Georges Canguilhem

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Georges Canguilhem

Georges Canguilhem (born June 4, 1904 in Castelnaudary , † September 11, 1995 ) was a French doctor, philosopher , epistemologist and lecturer at the Collège de France .

Life

Georges Canguilhem was accepted into the École normal supérieure in 1924 , 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 various cities in France. When he was teaching in Toulouse , he started studying medicine. He got a position at the University of Strasbourg in 1941 and received his doctorate in medicine in 1943.

Under the pseudonym "Lafont", Canguilhem took an active part in the Resistance . He worked as a doctor in the Auvergne . In June 1944, south of Clermont-Ferrand, on Mont Mouchet , he was involved in one of the greatest battles between the Resistance and the Germans. In 1948 he became dean of the Faculty of Philosophy in Strasbourg. Seven years later he became a professor at the Sorbonne and succeeded Gaston Bachelard as director of the Institute for the History of Science. He held this position until his retirement in 1971 and was still active in research afterwards. As inspector general for philosophy lessons and as president of the examination board for agrégation, he had a great and direct influence on philosophy lessons in France and was known to more than a generation of academic philosophers as a strict examiner. Philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze , Michel Serres , Jacques Derrida , Michel Foucault , Louis Althusser and Gilbert Simondon were influenced by him.

Since the 1990s, Canguilhem has also been increasingly received as an independent theorist. Based on the work of the neurophysiologists Kurt Goldstein and Viktor von Weizsäcker, he formulates a philosophy based on the life sciences and medicine, which claims to present knowledge and science from the perspective of life and the living. He's with Gaston Bachelard the founder of a methodology of the history of science as historical epistemology investigates and epistemological history the inner logic of historical orders of knowledge related to the timeliness of the relevant knowledge in the present. One of the methodologically significant distinctions is that between the object of the history of science and that of the sciences. The history of science is not itself a science. Its object is knowledge in its social, religious, political and moral significance, knowledge as a cultural phenomenon and not just as a logically coherent structure of sentences. The project of Canguilhem's philosophy is to make the history and historicity of human knowledge understandable from the perspective of life and not that of science. She places her emphasis on contradiction and not on identity, on error and not on timeless truths. The advancement of science, characterized by the error (erhur), stamps the traces of its wandering (errance) in its terms and definitions. To follow these tracks means to leave the linear path of history, to restore knowledge to its vitality and to restore norms to their unique diversity. With this program, the cornerstone of which was laid in the writing on the normal and pathological as early as 1943, Canguilhem created a standard of historical criticism of scientific objectivity from which French post-war philosophy draws.

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

Works

  • Écrits sur la Médicine, Editions du Seuil, Paris 2002, ISBN 2-020551705 .
  • La Connaissance de la vie, 1952, German The Knowledge of Life , Berlin: August Verlag 2009.
  • Idéologie et rationalité dans l'histoire des sciences de la vie. Paris: Vrin 2009 [1977].
  • La Formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris: PUF 1955, German The development of the reflex concept in the 17th and 18th centuries , Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2008.
  • Health - a question of philosophy. Edited and translated by Henning 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
  • Limits of medical rationality: historical-epistemological investigations, Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1989.
  • History of Science and Epistemology. Collected Essays. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979.
  • Le normal et le pathologique, medical dissertation from 1943, German: the normal and the pathological , Munich: Hanser 1974.

Secondary literature

  • Dominique Lecourt: Critique of the philosophy of science. Marxism and epistémology on Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault. Publishing house for the study of the labor movement, Berlin 1975.
  • ders .: Georges Canguilhem PUF, Paris 2008 (Series: Que sais je?) In French.
  • Georges Canguilhem, philosopher, historien des sciences Actes du colloque organisé au Palais de la Découverte les 6, 7 and 8 decembre 1990 by Étienne Balibar , M. Cardot, F. Duroux, M. Fichant, Dominique Lecourt et J. Roubaud, Bibliothèque du International College of Philosophy. Albin Michel, Paris 1993 ISBN 2-226-06201-7 .
  • Georges Canguilhem. Philosophy de la vie François Dagonet, Paris 1997.
  • Special issue of "Economy and Society" dedicated to G. Canguilhem. Economy and Society 27: 2-3. 1998.
  • R. Horton: GC Philosopher of Disease in: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 88: 316-319. 1995.
  • Borck, Cornelius (ed.): Measure and stubbornness: studies following Georges Canguilhem. Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2005.
  • Heike Delitz: Bergson Effects. Aversions and attractions in French sociological thinking , Weilerswist: Velbrück 2015, pp. 268–288.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Canguilhem, Georges
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lafont
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French philosopher, medic and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH June 4, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Castelnaudary near Toulouse
DATE OF DEATH September 11, 1995