The professor-researcher at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar (UCAD), Thierno Guèye, has just published La Philosophie à l’épreuve des nanotechnosciences. A book whose first part, Critique des nanotechnologies, was published in 2020 by Éditions Peter Lang Publishing in New York. The first book was prefaced by chemist Christian Joachim, research director at the CNRS, in charge of Nanosciences at the Centre d’Elaboration des Matériaux et d’études structurales (CEMES) in Toulouse, and the second by Serge Robert, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
Senegalese author Thierno Guèye has published two books, Critique des nanotechnologies and La Philosophie à l’épreuve des nanotechnosciences, from his doctoral thesis. In the preface to the first essay, Christian Joachim states that Thierno Guèye is a scientific geographer. He leaves, according to him, in nano with the good intention to limit the paths and to appreciate the nuances that allow to pass from one nano-valley to another. And the list of nano-valleys is long: nano-medicine, nano-credit, nano-right, nano-machines, nano-lithography, nano-production, nano-laundry, etc. nano-bacteria… «It is necessary here to recognize the beautiful work of Thierno Guèye taking word for word the history of the nano since its etymological beginnings in Greece where «nanno» was only an affectionate proper name unrelated to scientific or technical activity to the fineness of the atom-by-atom writing of our time,” he said.
The second book proposes to carry out the ambitious project of establishing the foundations of an epistemology of nanotechnosciences. It is an analysis of the philosophy of science on this new subject of great scientific, economic, political and social importance. While most research in the humanities on nanotechnology focuses on their social, ethical, political or economic dimensions, stresses Serge Robert, Guèye’s thesis indicates a strongly epistemological orientation. “The essay he is presenting here to the scientific community is the result of this thesis and makes precisely a missing link between literature in philosophy of science and the development of nanotechnology.Therefore, the angle of approach of the nano phenomenon is original from the start,” he says.
Thierno Guèye holds a double doctorate in philosophy from the Université de Grenoble and the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM). Since 2019, he has been a teacher-researcher and trainer at the Faculty of Science and Technology of Education and Training of the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar (FASTEF, U.CAD). He was a professor at the Institut de Technologie Agroalimentaire du Québec (ITA), founded Covoyagement and is a publisher at EJO Wolof Books. He also holds a Master’s degree from Science Po Toulouse and a DEA from U.C. He invented the “Quebecoise” method to make students read texts.
