André Comte-Sponville
b. 1952 · French materialist, rationalist and humanist philosopher
André Comte-Sponville (born in Paris in 1952) is a French philosopher working in the materialist, rationalist and humanist tradition. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was a student and friend of Louis Althusser, and earned his doctorate at the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. For many years he taught at the Sorbonne, leaving the university in 1998 to devote himself to writing and to lectures outside academia.
His thinking draws mainly on Epicurus, the Stoics, Montaigne and Spinoza, and among his contemporaries he stands close to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Conche and Clément Rosset. His books range from moral philosophy, such as A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, to reflections on love, solitude and happiness. In 2008 he was appointed to the French National Consultative Ethics Committee.
His atheism is not dogmatic. He proposes a spirituality without God, in which wisdom means living the present fully without transcendent consolations. His work has reached a wide readership in France and across the world through popular philosophy.
Key ideas
- Materialism: everything that exists is matter, and no transcendent principle explains or guarantees it.
- Spiritual atheism: one can give up God without giving up a spiritual life grounded in attention, generosity and love.
- The virtues: ethics is built from concrete virtues such as fidelity, justice, prudence and generosity rather than from absolute rules.
- Wisdom of the present: happiness is possible only in the lived moment, without waiting for compensation in another life.
- Humanism: human beings must accept their finitude and seek the meaning of their existence within it.
Curiosities
An official appointment
In 2008 he was named a member of the French National Consultative Ethics Committee by President Nicolas Sarkozy.
A decision at the Sorbonne
He left the Sorbonne in 1998 to devote himself exclusively to writing and lecturing.
Teachers and influences
Influenced by
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
- Blaise Pascal 1623–1662
- Benedictus de Spinoza 1632–1677
- Epicurus 341 BC–269 BC
- Michel de Montaigne 1533–1592
- Lucretius 93 BC–54 BC
- Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908–2009
- Louis Althusser 1918–1990
- Alain 1868–1951
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.