External links
- Podcasts featuring Chalier on Radio France
- * Articles in Revue Esprit
Catherine Chalier | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 2, 1947 Paris |
| Awards | 2017 French Voices Award |
| Education | |
| Education | University of Tours |
| Thesis | Essai sur l'existence religieuse : Judaïsme et altérité (1981) |
| Francis Kaplan | |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| Institutions | Paris X (Institut de recherches philosophiques) PhiloMonaco |
Main interests | Jewish thought, Levinas, Spinoza |
| Website | https://dep-philo.parisnanterre.fr/les-enseignants/chalier-catherine |
Catherine Chalier (born in Paris, 2 October 1947) is a French philosopher, translator, and author of works on Jewish thought and philosophy. She specializes in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, as well as that of Franz Rosenzweig and Baruch Spinoza. A convert from Catholicism to Judaism, she is a professor emeritus at Paris Nanterre University, also known as Paris X.
During la classe terminale, the final year of French secondary school, she was a student of Élisabeth de Fontenay. She defended her doctoral thesis [Essai sur l'existence religieuse : judaïsme et altérité (Essay on Religious Existence: Judaism and Alterity)] at the University of Tours in 1981 under the supervision of Francis Kaplan in the field of philosophy of religion.
At the age of 22, and following her first voyage to Israel, Chalier learned Hebrew and studied under Levinas himself at Paris X. It was the 1960s and, while his lectures emphasized the works of Hegel and Husserl above his own writings, she was deeply moved by the man himself, his story as a survivor of the Holocaust, and the optimism that she perceived in him. She has spoken about this in interviews. She associated this "light" with the commitment to "choose life" in the Jewish Scriptures and to the very Levinasian philosophy of responsibility to others, in particular those who suffer. She began to attend his Torah classes at the synagogue of the École normale israélite orientale (Paris), where he was passionate about teaching others the power of deriving "fresh insights" from the Torah rather than merely memorizing it.
Chalier has supervised many doctoral theses, including that of Christophe Schaeffer.
Chalier is a member of the jury for the awards at Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco.
Matthew Ray of the University of Bristol reviewed What Ought I to Do?: Morality in Kant and Levinas for the Heythrop Journal in 2004. Ray calls it a "comparative study" of Kant and Levinas on the question of the source of ethics which acknowledges that neither philosopher really addressed the actual location of morality. In fact, as Ray writes, Chalier spends a good deal of the introduction establishing that philosophy more broadly has a blind spot in the "questionable status of the free subject." Chalier proceeds throughout the book to compare and oppose Kant and Levinas on such key points as the finitude or infinity of the subject; the meaning of goodwill, the Levinasian concept of 'the face'; and the "issue of the moral significance of autonomy." The fault Ray finds in Chalier's analysis is that she doesn't confront real opposition to the too-similar views of Kant and Levinas; he suggests that she might have found something in Kierkegaard's strong association of religion with ethics. He grants that her book is otherwise thoroughly researched. Yet, while he acknowledges that she does address religion in chapter eight, it is chiefly to question whether Levinas' Judaism and Kant's Christianity operate similarly. Furthermore, as Ray argues, Chalier is adequately skeptical of Kant's "moral proof of the being of God," albeit with spelling out her reasons. Ray considers Chalier an undisputed "authority on Levinas" The book "fruitfully, if a little uncritically at times" relates Levinas' work to mature Kant's ethical writings and opens up new perspectives on Levinas, but unfortunately, in Ray's view, fails to engage with the secondary literature on Kant or Levinas.
« À l'issue de ma classe de terminale, ma professeure la philosophe Élisabeth de Fontenay m'avait prêté Totalité et infini qui venait de paraître, raconte Catherine Chalier.
Most recently, the Press's new title, Reading the Torah: Beyond the Fundamentalist and Scientific Approaches by Catherine Chalier, was recognized as a 2017 French Voices Award winner, presented by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the PEN American Center.
