Relativity and relativism

Claudine Tiercelin is Professor at the Collège de France, holding the "Metaphysics and Philosophy of Knowledge" chair since 2010. A member of the Institut (Académie des sciences morales et politiques) since December 2017, she is also a member of the Institut Jean Nicod (PSL) and the Academia Europea. Her work is rooted in the dual heritage of the French rationalist tradition and the founder of pragmatism: C. S. Peirce. In philosophy of knowledge, she adopts a conception of knowledge as rational, normative and fallible inquiry(Le Doute en question: parades pragmatistes au défi sceptique, Éditions de l'éclat, 2005, reed. 2016 with a long afterword). She defends a realistic and rational scientific metaphysics, in which the dispositional properties of things, conceived as causal powers, play a central role. Among her books on metaphysics: La Connaissance métaphysique (Fayard, 2011); Le Ciment des choses: petit traité de métaphysique scientifique réaliste (Éditions d'Ithaque, 2011).