Bruno Pinchard

Bruno Pinchard (born June 15, 1955 in Le Havre) is a French writer and scholar, PhD, and professor of philosophy.

Bruno Pinchard was born into a family of musicians.

His father is the composer Max Pinchard who gave him a musical education himself.

After studying at the Lycée François Ier (Le Havre), then at Louis-le-Grand, he was admitted to the École normale supérieure (class of 1976).

During these years, he attended courses given by Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan, and became friends with Pierre Caye and Pierre Lochak.

After receiving his Agrégation in philosophy in 1978, he also became a student at a second École Normale Supérieure in Pisa (1979–1981), where his professor was Eugenio Garin.

However, the decisive encounters were made outside the schools: those of the composer Georges Migot and the mathematician René Thom in France, as well as the musicologist Annibale Gianuario in Italy.

In 1982, he defended a post-graduate thesis at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales under the direction of Louis Marin: L'Orphée moderne, rhétorique et métaphysique du "suono delle parole" dans l'humanisme littéraire et musical du Cinquecento.

After defending his dissertation in 1991, "La Fabbrica della mente, de Cajétan à Vico" under the direction of Pierre Magnard at the University of Paris-IV Sorbonne, he was elected professor at the University of Tours and at the Centre d'études supérieures de la Renaissance (chair of Renaissance philosophy).

His study on the Fabbrica della mente, "architecture of the mind" (an expression borrowed from Tasso), published in 1992 under the title La Raison dédoublée, focuses historically on the Italian Renaissance, of which he makes the exemplary episode of a renewal of philosophy.

Based on the examination of this pivotal period, between the Middle Ages and modern times, he posits that the architecture of the mind capable of carrying a civilization is built from the "splitting" of its principle.

The thought of the Renaissance was split between scholasticism and modernity (through the question of analogy), between paganism and Christianity (with the return of Platonism), between land and sea (with the great discoveries).

From these historical observations, Bruno Pinchard's work consists in giving a conceptual meaning to the dynamics of "splitting".

For Pinchard, it is only on the basis of splitting that thought achieves its theoretical and practical ends.

As soon as the mind splits, human intelligence becomes fertile.

Pinchard thus opposes the critical power of duality to the reductions to a constrained unity which, in his eyes, characterize ideologies ,.

According to Pinchard, the real power of thought is to liberate the irrepressible split that resides in everything that claims to be a unity.

Pinchard manages to contain the destructive risk by finding in humanist myths a measure capable of imposing itself on the dividing power of intelligence.

Through this culture of reflected myth, Pinchard's thought is a humanism.

In the face of oppositions that now seem irreconcilable between profane and sacred, tradition and modernity, progress and decadence or globalisation and territorialisation, we find at work according to Pinchard federating myths, which are the foundations of a human community.

In fact, these myths do not hinder the deepening of the splits at the basis of historical life ,.

They constitute only the substantial bottom of it.

Pinchard finds universal expressions of these myths, in particular in Rabelais and in Dante: the giants of the origin and the cult of the Mediterranean goddesses ,.

By the same means he defends ontology against the anti-substantialist bias of contemporary philosophy, in particular the phenomenological current, any substance becoming for him a mythical center, which he names after René Thom, a "well of potential ".

Bruno Pinchard has maintained a constant dialogue with the mathematical work of René Thom.

He has sought in the geometry of catastrophes (topological folds of space) the deep form of these organizing myths.

Under the impulse of René Thom, his philosophy became an "occasionalism" which makes of every event an occasion actualizing the pure form of a myth.

He found an extension of this point of view in the idea of Capital according to Marx, which could be called a "mythological occasionalism ".

To sum up, according to Pinchard, splitting is the oldest mark of humanity, which knows itself to be exposed to becoming and death, that of a knowledge confronted with its share of ignorance and the duality of its engendering.

Since 2003, Bruno Pinchard has held the Chair of Philosophy of the Renaissance and the Classical Age at the Université Jean-Moulin Lyon-III, where he is director of the École doctorale de philosophie, Rhône-Alpes region (2007–2016).

In 2008, he taught at Japanese universities (Nihon, Waseda, Todai, Kwansei-Gakuin).

He has regularly visited China, in particular Sun-Yat-sen University in Canton and Beijing Normal University (BNU) in Beijing.

Bruno Pinchard seeks in philosophy to break with the "deconstruction" which reigned over his intellectual generation and calls, in return, for a "Metamorphosis of the philosophia perennis " (the "eternal philosophy"), that is to say, for the conditions of a rebirth confronting the consequences of the two world wars.

In 2016, he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy for a five-year term.

Since 2021, he has continued his work in France at the Centre Jean Pépin (CNRS-ENS Ulm), and has developed his research along two institutional lines: the Société Dantesque de France, of which he is the founder, and Actualités de René Thom.

Moreover, Bruno Pinchard has given lectures abroad: at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples, and at Italian research centers (Catania, Bologna, Trento).

He has presented works on Descartes at the University of Chicago and on Rabelais at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He has been invited to universities in Quebec (Laval and UM) and Romania.

He has traveled twice to Israel to present his work on Rabelais and the Jewish tradition.

He also works with the Université Libre de Belgique.