The Spirit of Atheism (Introduction to a Spirituality Without God), Albin Michel, 2006; Honey and Absinthe (Poetry and Philosophy in Lucretius), Hermann, 2008; On the Body, PUF, 2009; The Taste for Life and a Hundred Other Thoughts, Albin Michel, 2010; Sex Neither Death (Three Essays on Love and Sexuality), Albin Michel, 2012. He has just published a new, significantly expanded edition of his Philosophical Dictionary (PUF, September 2013).