Jean Cavaillès

Jean Cavaillès

Jean Cavaillès (born May 15, 1903 in Saint-Maixent-l'École , † April 5, 1944 in Arras ) was a French philosopher and mathematician . He took part in the Resistance against the German occupation, was tortured and then shot.

Life

Cavaillès was the son of an officer (geography teacher at the Ecole militaire) and a brilliant student in Bordeaux and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. In 1923 he was the first of his class to be admitted to the École normal supérieure . He studied mathematics, ancient Greek and philosophy, among others with Léon Brunschvicg and Émile Bréhier . In 1927 he passed the agrégation in philosophy . He also obtained a license in mathematics . In 1927 he stayed in Berlin, where he made the decision to do a doctorate on the history of set theory. In 1927 he did his military service and in 1928 was second lieutenant in the Tirailleurs sénégalais .

With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation , he spent almost a year in Germany in 1929/1930. During his time in Germany he came into contact with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl , Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger and studied the estate of the mathematician Paul Du Bois-Reymond in Tübingen in 1929 . He also went to Berlin, Hamburg and Göttingen, where Abraham Fraenkel referred to the correspondence between Richard Dedekind and Georg Cantor , which he edited with Emmy Noether , and to Freiburg im Breisgau, where he attended lectures by Husserl and Heidegger. From 1929 to 1935 he worked as a tutor at the École Normale, held lectures on the philosophy of science and mathematics courses for philosophy students, and prepared his doctoral thesis.

In 1936 Cavaillès became a teacher at a grammar school in Amiens , in 1938 he received his doctorate at the Sorbonne and then taught as maître de conférences de Philosophie générale et Logique at the Faculté des Lettres of the University of Strasbourg , where he was a colleague of early members of the Bourbaki group ( like André Weil , Charles Ehresmann , Henri Cartan ).

In 1939 he was mobilized as an infantry lieutenant of the 43rd Infantry Regiment and then transferred to the General Staff of the 4th Colonial Division. He was responsible for encryption work. Cavaillès' courage has been highlighted several times. He was captured on June 11, 1940. He fled to Belgium at the end of July and came to Clermont-Ferrand , where his Strasbourg faculty had found refuge.

In Clermont-Ferrand he held courses again as maître de conférences and met Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie in December 1940 , with whom he founded the small resistance group la Dernière Colonne . In order to reach a larger audience, the magazine Liberation was founded, on which Cavaillès was an active contributor. The first issue appeared in July 1941.

In 1941 Cavaillès was appointed professor of logic and philosophy of science at the Sorbonne and left Clermont-Ferrand. In Paris he joined Liberation-Nord and soon became a member of the leading group.

In April 1942, at the request of Christian Pineau , who was commissioned by the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA) in London to set up an intelligence service in the northern zone, he founded the Cohors network . Pineau was forced to move to the South Zone. Cavaillès developed the network and set up groups in Belgium and northern France.

Cavaillès was arrested by the French police near Narbonne in September 1942, together with Pineau, and, after a failed attempt to escape to London, was interned in Montpellier and later in the camp of Saint-Paul d'Eyjeaux, where he fled in December 1942.

Cavaillès was wanted by the police, continued to work underground, traveled to London in February 1943 and met Charles de Gaulle several times .

He returned to France on April 15 and resigned from the Liberation editorial team to devote himself entirely to direct action. He was assigned to sabotage the Navy camps in Brittany and the radio beacon of the German installations.

Betrayed by a liaison agent, he was arrested on August 28, 1943, along with his sister and brother-in-law. He was imprisoned and tortured in Fresnes and later in Compiègne . He was later transferred to the Arras Citadel , sentenced to death in January and shot on April 5, 1944.

His body was buried in Arras in a tomb with a wooden cross marked inconnu n ° 5 and later exhumed and taken to the crypt of the Sorbonne in Paris.

The character Luc Jardie in the 1969 film Army in the Shadow was inspired by Cavaillès.

Fonts

• E. Noether and J. Cavaillès (eds.), Correspondence Cantor-Dedekind . Paris, Hermann, 1937.
• Méthode axiomatique et formalisme . Hermann, Paris 1938.
• Remarques on the formation of the theory abstraite of the ensemble . Hermann, Paris 1938.
• Essais philosophiques . Hermann, Paris 1939
• "You collectif au pari" . In: Revue de métaphysique et de morale, XLVII, 1940, pp. 139-163.
• "La pensée mathématique", discussion avec Albert Lautman (4 février 1939) . In: Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, T.XL, 1946.
• Transfini et continu . Hermann, Paris 1947.
• Sur la Logique et la theory de la science . PUF, Paris 1947 (published posthumously by Georges Canguilhem and Charles Ehresmann ).
• Jean Cavaillès, Œuvres complètes de philosophie des sciences . Hermann, Paris 1994.
• Jean Cavaillès, On Logic and Theory of Science . Diaphanes, Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-03734-058-5 .

literature

• Pierre Cassou-Noguès : De l'expérience mathématique: essai sur la philosophie des sciences de Jean Cavaillès , Paris: Vrin, 2001
• Gabrielle Ferrières: Jean Cavaillès: un philosophe dans la guerre , 1903–1944, Paris: Félin, 2003
  • English translation: Jean Cavaillès: a philosopher in time of war 1903-1944 , Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press 2000
• Hourya Sinaceur: Jean Cavaillès. Philosophe mathématique , Paris 1994, and article Cavaillès in Dauben, Scriba Writing the history of mathematics , Birkhäuser 2002, p. 394

Web links

• Literature by and about Jean Cavaillès in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Jean Cavaillès in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)
• Jean Cavaillès. La philosophie du concept aujourd'hui _Congrès 2004

Remarks

1. ↑ after Sinaceur they founded Liberation Sud there
2. ^ Laurent Thiery, in Bernard Pudal, “  CAVAILLÈS Jean  ”, in Les Fusillés (1940-1944) , Éditions de l'Atelier, Ivry-sur-Seine, 2015 ISBN 978-2-7082-4318-7 .