Pierre Lévy (philosopher) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pierre Lévy (philosopher) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pierre Lévy (Tunis, 1956) is a French media scholar, most notable for the "collective intelligence" concept he introduced in a 1994 book^[1], anticipating discussions that became popular in the 2000's, such as Wikipedia, wikinomics and the power of diffuse collaboration.

He was a Professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Ottawa. From 1993 to 1998 he was Professor at the University of Paris VIII. Professor Levy studied the concept of collective intelligence and knowledge-based societies. He was a world-leading thinker on “cyberculture”. In 2004 he was elected as a member of the Royal Society of Canada. His final works were focused on the development of an Information Economy Meta Language (IEML) based on semiotic concepts. IEML aims to provide a semantic coordinate system for the addressing of concepts on the Internet.

He is one of the major philosophers working on the implications of cyberspace and digital communications. As soon as 1990 (before the web) he published a book about the merging of digital networks and hypertextual communication. Henry Jenkins, amongst others, cites him as an important influence on theories of online collective intelligence. Lévy's 1995 book, Qu'est-ce que le virtuel? (translated as Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age) develops philosopher Gilles Deleuze's conception of "the virtual" as a dimension of reality that subsists with the actual but is irreducible to it.

[edit]Publications

His principal work, published in French in 1994 and translated into English, is entitled Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace ISBN 0-7382-0261-4 (Perseus, 1999).

Main publications:

• La machine univers. La Decouverte, Paris 1987
• Les technologies de l'intelligence. La Découverte, Paris 1990
• L'idéographie dynamique. Vers une imagination artificielle ?. La Découverte, Paris 1992
• De la programmation considérée comme un des beaux-arts. La Découverte, Paris 1992
• Les arbres de connaissances. Découverte, Paris 1992 (with Michel Authier)
• L'intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace. La Découverte, Paris 1994
• Qu'est-ce que le virtuel ?. La Découverte, Paris 1995
• Cyberculture. Editions Jacob, Paris 1997
• World Philosophie (le marché, le cyberespace, la conscience). Editions Jacob, Paris 2000
• Cyberdémocratie. Essai de philosophie politique. Editions Jacob, Paris 2002