François Jullien

François Jullien
Born	2 June 1951 Embrun, Hautes-Alpes
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Main interests	Chinese philosophy

François Jullien (born 2 June 1951 in Embrun, France) is a French philosopher, Hellenist, and sinologist.

An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure (Paris) and holder (since 1974) of the agrégation, France's professorial degree, François Jullien studied Chinese language and thought at Peking University and Shanghai University from 1975 to 1977. He received his French university doctorate (doctorat de troisième cycle) in 1978 and his French research doctorate (doctorat d'État) in Far East studies in 1983.

Since then Jullien has been head of the Antenne Française de Sinologie in Hong Kong (1978–1981), a guest of the Maison Franco-Japonaise in Tokyo (1985–1987), president of the Association Française d'Etudes Chinoises (1988–1990), director of the East Asia department (UFR) of Paris Diderot University–Paris VII (1990–2000), president of the Collège International de Philosophie (1995–1998), professor at Paris Diderot University, and director of both the Institut de la Pensée Contemporaine and the Centre Marcel-Granet.

He was a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France from 2001 to 2011 and is the current Chair of Alterity at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (Paris).

Jullien has edited several anthologies for the Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) and for the Agenda de la Pensée Contemporaine, the latter published first by PUF, then by Éditions Hermann. Several conferences dealing with his philosophy have been held in France and abroad (Germany, Argentina, China, Vietnam). Among the most recent are:

Jullien received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in Germany in 2010 and the Grand Prix de Philosophie of the Académie Française for his body of work in 2011.

Marcel Gauchet has summed up François Jullien's work in the following terms: "The work of François Jullien seems to me to follow the grand lines of the unwritten but oh-so-influential program of what I shall call the twentieth-century anthropological school. Primarily but not exclusively French, this school came to fruition in the work of Durkheim, Mauss, Granet, Lévi-Strauss, and a few others as well. It is, in a word, the school of Western decentralization. [...] These various undertakings have made it possible for us to conceive of an "outside" ["dehors"], to borrow a particularly felicitous term from François Jullien. [...] But François Jullien is not content to contribute to this most difficult of enterprises. He has brought the decentralization to its fulfilment, for he has turned it back on the West. In particular, he has done this in the field of philosophy, something no one had ever done before, and by taking on China's alterity, which, it must be said, provided a privileged standpoint. He has thus carried decentralization further than his predecessors. He has shown us how to look from 'elsewhere' at our most theoretical and abstract thought, dealing with the fundamental categories that allow us to apprehend any object spontaneously. He has become the ethnologist of our conceptual universe."

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