Georges Canguilhem

Georges Canguilhem ( born June 4, 1904 in Castelnaudary to Toulouse; † 11 September 1995) was a French physician, philosopher, epistemologist and professor at the Collège de France.

Life

Georges Canguilhem was added in 1924 to the École Normale Supérieure, in the same year as Jean- Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, and Paul Nizan. He passed his agrégation in 1927 and then taught in high schools in different cities in France. When he taught in Toulouse, he took up the study of medicine. He got a job in 1941 at the University of Strasbourg and in 1943 received his doctorate in medicine.

Under the pseudonym " Lafont " Canguilhem took an active part in the Resistance. He worked as a doctor in the Auvergne. In June 1944, he was south of Clermont- Ferrand, involved in the Mont Mouchet, at one of the biggest battles between the Resistance and the Germans. In 1948 he was Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy in Strasbourg. Seven years later he became professor at the Sorbonne and successor of Gaston Bachelard as director of the Institute for the History of Science. He retained this position until his retirement in 1971 and was then still in the research active. As Inspector General for the teaching of philosophy and as President of the Examination Board for the agrégation he had known large and direct impact on the teaching of philosophy in France and was more than a generation of academic philosophers as strict auditor. Philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Gilbert Simondon were influenced by him and have expressed their solidarity.

Canguilhem is now increasingly also received as an independent theorist since the 90s. He formulated based on the work of the neurophysiologist, Kurt Goldstein and Viktor von Weizsäcker, oriented towards the life sciences and medicine philosophy that represents the claim to represent the knowledge and science from the perspective of life and living. He is being studied together with Gaston Bachelard the founder of a methodology of science history as Historical Epistemology or epistemological history the inner logic of historical orders of knowledge related to the timeliness of the respective knowledge in the present. One of the major methodological distinctions is that between the object of science history and the sciences. The history of science is not science itself. Its subject is the knowledge in its social, religious, political and moral importance, knowledge as a cultural phenomenon and not merely as logically coherent structure of sentences. The project of philosophy Canguilhem is to make history and historicity of human knowledge from the perspective of life and not that of the science course. She puts her emphasis on the opposition and not the identity on error and not on timeless truths. The from error ( erreur ) characterized progression of science should remind the traces of their wanderings ( errance ) in their terms and their definitions. This traces to follow is, to leave the linear path of history, its liveliness and the knowledge of the standard refund their unique diversity. With this program, the foundation is set in the font to normal and pathological early as 1943, Canguilhem creates a scale of historical criticism of scientific objectivity, which draws from the French post-war philosophy.

Canguilhem was awarded the 1983 George Sarton Medal -, one of the most prestigious prizes for History of Science, founded by George Sarton and Lawrence Joseph Henderson History of Science Society ( HSS).

Quotes

  • " The drive of the technique lies in the requirements of the animal. [ ... ' V] p we can form no new body ', we need to add the internal organs external organs. [ ... ] The ultimate Nichtableitbarkeit the art from the science of constructing from the recognition and the impossibility of a full and continued implementation of science go into the plot thus the adoption of the originality of a "power" back " ( Canguilhem 2006:. 19f. )
  • " Certainly, defined by science environment consists of laws, but these laws are nothing more than theoretical abstractions The real living things, however, does not live in the middle of laws, but in the midst of other living beings and events that modify the those laws [ ... ] Since the. . concrete living beings in a world of concrete objects lives, it lives in a world of possible vicissitudes. Nothing happens by chance, but everything in the form of events. precisely in the environment is unreliable. their unreliability is right actually its becoming, its history " ( Canguilhem 1974: 133).
  • "You can assume that life brings the logic out of the socket without believing the same time, you'd better get on with it, if you dispense with the formation of concepts [ ... ] " ( Canguilhem 2008: 5).
  • " Judging, a scientific proposition is true, one confesses to him a retroactive validity to that immediately removes him becoming the dreams of the approaches, the failures, the mistakes, ie of thought, for someone the responsibility belongs " ( Canguilhem 2008: 190f. ).
  • " L' auteur soutient que la fonction de la philosophie est propre de l' existence de l' homme compliquer, y compris l' existence de l' histories de science" ( Canguilhem 2009: 176).

Works

  • La Connaissance de la vie, 1952, dt The Cognition of Life, Berlin: Verlag August 2009.
  • Idéologie rationalité et dans l' histoire des sciences de la vie. Paris: Vrin 2009.
  • La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris: PUF 1955, dt The formation of the reflex concept in the 17th and 18th centuries, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008.
  • Health - a matter of philosophy. Edited and translated by Hennig Schmidgen. Berlin: Merve Verlag 2005 ISBN 978-3-88396-204-7.
  • Science, technology, life. Contributions to historical epistemology. Edited and with an afterword by Henning Schmidgen. Berlin: Merve Verlag 2006 ISBN 978-3-88396-224-5.
  • Boundaries of medical rationality: historical - epistemological investigations, Tübingen: Edition Discord, 1989.
  • History of science and epistemology. Collected Essays. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1979.
  • Le normal et le pathologique, medical dissertation of 1943, dt The Normal and the Pathological, The Hague: Mouton 1974.

Secondary literature

  • Dominique Lecourt: critique of the philosophy of science. Marxism and Epistemology over Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault. Publishing for the study of the labor movement, Berlin 1975.
  • Idem: Georges Canguilhem PUF, Paris 2008 (Series: Que sais je? ) in French language.
  • Georges Canguilhem philosophe, histories of Sciences Actes du colloque organisé au Palais de la Découverte les 6, 7 et 8 octobre 1990 par Etienne Balibar, M. Cardot, F. DUROUX, M. Fichant, Dominique Lecourt et J. Roubaud, Bibliothèque du Collège International de Philosophie. Albin Michel, Paris 1993 ISBN 2-226-06201-7.
  • Georges Canguilhem. Philosophie de la vie Francois Dagonet, Paris 1997.
  • Special issue of "Economy and Society " dedicated to G. Canguilhem. Economy and Society 27:2-3. In 1998.
  • R. Horton: GC Philosopher of disease, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 88:316-319. In 1995.
  • Borck, Cornelius ( eds.): measure and obstinacy: studies after Georges Canguilhem. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005.
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