The École pratique des hautes études (French pronunciation: [ekɔl pʁatik de ot.z‿etyd]), abbreviated EPHE, is a French postgraduate top level educational institution, a Grand Établissement.
EPHE is a constituent college of the Université PSL (together with ENS Ulm, Paris Dauphine or Ecole des Mines). The college is closely linked to École française d'Extrême-Orient and Institut français du Proche-Orient.
The Annales school (French pronunciation: [a'nal]) is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century to stress long-term social history. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and monographs. The school has been influential in setting the agenda for historiography in France and numerous other countries, especially regarding the use of social scientific methods by historians, emphasizing social and economic rather than political or diplomatic themes.
The school deals primarily with late medieval and early modern Europe (before the French Revolution), with little interest in later topics. It has dominated French social history and heavily influenced historiography in Europe and Latin America. Prominent leaders include co-founders Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Henri Hauser (1866–1946) and Marc Bloch (1886–1944). The second generation was led by Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) and included Georges Duby (1919–1996), Pierre Goubert (1915–2012), Robert Mandrou (1921–1984), Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009), Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), and Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988). Institutionally it is based on the Annales journal, the SEVPEN publishing house, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme (FMSH), and especially the 6th Section of the École pratique des hautes études, all based in Paris. A third generation was led by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929–2023) and includes Jacques Revel, and Philippe Ariès (1914–1984), who joined the group in 1978. The third generation stressed history from the point of view of mentalities, or mentalités. The fourth generation of Annales historians, led by Roger Chartier (born 1945), clearly distanced itself from the mentalités approach, replaced by the cultural and linguistic turn, which emphasizes the social history of cultural practices.
Henry Corbin (14 April 1903 – 7 October 1978) was a French philosopher, theologian, and Iranologist, professor of Islamic studies at the École pratique des hautes études. He was influential in extending the modern study of traditional Islamic philosophy from early falsafa to later and "mystical" figures such as Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi, and Mulla Sadra Shirazi. With works such as Histoire de la philosophie islamique (1964), he challenged the common European view that philosophy in the Islamic world declined after Averroes and Avicenna.
Born into a Catholic family, he converted to Protestantism between 1927 and 1930. He received a Catholic education, obtaining a certificate in Scholastic philosophy from the Catholic Institute of Paris at age 19. Three years later he took his "license de philosophie" under the Thomist thinker Étienne Gilson. He studied modern philosophy, including hermeneutics and phenomenology, becoming the first French translator of Martin Heidegger. On 13 October 1929, Louis Massignon (director of Islamic studies at the Sorbonne) introduced him to Suhrawardi, the 12th-century Persian Muslim thinker. In a late interview, Corbin said: "through my meeting with Suhrawardi, my spiritual destiny ... was sealed. Platonism, expressed in terms of the Zoroastrian angelology of ancient Persia, illuminated the path that I was seeking." He thus dedicated himself to understanding Iranian Islam, which he believed esoterically expressed older perennial insights related to Zoroastrianism and Platonism.
The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (French: École des hautes études en sciences sociales, EHESS) is a graduate grande école and grand établissement in Paris focused on academic research in the social sciences. The school awards Master and PhD degrees alone and conjointly with the grandes écoles École normale supérieure, École polytechnique, and École pratique des hautes études.
Originally a department (Section VI) of the École pratique des hautes études, created in 1868 with the purpose of training academic researchers, the EHESS became an independent institution in 1975. Today its research covers social sciences, humanities, and applied mathematics. Degrees and research in economics and finance are awarded through the Paris School of Economics.
Georges Edmond Raoul Dumézil (French: [dymezil]; 4 March 1898 – 11 October 1986) was a French philologist, linguist, and religious studies scholar who specialized in comparative linguistics and mythology. He was a professor at Istanbul University, École pratique des hautes études and the Collège de France, and a member of the Académie Française. Dumézil is well known for his formulation of the trifunctional hypothesis on Proto-Indo-European mythology and society. His research has had a major influence on the fields of comparative mythology and Indo-European studies. In the 1930s he was a supporter (though not a formal member) of the far-right group Action Française, leading to criticism from left-wing scholars in the 1980s and afterwards.
Georges Raymond Nicolas Albert Roux (French: [ʁu]; November 16, 1914 – August 12, 1999) was a French writer, author of the popular history books about the Ancient Near East, Ancient Iraq and La Mésopotamie.
Son of a French Army officer, Roux moved with his family to the Middle East at the age of nine where he subsequently lived for 12 years in Syria and Lebanon before returning to France in 1935. Roux was educated by Jesuits in Beirut and studied medicine at the University of Paris, where he graduated in medicine in 1941 and later studied Oriental studies at École pratique des hautes études.
Claude Rilly (born November 4, 1959) is a French linguist, Egyptologist, and archaeologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research who primarily specializes in Meroitic and Nilo-Saharan languages. He is professor at the École pratique des hautes études since 2019.
He is also the Director of the French Archaeological Mission in Sedeinga, Sudan.