Peter Bieri / Pascal Mercier

Our uncertain times have been a boom period for simple recipes for happiness and quick-fix handbooks. As a philosopher, Peter Bieri prefers to rely on the classic instruments of the Enlightenment. He also writes novels under the pseudonym Pascal Mercier – skillful and thrilling stories of people on the journey of their lives: Perlmann’s Silence, The Piano Tuner, and most recently Lea. Night Train to Lisbon has sold over a million copies. Both his philosophical work and the characters of his novels are expressions of the search for a comprehensive understanding of the world and our place in it. Bieri’s ideal is a critical but comprehensible philosophy. One which will provide answers to life’s urgent questions. The Craft of Freedom deals with the question of freedom of choice within a spectrum of options and a corset of conditions. Bieri published a lengthy series of essays in DIE ZEIT magazine on life’s central philosophical questions entitled »How should we live?« As one of the leading exponents of analytical philosophy he used to teach at Berlin’s FU, but left the university during the study reform process to concentrate on writing full time.

Born in Switzerland in 1944, he is the winner of numerous awards including the Marie-Luise Kaschnitz Prize, the Italian Grinzane Cavour prize for literature and the Lichtenburg medal of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.