About CIPh

Rue Descartes is first and foremost an address, that of the Parisian site of the Collège International de Philosophie founded in 1983 by François Châtelet, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Faye and Dominique Lecourt. This quarterly review aims to be a place for experimentation in philosophy, far from any established thought and academicism. It aims to combine other knowledge (science, art and aesthetics, human and social sciences), to be a meeting place open to international debates, to answer questions from the contemporary world in order to define what philosophy can and should do today.

Published in “paper” version at the Presses Universitaires de France, and relayed for a long time on the Internet via the cairn.info platform, Rue Descartes has chosen to evolve towards a digital publication, for four main reasons:
Improve its international availability and dissemination. Adequate to the new modes of consultation and use of scientific articles, electronic dissemination also resonates with the international vocation of the CIPh: on the one hand, it allows direct and immediate access to the texts for international contributors and readers of the journal. It also allows, on occasion, to add to the translation of texts into French their publication in their original version.

Report on the research carried out at the International College of Philosophy: in addition to the thematic issues hosted in the “The Review” section, ruedescartes.org proposes, in its “Ongoing Research” section, to regularly publish written traces, fragments from seminars, symposia and study days organized by the ICHD, as contributions reflecting a thought in motion.

Enhancing the value of the ICHD’s archives: During its nearly thirty years of existence, the ICHD has built up (and continues to build up, day by day) a considerable archive, through the recording of the meetings and seminars that took place there: the great names of French and international philosophy meet there, and make themselves heard in the philosophical, scientific, cultural and social concerns that were theirs. All these testimonies offer a privileged insight into the forms and transformations of philosophical reflection of the last quarter of a century; insights that ruedescartes.org will be able to offer to the widest possible audience, by enhancing this archive collection through the regular publication of a selection of them, in the “Past Composite” section.

Encourage cross-fertilization between philosophy and other fields. As its founders pointed out, “the reason for the intersection could be a kind of charter for the College”, a place where philosophical reflection has from the outset been concerned with placing itself at the boundaries between philosophy, science, art, politics and education… However, this structure, whose philosophy no longer occupies the centre, but which is deployed through neighbourhoods and networks, is now embodied by the digital interconnection of the fields of specialization. The possibility, offered by hypertext links, to refer directly to sources and extra-philosophical knowledge, will be for the reader of ruedescartes.org to concretely experience this indissoluble relationship between philosophy and its different “outside”.