Jean-Michel Salanskis

Jean-Michel Emmanuel Salanskis (born 5 April 1951 in Paris) is a French philosopher and mathematician, professor of science and philosophy at the University of Paris X Nanterre.

Life Originally gaining a Diplôme d'études approfondies in pure mathematics, he went on to study philosophy with Luis Puig and Jean-Francois Lyotard from 1974 to 1983. In 1986 he completed a doctoral dissertation on Le continu et le discret (the continuous and the discrete).

Work He is an important interpreter of continental philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze, and he has published widely in English and French. He has also written about Judaism and the philosophy of mathematics.

In his book La gauche et l'égalité he argues that the left is structured by a “critique of power taking the form of a critique of man’s humiliation at the hands of transcendence" (p. 22), and that it is therefore necessary "to eliminate entirely the communist episode from the left,” for this episode partakes of the crushing of the people by one man who can “become the keystone of the world, restoring the attributes and the aura of royalty" (p. 37).

In his 2010 book Derrida, he presents the philosophy of Jacques Derrida in an accessible manner for the lay reader, showing how Derrida's work related to the fields of psychoanalysis, radical politics, and literature.

In Les temps du sens he embarks on a project to devise a mathematical hermeneutics that can be applied to fields such as philosophy of science, cognitive sciences and philosophy of religion.