Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard | |
|---|---|
| Era | 20th Century Philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
Main interests | Philosophy of science |
Notable ideas | "epistemological break" |
Gaston Bachelard (June 27, 1884 – October 16, 1962) was a French philosopher and poet who rose to some of the most prestigious positions in the French academy. His most important work is in poetics and the philosophy of science. In philosophy of science he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break (obstacle épistémologique et rupture épistémologique). He influenced many French philosophers in the latter part of the twentieth century, among them Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser.
Life and work
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Bachelard was a postmaster in Bar-Sur-Aube, and then studied physics before finally becoming interested in philosophy. He was a professor at Dijon from 1930 to 1940 and then became the inaugural chair in history and philosophy of the sciences at the Sorbonne.
Bachelard's studies of the history and philosophy of science in such works as Le nouvel esprit scientifique ("The New Scientific Mind") (1934) and La formation de l'esprit scientifique ("The Formation of the Scientific Mind") (1938) were based on his vision of historical epistemology as a kind of psychoanalysis of the scientific mind. He argued against Comtean positivism that it had been superseded by such scientific developments as the theory of Relativity.
In the English-speaking world, the connection Bachelard made between psychology and the history of science has been little understood. Bachelard demonstrated how the progress of science could be blocked by certain types of mental patterns, creating the concept of obstacle épistémologique ("epistemological obstacle"). One task of epistemology is to make clear the mental patterns at use in science, in order to help scientists overcome the obstacles to knowledge.
Through his concept of "epistemological break", Bachelard underlined the discontinuity at work in the history of sciences. (The term itself is almost never used by Bachelard, but became famous through Althusser.) A rationalist in the Cartesian sense, he opposed "scientific knowledge" to ordinary knowledge, and held that error is only negativity or illusion. The role of epistemology is to show the history of the (scientific) production of concepts; those concepts are not just theoretical propositions: they are simultaneously abstract and concrete, pervading technical and pedagogical activity. This explains why "The electric bulb is an object of scientifical thought… an example of an abstract-concrete object."[1] To understand the way it works, one has to pass by the detour of scientific knowledge. Epistemology is thus not a general philosophy that aims at justifying scientific reasoning. Instead it produces regional histories of science.
Thomas S. Kuhn used Bachelard's notion of "epistemological rupture" (coupure or rupture épistémologique) as re-interpreted by Alexandre Koyré to develop his theory of paradigm shifts; Althusser and Michel Foucault also drew upon Bachelard's epistemology.
In addition to epistemology, Bachelard's work deals with many other topics, including poetry, dreams, psychoanalysis, and the imagination. The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938) and The Poetics of Space (1958) are among the most popular of his works.
Quotations
- Et, quoi qu’on en dise, dans la vie scientifique, les problèmes ne se posent pas d’eux-mêmes. C’est précisément ce sens du problème qui donne la marque du véritable esprit scientifique. Pour un esprit scientifique, toute connaissance est une réponse à une question. S’il n’y a pas eu de question, il ne peut y avoir de connaissance scientifique. Rien ne va de soi. Rien n’est donné. Tout est construit, Gaston Bachelard (La formation de l'esprit scientifique, 1934)
- "And, irrespective of what one might assume, in the life of a science, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this that marks out a problem as being of the true scientific spirit: all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is given. All is constructed."
- It is the pen which dreams.
Bibliography
His works include:
- 1932: L'intuition de l'instant
- 1934: Le nouvel esprit scientifique ISBN 2-13-044374-5
- 1938: La formation de l'esprit scientifique ISBN 2-7116-1150-7
- 1938: La psychanalyse du feu
- 1940: La philosophie du non ISBN 2-13-052578-4
- 1942: L'eau et les rêves ISBN 2-253-06099-2
- 1943: L'air et les songes
- 1946: La terre et les rêveries du repos ISBN 2-7143-0299-8
- 1948: La terre et les rêveries de la volonté
- 1949: Le Rationalisme appliqué (PUF, Paris)
- 1958: La poétique de l'espace English translation ISBN 0-8070-6473-4
- 1960: La poétique de la rêverie
- 1961: La flamme d'une chandelle ISBN 2-13-053901-7
Introduction
- Cristina Chimisso, Gaston Bachelard: Critic of Science and the Imagination, Routledge 2001
Endnotes
- ^ in Le Rationalisme appliqué (PUF, Paris, 1949, 2e ed. of 1962, p.104ff).
