1. Michel Onfray's philosophy is mainly influenced by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Epicurus, the Cynic and Cyrenaic schools, as well as French materialism.
17 Facts About Michel Onfray
1. 2.
Michel Onfray has gained notoriety for writing such works as Traite d'atheologie: Physique de la metaphysique, Politique du rebelle: traite de resistance et d'insoumission, Physiologie de Georges Palante, portrait d'un nietzcheen de gauche, La puissance d'exister and La sculpture de soi for which he won the annual Prix Medicis in 1993.
3.
Michel Onfray has become appreciated by some far-right circles, notably with his sovereignist magazine Front populaire.
4.
The young Michel Onfray did not appreciate his new environment, which he describes as a place of suffering.
5.
Michel Onfray went on to graduate with a teaching degree in philosophy.
6.
Michel Onfray taught this subject to senior students at a high school that concentrated on technical degrees in Caen between 1983 and 2002.
7.
Michel Onfray was a secondary school philosophy teacher for two decades until he resigned in 2002 to establish a tuition-free Universite populaire at Caen, at which he and several colleagues teach philosophy and other subjects.
8.
Michel Onfray recognises Freud as a philosopher but brings attention to the considerable cost of Freud's treatments and casts doubts on the effectiveness of his methods.
9.
In 2015, Michel Onfray published Cosmos, the first book of a trilogy.
10.
Michel Onfray considers ironically that it constitutes his "very first book".
11.
Michel Onfray describes himself as an atheist and considers theistic religion to be indefensible.
12.
Michel Onfray has published nine books under a project of history of philosophy called Counter-History of Philosophy.
13.
Michel Onfray has been involved in promoting the work of Jean Meslier, an 18th-century French Catholic priest who was discovered, upon his death, to have written a book-length philosophical essay promoting atheism.
14.
In Michel Onfray's latest book, Decadence he argued for Christ myth theory, which is a hypothesis that Jesus was not a historical person.
15.
Michel Onfray based this on the fact that, other than in the New Testament, Jesus is barely mentioned in accounts of the period.
16.
In 2007 he conducted an interview with the future French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who, Michel Onfray declared in Philosophie Magazine, was an "ideological enemy".
17.
That is particularly the case of the historians Guillaume Mazeau, Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jean-Marie Salamito with his essay Monsieur Michel Onfray au pays des mythes as well as Ian Birchall.