Dr. Lestel is developing a “philosophical ethology” that aims to think what it means to be alive in all its complexity and dimensions. Philosophical ethology is not a philosophy of ethology. Its originality lies in its ambition to take into account all actual or potential living agents – animals, plants, fungi, viruses, of course, but also AIs, robots, digital avatars, dolls, stuffed animals, puppets, fictional characters, ghosts, angels and ETs. – and to think about the status of the post-biological living and the posthuman ecologies in progress. Dr. Lestel approaches philosophical ethology within the framework of an emerging philosophical paradigm – that of Multiversalism – which aims to think the present world by confronting it with the possible worlds to which it is linked, and which engages philosophy in unprecedented adventures with science fiction and art. Dr. Lestel thus asks to what extent philosophy is dependent on its anchorage in a particular animal, Homo sapiens, and what might be a philosophy produced by other-than-human agents (e.g. AIs), by cyborg-philosophers or by genetically modified philosophers. Since 2017, Dr. Lestel has been developing the principles of an “ethology of robots and AIs” with Prof. Gentiane Venture.
2012- present: Associate Professor in Contemporary Philosophy and Philosophical Ethology at Ecole normale supérieure de Paris (ENS Ulm), Department of Philosophy.
2011- present: Tenured senior researcher, Archives Husserl (UMR/CNRS 8547).
1994- 2001: Associate Professor, Ecole normale supérieure of Paris (ENS Ulm), in Cognitive Sciences.
1989-1994: Associate Professor, Université de Rouen, Department of Psychology.
1988-1989: Research Associate, Center for the Philosophy & History of Science, Boston University, USA.
1984-1986: Research Engineer, Laboratoire d’Intelligence Artificielle, Centre de Recherches de la Compagnie des Machines BULL, et Direction des Recherches Avancées.
Main Visiting Research Positions (last 10 years)
2018-2019: Berggruen Fellow, Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University
2017-2018: Visiting Professor, GVLab, Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Tokyo.
2013-2014: Full-time researcher at CNRS in philosophy (section 34), University of Tokyo, Department of Computer Sciences/Japanese-French Laboratory of Informatics.
Books
Machines Insurrectionnelles. Vers une théorie postbiologique du vivant, Paris : Fayard, 2021.
Apologie du Carnivore, Paris : Fayard, 2011. Translated into English, Columbia University Press, 2014. Translated into Japanese, trad. Miyako Otsuji, Tokyo: Sayusha, April 2020. Translate into Spanish, February 2024, Instituto de esthética, Pontificia Universidad catolica de Chile, trans. By Zeto Borquez.
Les Amis de mes Amis, Paris: Le Seuil, 2007 (The Friends of My Friends). (Translation into Japanese by Shigeru Watanabe and Yochi Sumi, Nakanishia ed.; translated by Jeffrey Bussolini, to be published by Columbia University Press).
L’animal singulier, Paris : Le Seuil, 2004 (The Singular Animal). (To be published by Edinburgh University Press).
Les origines animales de la culture, Paris : Flammarion, 2001 (The Animal Origins of Culture). Translation into Portuguese, 2003. Translation into Romanian, 2004. Translation into English, forthcoming.
L’animalité : essai sur le statut de l’homme, Paris : Hatier, 1996. (Animality. Essay on the status of Human). Translation into Korean, 2001.Second edition, Editions de l’Herne, 2007. Translated into English, Edinburgh University Press, in press.
Articles
“Ethology. The narrative Turn”, The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, Oxford University Press, 2021.
“A Portrait of Fictional Characters as Darwinian monsters”, in: Keith Moser (ed.), The Metaphor of the Monster: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Understanding the Monstrous Other in Literature, Bloomsbury Academic, pp.17-33, 2020.
“Like the Fingers of the Hand: Thinking the Human in the Texture of Animality”, in: Louisa MacKenzie & Stephanie Posthumus (eds.), French Thinking about Animals, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, pp.61-73, 2015.
“Ethology, Ethnology and Communication with extra-Terrestrial Intelligence”, in: Douglas A. Vakoch (ed.), 2014, Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication, The NASA History Series, pp.229-236, 2014.
“The Philosophical Ethology of Dominique Lestel”, Angelaki. Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Special Issue, volume 19, number 3, September 2014. That issue has been re-published under the title: Matthew Chrulew, Brett Buchanan & Jeffrey Bussolini (eds.), 2017, The Philosophical Ethology of Dominique Lestel, London: Routledge.
