In French 🇺🇸
I work on the overcoming of the nature/culture dualism, from a perspective that is both historical—rooted in the twentieth-century history of philosophy in the United States and France—and informed by contemporary issues.
My aim is to develop the conditions for a closer interdisciplinarity between the natural sciences and the social sciences, in order to respond intelligently to current social challenges.
My research unfolds along three lines:
A historical strand, devoted to the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and his early effort to move beyond the dualism between nature and culture.
A comparative strand, devoted to other attempts to move beyond the nature/culture dualism in the first half of the twentieth century, in France and Europe.
A contemporary strand, which aims to rethink the relationship between sex and gender beyond the nature/culture divide.
My research areas include:
Twentieth-century philosophy (United States & France)
Philosophy of the natural and social sciences
Social epistemology
Queer & feminist theories
History of American philosophy · History and philosophy of science · Social philosophy
In my doctoral dissertation, I examine how John Dewey challenges the nature/culture dualism in order to open up a more robust interdisciplinarity between the natural and the social sciences—an interdisciplinarity he considers essential for understanding and addressing early twentieth-century American social problems, from public health and education to urbanization and the depletion of natural resources. Dewey argues that this entrenched dualism tends to obstruct social inquiry by treating social life as radically separate from the biological and ecological conditions in which it is embedded.
To counter this tendency, Dewey develops a non-dualistic framework he calls “cultural naturalism,” meant to trace the continuities and interactions between nature and society. Cultural naturalism thus charts a course between two symmetrical pitfalls: radical anti-naturalism, which excludes in principle any meaningful explanatory role for biological structures and ecological constraints in social inquiry, and reductionist naturalism, which undermines the specificity of socio-cultural phenomena by reducing them to psychological or biological substrates. Dewey’s broader aim is to rethink nature and the natural conditions of human life in a way that supports both rigorous social inquiry and the intelligent criticism and transformation of existing forms of life.
History of French and European philosophy · History and philosophy of science
Building on my initial work on Dewey, I have expanded my research to other philosophical projects that sought, in the first half of the twentieth century, to move beyond the nature/culture dualism, in France and accross Europe. I co-edited with Marco Dal Pozzolo and Matteo Pagan a volume, Rethinking Nature: Dewey, Canguilhem, Plessner (Rue d’Ulm, 2023). It compares the ways in which these three thinkers reconceptualized the natural embeddedness of human phenomena without losing sight of their emergent socio-cultural specificity, through sustained engagement with the biological and social sciences of their time.
Within this broader comparative perspective, I have focused in particular on Georges Canguilhem, whose 'biological philosophy' foregrounds the entanglement of nature and culture in the determination of human norms. I have written a comparative chapter, and I am preparing a short book based on an unpublished text in which Canguilhem examines the medical and social management of “hermaphrodism” in the 1930s and outlines a biocultural framework for thinking about “sex.”
Feminist theory · Social epistemology · Philosophy of science
Finally, I examine epistemological debates surrounding the sex/gender distinction in feminist and queer theory—one of the central arenas in which the nature/culture dualism is both rearticulated and contested today. My work investigates the tension, since the 1990s, between naturalist and social-constructivist approaches. For instance, I have studied the thesis of the social construction of biological sex and the major epistemological and metaphysical questions it has raised, especially as they emerge in the exchange between Judith Butler and Sally Haslanger. More broadly, I engage with contemporary scientific research—such as Anne Fausto-Sterling’s—that investigates gender/sex interactions from a biocultural perspective.