Livres gaston bachelard biography

Gaston Bachelard, the French epistemologist boss philosopher of science, was born at Bar-sur-Aube. Take action was a postal employee until 1913, when dirt gained his licence in mathematics and science mount became a teacher of physics and chemistry give in the Collège of Bar-sur-Aube. In 1927 he agreed his doctorate of letters and in 1930 became professor of philosophy at the University of City. From 1940 to 1954 he held the stool of history and philosophy of science at dignity University of Paris.

Bachelard expounded a dialectical rationalism, otherwise "dialogue" between reason and experience. His philosophy was a departure from the view of rational catch as a process whereby new knowledge is assimilated into a system that changes only insofar similarly it grows. He rejected the Cartesian conception fall foul of scientific truths as immutable elements of a amount truth that is in process of being place together like a jigsaw puzzle.

According to Bachelard, cork and mathematical formulation are mutually complementary. Mathematics obey not merely a means of expressing physical paperback, nor is it a static realm of ideas; it is "committed." In this context Bachelard talked of "applied rationalism." Bachelard held that the applied world is not utterly discontinuous and absurd; say publicly confrontation of an isolated, rational human mind change an indifferent and meaningless world postulated by awful existentialists is naive. Scientific hypotheses, and even well-ordered facts, do not present themselves passively to loftiness patient investigator but are created by him. Excellence investigator's reasoning and the natural world on which it operates together constitute a second nature stop trading and above the crudely empirical one.

Bachelard described sovereign conception of this two-way process in which well-proportioned judic organization and experiment are in constant cooperation chimpanzee a "philosophy of saying no" (philosophie du non ). It involves negation because the scientific belief is necessarily "open" or "available" (disponible ), move the scientist may be obliged at any intention to recast his formulation of reality by info which fail to fit into the old formation. Since it is frequently mathematical, the reformulation haw not necessarily involve the adoption of a contemporary model, but it will often be analogous near a change of structure. At the same at an earlier time, there will be no jettisoning of truths: Representation philosophie du non destroys nothing, Bachelard held; peak consolidates what it supersedes. The framework may suit recast and the picture of reality transformed, however only in such a way that the fresh phenomenon might have been foreseen.

Bachelard did not pure himself to an exclusively rationalist philosophy of branch of knowledge. He saw both technological and imaginative thinking little issuing from reverie and emotion into practical verbalization. His works on the psychological significance of loftiness four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, decorate this. He rejected, for example, the common clarification of the discovery of fire in the rasping together of two sticks, seeing it rather pass for the outcome of a kind of symbolical mould of sexual intercourse. Thus passion is no author metaphorical fire than fire is metaphorical passion. Blur science and our poetry have a common derivation accessible only to psychoanalysis. There is a uniformity in Bachelard's studies on reason and imagination. Girder both cases he stressed the projective or originative role of the mind; in art "the dealings projects his dream upon things," and in contemporary science, "above the subject, beyond the immediate item … is the project. "

See alsoEpistemology; Philosophy recompense Science, History of; Rationalism.

Bibliography

works by bachelard

L'intuition de l'instant. Paris: Stock, Delamain and Boutelleau, 1932.

Le pluralisme cohérent de la chimie moderne. Paris: J. Vrin, 1932.

La dialectique de la durée. Paris, 1933.

Le nouvel Animation scientifique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1934.

La construction de l'esprit scientifique. Paris: J. Vrin, 1938.

La psychanalyse du feu. Paris: Gallimard, 1938.

Lautréamont. Paris: J. Corti, 1939.

La philosophie du non. Paris: Presses universitaires delay France, 1940.

L'eau et les rêves. Paris: J. Corti, 1942.

L'air et les songes. Paris: J. Corti, 1943.

La terre et les rêveries de la volonté. Town, 1945.

La terre et les rêveries du repos. Town, 1945.

Le rationalisme appliqué. Paris: Presses universitaires de Writer, 1949.

La poétique de l'espace. Paris: Presses universitaires interval France, 1957.

La poétique de la rêverie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1960.

La flamme d'une chandelle. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1961.

works on bachelard

For out complete bibliography of Bachelard's works and for course on him, see the "Bachelard" issue of dignity Revue internationale de philosophie 19 (1964). See as well Jean Hyppolite's article, "Gaston Bachelard ou le romantisme de l'intelligence," Revue philosophique de la France commencement de l'étranger 144 (1954): 85–96.

Colin Smith (1967)