My Path

This chapter explains Marion’s intellectual, cultural, and religious background and academic pathway. It provides an account of French intellectual life in the late twentieth century, including the student revolutions and the movement of the “New Philosophers.” It also discusses the contribution of several prominent French intellectuals. Marion outlines the history of the founding of the Catholic lay journal Communio and comments on the importance of several twentieth-century theologians. He also discusses the French academic system and its future.

Governing Big Data

2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day through pictures, messages, gps-data, etc. "Big Data" is seen simultaneously as the new Philosophers Stone and Pandora's box: a source of great knowledge and power, but equally, the root of serious problems.

Knowledge and language ‘for the ladies’

Across Europe, as early as the seventeenth century (and even more so in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) women became the target of scientific treatises which aimed to explain new scientific knowledge to an unspecialized audience. Women were the privileged recipients of popularizing works of science and literature, and therefore indirectly contributed to introducing the new philosophers. In view of women's limited education, and their ignorance of Latin, works ‘for the ladies’ became synonymous with something adapted so as to become elementary and easy to grasp. Knowledge ‘for the ladies’ extended also to language, with the production across various countries of grammatical works which claimed to be, according to their titles and prefaces, expressly meant for the female sex. In agreement with the viewpoint that saw women as being incapable of real intellectual efforts, authors of these grammars shunned dry, boring, and taxing ways of learning, in favour of quicker and more pleasant and entertaining ones.

Auf die Schiffe, ihr Pädagogen! Ein einführender Textkommentar zu Nietzsches Aphorismensammlung Die fröhliche Wissenschaft

Not only does Nietzsche anticipate the doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence and the diagnosis of God's death in his collection of aphorisms "The Gay Science" (1882), but he also suggests what is later exposed more explicitly in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and in "On the Genealogy of Morals" (1887): the project of an anti-metaphysical human science with a strong psychological focus and the task for 'new philosophers' to discover and reclaim 'another world' of knowledge and life. In this respect, "The Gay Science" has not been paid adequate attention and has been underestimated so far, in particular by German-speaking educationalists.