Émile Boutroux

Étienne Émile Marie Boutroux (born July 28, 1845 in Montrouge , † November 22, 1921 in Paris ) was a French philosopher of the 19th century and a staunch opponent of pure materialism in the sciences. His concern was the compatibility of religion and science. Director of the Fondation Thiers in 1902. Member of the Académie française in 1912.

Émile Boutroux

Life

Émile Boutroux grew up in Montrouge near Paris (now the Hauts-de-Seine department) and attended the Lycée Napoléon (now the Lycée Henri IV ) there. From 1865 he studied at the elite university École Normale Supérieure in Paris, especially with Jules Lachelier , who was a teacher at the Lycée de Caen from 1858 to 1864 and then until 1875 at the École Normale Supérieure.

In 1868, at the suggestion of his doctoral supervisor Félix Ravaisson, he moved to the University of Heidelberg , where he heard from Eduard Zeller , Hermann von Helmholtz and Heinrich von Treitschke, among others , and got to know the German philosophers. What was remarkable for him was the open exchange of ideas between the various disciplines and faculties, which was not common in France.

In 1870 Boutroux returned to France before the outbreak of the Franco-German War. - His first job was as a philosophy teacher at the Lycée de Caen . In 1874 he wrote his doctoral thesis De la contingence des lois de la nature ("The contingency of natural laws"). In it Boutroux examines the importance of Kant's philosophy for the sciences. At the same time, the then necessary treatise in Latin De veritatibus aeternis apud Cartesium ("On the eternal truths in Descartes ") was created.

From 1874 to 1876 he taught at the University of Nancy, where he met his future wife Aline Poincaré, sister of the mathematician Henri Poincaré . The mathematician and science historian Pierre Boutroux (1880–1922) emerged from the marriage. Through the marriage he was also related to Raymond Poincaré , a cousin of his brother-in-law and later French President (1913-1920). In 1877 he took over a professorship at the École Normale Supérieure and during this time also translated the first three volumes of Eduard Zeller's “Philosophy of the Greeks”. From 1885 Boutroux held lectures on the history of German philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris , where he was appointed professor of history and modern philosophy in 1888. In 1898 he became a member of the Institut de France , in 1902 he finished teaching at the university when he took over the post of director of the Fondation Thiers . In 1911 he wrote a detailed monograph on his friend William James . In 1914, while still studying in Jena, he, who once valued Germany and its philosophers so much, finally turned away from the “land of barbarians” when war broke out, disappointed and bitter.

Influences

The “metaphysical-spiritualistic positivism” of his teacher Jules-Esprit-Nicolas Lachelier had a decisive influence on Boutroux and later on Henri Bergson. Schelling's philosophy was introduced to him through his doctoral supervisor, Ravaisson . In 1893 he devoted himself to a longer study visit to Freiburg / Br. with Alois Riehl . In 1914 he heard Rudolf Eucken in Jena .

Boutroux's immediate students include a. Henri Berr, Camille Mélinand , Maurice Blondel , Émile Durkheim , Léon Brunschvicg , Henri Bergson , William James .
In Paris, Boutroux gathered an interdisciplinary circle around him based on a model he had seen in Germany, which was joined by his immediate students as well as his brother, the physicist Léon Boutroux, the mathematicians Jules Tannery and Henri Poincaré, the astronomer Benjamin Baillard and others. From this circle ("Boutroux circle") the foundations of conventionalism arose .

Contingentism

To distinguish it from spiritualism , Boutroux's teaching was called contingentism by his students . His philosophy developed in an epoch which, against the background of scientific research and the claim to explanation that arose with it, is increasingly dedicated to the question of the opposition between determinism and free will. The term is already dealt with programmatically in his dissertation. Boutroux differentiates between contingency (French: contingence ) and chance ( hasard ) in the way that chance denotes the "uncontrolled occurrence of an event", whereas contingency denotes the "absence of necessity in individual cases, without the presence of causes or the validity of laws generally to be denied. "According to Boutroux, determinism does not have to mean a universally valid imperative:

"One must not confuse determinism with reality: necessity expresses the impossibility that a thing is different from what it is; determinism expresses the sum of the conditions by virtue of which the appearance as it is, together with all its forms of being, must turn out . "

The concept of contingency is based on the different qualities of things that make up complex reality:

“It means facing reality outside of the conditions when you relate the quantity to a homogeneous quality or disregard all quality. Everything that is has qualities and for that very reason takes part in the indeterminacy and changeability that belong to the essence of quality. Hence the principle of the absolute persistence of quantity cannot be strictly applied to real things: these have a content of life and variability that is never exhausted. "

The obvious reality of the laws of nature on the one hand, and the presupposition of what Boutroux calls God or human freedom (or what Henri Bergson later called "creative development") and the contradiction connected with it, Boutroux resolves by assuming a gradual realization of contingency which results in a hierarchy of the sciences, one of which cannot be easily traced back to another (e.g. biology to chemistry, this to physics, etc.). In rejecting the Cartesian worldview, Boutroux, otherwise a critic of positivism, agrees with Comte :

"The positivism of Auguste Comte summarized the results of the criticism by teaching that the higher cannot be reduced to the lower, and that to the extent to which one wants to give account of a higher reality, new laws must be introduced, who are capable of a peculiar specification and cannot be traced back to the previous ones. "

This also applies to the increase in contingency at every level of the laws, which Boutroux hierarchically divides into

• the laws of logic based on them
• the laws of mathematics (especially arithmetic)
• the mechanical laws
• the physical laws of irreversible processes
• the laws of chemistry
• the laws of living things, again divided into biological, psychological and sociological laws

“Science shows us… a hierarchy of the sciences, a hierarchy of laws, which we bring closer together, but which we cannot merge into a single science and law. In addition, it shows us, in addition to the relative inequality of laws, their mutual influence. The physical laws force themselves on the living being, but the biological ones work with the physical ones. "

Works

• De la contingence des lois de la nature (extended dissertation, 1874; German translation Die Kontingenz der Naturgesetze . By Isaak Benrubi, 1907)
• La Grèce vaincue et les premiers stoïciens (1875)
• La Philosophy des Grecs, de E. Zeller (translation, 1877–1884)
• La Monadologie, de Leibnitz (translation, 1881)
• Socrate, fondateur de la science morale (1883)
• Les Nouveaux Essais, de Leibnitz (translation, 1886)
• Questions de morale et d'éducation (1895)
• De l'idée de loi naturelle dans la science et la philosophie (1895; German translation on the concept of natural law in science and in contemporary philosophy . By Isaak Benrubi, 1907)
• Études d'histoire de la philosophie (1897)
• Du devoir militaire à travers les âges (1899)
• Pascal (1900)
• Essais d'histoire de la philosophie (1901)
• La Philosophy de Fichte. Psychologie du mysticisme (1902)
• Science et religion dans la philosophie contemporaine (1908)
• William James (1911)
• La Nature et l'Esprit (posthumous, 1925)
• Études d'histoire de la philosophie allemande (posthumous, 1926)
• La Philosophy de Kant (posthumous, 1926)
• Nouvelles études d'histoire de la philosophie (posthumous, 1927)
• Des vérités éternelles chez Descartes (1927, French translation of the Latin theses from 1874 by Georges Canguilhem )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Irmingard Böhm:  LACHELIER, Jules-Esprit-Nicolas. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 4, Bautz, Herzberg 1992, ISBN 3-88309-038-7 , Sp. 930-933.
2. ↑ Michel Espagne: L'Allemagne d'Émile Boutroux . Revue de Métaphysique et de morale 29 (3), 2001
3. ^ Mary Jo Nye: The moral freedom of man and the determinism of nature . British Journal of the History of Science 9, 1976
4. ↑ Laurent Rollet: Henri Poincaré - des mathématiques à la philosophie . Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, Nancy, 2000
5. ^ Henri Poincaré: La science et l'hypothèse , 1902; German transl .: Science and Hypothesis , Leipzig, 1906
6. ↑ Boutroux, The Contingency of Natural Laws 1874
7. ↑ M. Heidelberger, 2006
8. ^ Boutroux, 1895
9. ↑ Boutroux, 1874, 58f.
10. ↑ Boutroux, 1895, 52ff.
11. ↑ Boutroux, 1895, final chapter

literature

• Otto Boelitz: Causality and Necessity in Emile Boutroux's Theory of Contingency. A contribution to the history of the latest French philosophy. (Leipzig, Quelle & Meyer, 1907)
• Paul Archambault: Emile Boutroux: choix de textes avec une étude sur l'œuvre Paris [1908] (Les grands philosophes français et étrangers).
• Isaak Benrubi: Émile Boutroux and the philosophical awakening of the present . (Int. Monthly for science, art and technology, 8 (8) 1914)
• Michael Heidelberger: The contingency of the laws of nature in Émile Boutroux . in: Natural Laws: Historical-Systematic Analysis of a Basic Scientific Concept , ed. by Karin Hartbecke and Christian Schütte. (Paderborn: Mentis 2006, 269-289) ISBN 978-3-89785-447-5

Web links

Commons : Émile Boutroux  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Émile Boutroux  - sources and full texts (French)

• Literature by and about Émile Boutroux in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and list of works of the Académie française (French)
• Brief chronology and bibliography of the University of Nancy