After passing his
baccalauréat in Senegal, Diagne was admitted to the demanding public
secondary school Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, following in the footsteps, almost a half-century later, of his compatriot and the first president of Senegal,
Léopold Sédar Senghor. There he prepared for the entrance exams to the
École Normale Supérieure, meanwhile receiving his
license and
maîtrise level degrees in philosophy at the
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. At the École Normale Supérieure he studied with
Althusser and
Derrida. After receiving his agrégation in Philosophy (1978), Diagne spent a year at
Harvard University in an exchange program. In 1982 he defended a doctoral thesis in mathematics at Université Paris I, where, in 1988, he also completed his doctorat d’Etat, under the direction of
Jean-Toussaint Desanti, on
George Boole’s algebra of logic. In 1982, Diagne returned to his native country to teach philosophy at
Cheikh Anta Diop University in
Dakar, where he became vice-dean of the College of Humanities. The former president of the Republic of Senegal,
Abdou Diouf, named him Counselor for Education and Culture, a position which he held from 1993 to 1999. Having taught for several years in the departments of Philosophy and Religion at
Northwestern University (2002 to 2007), Diagne is currently Professor of
French, and former Chair of the Department of French and Romance Philology with a secondary appointment in the Department of Philosophy, at
Columbia University in
New York. He is director of the Institute of African Studies. Diagne is co-director of
Éthiopiques, a Senegalese journal of
literature and philosophy, and a member of the editorial committees of numerous
scholarly journals, including the
Revue d’histoire des mathématiques,
Présence africaine, and
Public Culture. He is a member of the scientific committees of
Diogenes (published by
UNESCO’s
International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences),
CODESRIA (
Conseil pour le développement de la recherche en sciences sociales en Afrique), and of the
African and
Malagasy Committee for Higher Education (CAMES), as well as UNESCO's Council on the Future. He has been named by
Le Nouvel observateur one of the 50 thinkers of our time. In October 2007, he was invited to participate in a white paper commission on the defense and national security in the French Senate in Paris. In April 2025, Souleymane Bachir Diagne ended his career as a teacher-researcher, after more than fifteen years of career, at Columbia University, in New York, United States. == Work ==