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Dr Thomas Lepeltier, PhD

19th April 2019

is a French independent scholar and science writer. After completing a PhD in Astrophysics, he oriented his research toward the history and philosophy of science, with a strong interest in scientific theories concerning, on the one hand, the history of life and, on the other hand, the universe. This led him to study respectively the theory of evolution and cosmological models. His main books on these topics are Darwin hérétique (Seuil, 2007), Univers parallèles (Seuil, 2010) and La Face cachée de l’univers (Seuil, 2014). While he was doing research on these subjects, he discovered animal ethics and opened up his specialist areas even further. In 2013, he published La Révolution végétarienne (Éditions Sciences Humaines, 2013), arguing that the evolution of our society should led it to ban animal products in order to be consistent with its own values. Of course, the idea encounters strong resistance, particularly in France. But in a more recent book, L’Imposture intellectuelle des carnivores (Max Milo, 2017), Thomas Lepeltier shows that the justifications for the consumption of animal products put forward by academics and journalists are nonsense. This does not mean he thinks that arguments used to defend animals are always correct. In particular, in a forthcoming paper, he criticizes the reliance on science as a foundation for vegan ethics:  “A critique of some appeals to science in animal ethics” in the Journal of Animal Ethics. In addition, convinced that the questions raised by animal ethics go beyond the consumption of animal products, he is currently studying animal suffering in the wild. In an article to be published in a book he has co-edited about antispeciesism, La Révolution antispéciste (Presses Universitaires de France, 2018), he even tries to find a solution to the problem of predation (“Faut-il sauver la gazelle du lion?”). Otherwise, when he is not trying to save non-human animals or to understand the cosmos, Thomas Lepeltier writes articles for French popular science magazines (mainly Sciences Humaines and La Recherche). His website is http://thomas.lepeltier.free.fr.