(Embrun, France, 1951) is a Sinologist and Professor at the Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot, as well as being director of the Institut de la Pensée Contemporaine and of the Marcel-Granel Institute. He has been president of the French Association of Chinese Studies and of the Collège International de Philosophie. He has devoted his academic work to exploring the relations between Chinese thought and European philosophy, seeking other kinds of intelligibility in the Far East. He has published a large number of books, most recent amongst which are Nutrir la vida: más allá de la felicidad (Katz, 2008 – published in English as Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness, MIT Press, 2007), La sombra en el cuadro (The Shadow on the Picture – Arena Libros, 2009), Las transformaciones silenciosas (Bellaterra, 2010 – to be published in English as The Silent Transformations, University of Chicago Press, 2011), De lo universal, de lo uniforme, de lo común, del diálogo entre las culturas (On the Universal, the Uniform, the Ordinary and Dialogue Between Cultures – Siruela, 2010) and the as-yet untranslated book Cette étrange idée du beau (Grasset, 2010).
