Michel Onfray is a French philosopher whose writings celebrate hedonism, reason, and atheism. He approaches philosophy with a hierarchical and elitist perspective, deliberately avoiding the oversimplification of complex ideas for popular consumption. Onfray aligns himself with the tradition of individualist anarchism, which he posits as a driving force throughout philosophical history. His work intertwines philosophy with psychoanalysis, critically examining religion as indefensible.
A quirky, off-beat take on philosophers and their palates, tracing the food obsessions of philosophers from Diogenes to Sartre, Appetites for Thought guides us around the philosophers' banquet table with erudition, wit and irreverence.
Michael Onfray passionately defends the potential of hedonism to resolve the dislocations and disconnections of our melancholy age. In a sweeping survey of history's engagement with and rejection of the body, he exposes the sterile conventions that prevent us from realizing a more immediate, ethical, and embodied life. He then lays the groundwork for both a radical and constructive politics of the body that adds to debates over morality, equality, sexual relations, and social engagement, demonstrating how philosophy, and not just modern scientism, can contribute to a humanistic ethics. Onfray attacks Platonic idealism and its manifestation in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic belief. He warns of the lure of attachment to the purportedly eternal, immutable truths of idealism, which detracts from the immediacy of the world and our bodily existence. Insisting that philosophy is a practice that operates in the real, material world, Onfray enlists Epicurus and Democritus to undermine idealist and theological metaphysics; Nietzsche, Bentham, and Mill to dismantle idealist ethics; and Palante and Bourdieu to collapse crypto-fascist neoliberalism. In their place, he constructs a positive, hedonistic ethics that enlarges on the work of the New Atheists to promote a joyful approach to our lives in this, our only, world
Religion is making a comeback, bringing in its wake extremism. This text demonstrates that organised religion is motivated by worldly, historical and political power; that the three monotheisms - Christianity, Islam and Judaism - exhibit the same hatred of women, reason, the body, the passions; that religion denies life and glorifies death.