As part of the lecture series on Independence of the Mind, organized by the French Cultural Centre and PRIO, Luc Ferry has visited Norway, hosting a seminar on secularism. The seminar had an attendance of almost 250 people. Luc Ferry is a model public intellectual, able to draw on multiple roles as a political scientist, philosopher, commentator, essayist and former minister of education and research in France.
The seminar is in French, with simultaneous translation to Norwegian
Luc Ferry is one of France's 'New Philosophers': a group of influential intellectuals who confronted Marxism and other radical thinking in France in the 1970s. He is the author of more than 15 books, with his major breakthrough coming in 1985 with the book La pensée '68 (French Philosophy of the Sixties). In this book (co-authored with Alain Renaut), he criticized what he viewed as the value relativism then in fashion within French philosophy: post-structuralism. With books like the prestigous Political Philosophy (1984-85), Ferry became one of the most important contemporary thinkers of theoretical philosophy. He has also written popular philosophy like Homo Aestheticus (1990), The New Ecological Order (1992), God - Man, and the Meaning of Life (1992), and The Wisdom of the Moderns (1998) - books that have confirmed his role as an important analyst of modern society. Luc Ferry is not just one of the voices of the New Philosopher movement; he has also proved that it is possible to combine thinking with real-world practice: in 2002-04, he held the post of Minister of Education and Research in France.
