Peter Bieri (author)

Peter Bieri (born 23 June 1944), better known by his pseudonym, Pascal Mercier, is a Swiss writer and philosopher.

Bieri studied philosophy, English studies and Indian studies in both London and Heidelberg. He took his doctoral degree in Heidelberg in 1971 after studies with Dieter Henrich and Ernst Tugendhat on the philosophy of time, with reference to the work of J. M. E. McTaggart. After the conferral of his doctorate, Bieri followed an academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. In 1983 he started work at the University of Bielefeld and later he worked as a scientific assistant at the Philosophical Seminar at University of Heidelberg.

Bieri co-founded the research unit for Cognition and Brain studies at the German Research Foundation. The focuses of his research were the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. From 1990 to 1993, he was a professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Marburg; from 1993 he taught philosophy at the Free University of Berlin while holding the chair of analytic philosophy, succeeding his mentor, Ernst Tugendhat.

In 2007 he retired early, disillusioned by academic life and condemning what he saw as the rise of managerialism ("Eine Diktatur der Geschäftigkeit") and decline in respect for academic work.

Under the pseudonym Pascal Mercier, Peter Bieri has published four novels to date. In 2006 he was awarded the Marie-Luise-Kaschnitz Prize.

Philosophical works

• Peter Bieri: Das Handwerk der Freiheit. Hanser, Munich 2001. ISBN 978-3-446-20070-8
• Peter Bieri: Eine Art zu Leben. Hanser, 2013. ISBN 978-3-446-24349-1

A full list of his philosophical works may be found on Wikipedia's German pages.

Novels

• Pascal Mercier: Perlmanns Schweigen, English Perlmann's Silence. Albrecht Knaus, Munich 1995. ISBN 3-442-72135-0
• Pascal Mercier: Der Klavierstimmer. Albrecht Knaus, Munich 1998. ISBN 3-442-72654-9
• Pascal Mercier: Nachtzug nach Lissabon, English Night Train to Lisbon. Hanser, Munich 2004. ISBN 3-446-20555-1, English ISBN 978-0-8021-4397-6
• Pascal Mercier: Lea (Novelle). Hanser, Munich 2007. ISBN 978-3-446-20915-2