Discover the Best Books Written by Pascal Mercier

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 the University of Heidelberg.

Bieri co-founded the German Research Foundation's Cognition and Brain studies research unit. His research focused on 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. Bieri uses the pseudonym Pascal Mercier as a writer, made up of the surnames of the French philosophers Blaise Pascal and Louis-Sébastien Mercier. 

Martin Halter, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, criticized Bieri's attempt "to dress up the trite man from Bern in a French philosopher's lace jabot" as a pretentious mannerism. Peter Bieri has published five novels to date. Reviewers have identified “heart, woe and a lot of fate” as “his recipe for success,” which Bieri, aiming at “wellness literature,” applies in each of his books with little variation.