Alexis Pinchard

I am a former fellow of the Ecole normale supérieure (Paris) and a former non-residential fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies (Harvard University) in Washington, D.C., where I was pursuing research in Greek philosophy with special interest in Indo-Iranian comparative cosmology (2010-2011). In France, I am a “professeur agrégé” of philosophy in the selective “Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Ecoles” (« khâgne » and « hypokhâgne » A/L, i.e. the Humanities Section of the “CPGE”). I am qualified by the French National Council of Universities (CNU) for the job of Lecturer in Philosophy (« Maître de conférences »). My current teaching regularly deals with ancient philosophy, especially Plato, Pre-Socratics and Aristotle, with a supplementary interest in continental metaphysics. Moreover I have had opportunities to teach philosophy and ancient cultures at a variety of institutions in France and abroad (University of Leipzig, of Aix-Marseille, of Reims and of Tours).
I possess an excellent knowledge of Greek and Sanskrit, as it is testified by several published translations (large extracts of Proclus, of Plato and Aristotle, Paippalāda Saṃhitā  18.26). I am qualified by the French CNU also for the job of Lecturer in Classics and Sanskrit. My experiences in cross-comparative studies have supported the expansion of my horizons beyond French Academy. For example I wrote two recent papers in English (« The History of Sphoṭa: from Ontology to Epistemology? » and « The Argumentative Value of Āgamic Quotations in the Sphoṭasiddhi by Bharata Miśra », for the Journal of Indian Philosophy, currently under review). Linguistics, however, functions in my scholarship chiefly as a means to pursue a novel understanding of fundamental ancient assumptions about ontology, especially Plato’s ontology. Besides many papers, reviews and presentations on Plato (for example my review of Delcomminette’s Le Philèbe de Platon, and my paper entitled « L’expérience du beau et la séparation des Formes chez Platon »), I recently published a book (a revised version of my PhD dissertation), Les langues de sagesse dans la Grèce et l’Inde anciennes (Droz, Genève, 2009, 638 pages), which tries to bring a new approach to Plato’s theory of Ideas through a paradigm shift concerning the origins of Greek philosophy. The ontological aspect of my work clearly appears in several chapters of this book, such as that entitled « De la complexité du signe à la complexité de l’être », and in refereed articles published in international journals, such as that entitled « Les langues indo-européennes sont-elles les langues de l’être? Le témoignage indo-iranien », in Antiquorum Philosophia 4).
Let me briefly present the results of this first book, which has also been reviewed has been already reviewed in several journals (see Alberto Bernabé Pajarès in BMCR and R. Schmitt in Indo-Iranian Journal 53). In order to find a rule organizing the homonymy of the Greek word sophía, which designates the plain cleverness of the riddle-decipherer so much as the universal knowledge based on the highest reality, I suggest reading again the fundamental  texts of philosophy with a new method: structural comparitivism. This method has already proved its systematizing power in grammar and mythology. India, by having elevated true speech to the rank of spiritual excellence, has a privileged place in this comparison. Thus we become able to deduce Plato's famous “theory of Ideas”, which is the real center of Greek wisdom in spite of its controversial aspect — or even because of it —, from the very old contrast between the language of the gods and the language of the men: this contrast has been clearly explained by the Vedic seers and is present in poetic most of the tradition of an Indo-European descent, including Homer and the Orphic tradition. Therefore the Sophists can no longer serve as a simple foil for philosophers seeking the essence of things: they incarnate a legitimate sapiential option that recognizes the creative power of names. Indeed the trace of a common filiation of these two antagonist interpretations of wisdom lies in the fact that both swear allegiance to the Eleusinian mysteries of immortality, each one pretending to be their one legitimate heir. These rituals, which are supposed to bring a man to his own perfection along an inner path, constitute the most likely source for Plato’s undemonstrable assumptions about ontology, inasmuch as his ontology contrasts the default of the sensible realm with the perfection of the intelligible realm.
Of course, this way to inquire about Plato’s ontology implies a close connection with Pre-Socratic studies. Moreover, I published several papers dealing with the Neo-Platonist tradition (3 published papers or chapters of book about Proclus), so that I can conceptually situate my research in a long chronology.