Hélène Metzger

Hélène Emilie Metzger , née Bruhl, (born August 26, 1889 in Chatou near Paris ; † March 1944 or soon after in Auschwitz ) was a French science historian and philosopher.

biography

Hélène Metzger was the daughter of the jeweler Paul Bruhl (1855-1922, grandson of the rabbi ( miraculous rebel ) Isaac Brühl from Worms) and Eugénie Emilie Adler (born 1864 in Frankfurt) and niece of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (who was the sister of Alice Louise of Paul Bruhl married and then called himself Lévy-Bruhl). Paul Bruhl's father emigrated from Worms to the USA, made a fortune there through inventions and then settled in France with extensive property in Chatou. In 1891, Hélène Bruhl's mother died after the birth of their second daughter, Louise, and the father married Marguerite Casevitz, with whom he had three sons (including Adrien Bruhl ).

She first studied mineralogy at the Sorbonne with Frédéric Wallerant and received her diploma in physics from him in 1912 with a thesis on the crystallography of lithium chlorate . In 1918 she received her doctorate in the history of science in Paris with a dissertation on the development of crystallography. In it she showed how crystallography developed as an independent discipline at the end of the 18th century. She then turned to the development of chemistry, and her work, the first part of which appeared in 1923 ( Les doctrines chimiques en France, du debut du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle ) received the Binoux Prize of the Académie des Sciences in 1924. The second part appeared in 1930 ( Newton , Stahl , Boerhaave et la doctrine chimique ) and her lectures at the Institut d'Histoire de Science at the Sorbonne in 1932/33 ( La philosophie de la matière chez Lavoisier ) can be understood as the third part.

She increasingly turned to philosophy and in 1925 won the Prix Bordin of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques with Les concepts scientifiques . As a philosopher, she was a student of Émile Meyerson and Lucien Lèvy-Bruhl, but was not a strict adherent of positivism. She was also interested in non-rational influences on scientists, the influence of ideologies (religion, philosophy) and the aberrations of science (in which she was supported by Léon Brunschvicg ). She carried this out, among other things, in a paper on the influence of natural religion on some of Newton's English commentators ( Attraction universelle et religion naturelle chez quelques commentateurs anglais de Newton , 1938) and planned a similar study with regard to Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier , but could no longer realize that.

She was a member of the History of Science section of the Center Internationale de Synthèse (CIS) in Paris by Henri Berr and Aldo Mieli and a founding member of the International Academy of the History of Science and its predecessors. In 1931, until her arrest, she was their treasurer and administrator. In 1933 it played an important role in the relocation of the International Congress for the History of Science (in view of the seizure of power by the National Socialists), which was planned for 1934 in Berlin (it took place in Coimbra ). She was also the librarian of their library on Rue Colbert in Paris. From 1939 she also managed the library of the CIS. She was secretary of the Groupe Francais d'Histoire des Sciences and had close contacts with historians of science such as Pierre Brunet , Alexandre Koyré , George Sarton , Federigo Enriques , Aldo Mieli, Robert Lenoble and Paul Mouy . In the foreword to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn described it as a formative influence on his preoccupation with the history of science.

When the German occupation began, she went to the Bureau d'Études Israelites in Lyon to study the philosophy of Jewish monotheism. The summary of this appeared in the Revue philosophique in 1947 and the introduction in 1954 in a book that her brother Adrien Bruhl edited: La science, l'appel de la religion et la volonté modern.

In February 1944 she was arrested in Lyon, taken to the Drancy assembly camp , and on March 7th deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp , where her trail is lost (only 20 of the 1501 Jews on the transport survived).

In 1913 she married Paul Metzger (1881–1914), a promising scientist who fell at the beginning of the First World War.

Fonts

• La genese de la science des cristaux , Paris 1918, reprint 1970
• Les doctrines chimiques en France, du debut du XVIIe a la fin du XVIIIe siècle , Paris 1923, reprint 1970
• Les concepts scientifiques , Paris 1926
• La Chimie , Paris 1930 ( Histoire du monde : La civilization europèenne moderne 4)
• Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave et la doctrine chimique , Paris, 1930
• La philosophie de la matière chez Lavoisier , Paris, 1935
• Attraction universelle et religion naturelle chez quelques conmentateurs anglais de Newton , Paris, 1938
• La science, l'appel de la religion et la volonté humaine , Ed. Adrien Bruhl, Paris, 1954.
• La Méthode philosophique en histoire des sciences , Ed. Gad Freudenthal, 1987
• Extraits de lettres, 1921–1944, in: Gad Freudenthal (Ed.), Études sur / Studies on Hélène Metzger, 1990, pp. 247–269.

literature

• Suzanne Delorme: Hélène Metzger , in: Dictionary of Scientific Biography , Volume 9, pp. 340–342
• B. Bensaude-Vincent: Chemistry in the French tradition of philosophy of science: Duhem, Meyerson, Metzger and Bachelard , Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Volume 36, 2005, pp. 627-648.
• Christina Chimisso: Hélène Metzger: The History of Science between the Study of Mentalities and Total History , Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Volume 32, 2001, pp. 203–241.
• C. Chimisso: Writing the History of the Mind - Philosophy and Science in France, 1900 to 1960s, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008.
• C. Chimisso, Gad Freudentha: A Mind of Her Own. Hélène Metzger to Émile Meyerson, 1933 , Isis, Volume 94, 2003, pp. 477-491.
• Gad Freudenthal (Ed.): Études sur / Studies on Hélène Metzger , Leiden, Brill, 1990.

Web links

• Gad Freudenthal: Hélène Metzger, Jewish Women's Archive

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions, University of Chicago Press 1996, p. VIII. In addition to her work on chemistry, he mentioned Koyre ( Études galiléennes ), Émile Meyerson ( Identity and Reality ) and Anneliese Maier ( Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14 Century ) and Arthur Oncken Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being .