Michel Onfray

Michel Onfray (1959) was born in Normandy and spent part of his childhood in an orphanage, receiving his education at a Catholic school, "that vicious furnace," as he later called it. He earned a doctorate in Philosophy and pursued a teaching career. He was a secondary school teacher at the Caen technical high school until 2002, when he resigned from public education to create the Popular University of Caen, with the purpose of teaching a "counter-history" of philosophy. Author of numerous books, Michel Onfray developed a theory of hedonism that proposes the reconciliation of man with his body, a sensual machine, and an ethics founded on aesthetics. An admirer of Nietzsche, he defines himself as a "Freudo-Marxist." He displays uncompromising atheism and considers Christianity indefensible.