Gilles Châtelet

Gilles Châtelet (2 February 1944 – 11 June 1999) was a French philosopher and mathematician. Châtelet began studying at the École Normale Supérieure Fontenay-Saint-Cloud-Lyon in 1963. During the student upheavals of the late 1960s and the following years, he was a member of the Communist Party and associated with the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR). He became a gay activist due to his time in California in 1969, but went to the FHAR as a "way of finding again the ambiance of the United States." He later studied at University of Paris XI where he obtained his PhD in pure mathematics on 20 December 1975 and wrote his thesis on differential topology. Châtelet became a professor of mathematics in 1979 at the University of Paris VIII St. Denis (formally Known as the Free University of Vincennes). From 1981 to 1983 he was the scientific attaché at the French embassy in Israel. He was the program director at the International College of Philosophy from 1989 to 1995. He is known to have designed a seminar titled "Love Science Philosophy." In 1994 he joined the Laboratory of Thinking Science which was just founded by Charles Alunni where until his death he taught an influential seminar titled "Action, Power and Virtuality." He died by suicide in Paris on 11 June 1999. In 1986, he began writing for L'Autre until the journal's closure by its publisher Michel Butel in 1990. In 1993 Éditions du Seuil published his book Les Enjeux du mobile, (Translated into English as Figuring Space) which was a study of mathematics, physics and philosophy. In this book, Châtelet tries to reflect on the perception of movement in philosophy, mathematics and physics by way of using concepts of virtuality and intensive quantities borrowed from Nicole Oresme and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, He presents his conception of the deafening but complicated relationship between mathematics, physics and philosophy through a comparison between intuition and discourse, sense and speech.