On January 30, 2020, from 6:00 pm to midnight, professors and researchers from the Collège de France, producers from France Culture and their guests will debate in public the issues raised by the theme of the 2020 edition: Being alive.
Life has become a supreme value in our societies, driven both by the extraordinary development of the biological sciences and by the growing feeling that life, in all its forms, must be protected. However, being alive refers to a great plurality of experiences and issues that are difficult to unify.
It is that life intertwines the biological and the biographical, the properties of organized beings that make up a system and the narrative of events that affect them, fact and value. It is also that life is bordered by limits, to which our knowledge and imagination apply with varying degrees of success: the emergence and death of the living matter, its interaction with technology and machines, and also the lives of others, gods, humans or animals, the dreamed, possible, utopian or fantastic life. Finally, life serves as a fundamental metaphor to qualify our relationship with the objects, ideas and beings that accompany us, and we always seem, as living beings, to presume its definition.
For an entire evening, the Collège de France and its partners invite you to explore these lines of life together. Two amphitheatres will be open to the public from 6 p.m. to midnight, each with an original and varied program.
With the exceptional participation of 8 professors from the Collège de France :
- Philippe Aghion, titulaire de la chaire « Economie des institutions, de l’innovation et de la croissance »
- Patrick Boucheron, titulaire de la chaire « Histoire des pouvoirs en Europe occidentale, XIIIème-XIVème siècle »
- Alain Fischer, titulaire de la chaire « Médecine expérimentale »
- Edith Heard, titulaire de la chaire « Epigénétique et mémoire cellulaire »
- François Héran, titulaire de la chaire « Migrations et sociétés »
- Pierre-Michel Menger, titulaire de la chaire « Sociologie du travail créateur »
- Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, titulaire de la chaire « Religion, histoire et société dans le monde grec antique »
- Alain Prochiantz, titulaire de la chaire « Processus morphogénétiques » (2007-2019)