Louis Rougier

Louis Auguste Paul Rougier (born April 10, 1889 in Lyon , France , † October 14, 1982 in Paris) was a French philosopher and professor at the University of Franche-Comté . He became known for his contributions to epistemology , philosophy of science , political philosophy and church history .

Life

Having suffered from pleurisy in his youth , Rougier was exempted from working as a weapon in the First World War and during this time devoted himself primarily to intellectual interests. He completed his studies in philosophy at the University of Lyon and, having passed the Agrégation in philosophy, received the license to teach at grammar schools, where he taught until 1924.

In 1914 he began a work on the application of non-Euclidean geometry in special relativity . He obtained his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1920 with La philosophie géometrique de Poincaré and Les paralogismes du rationalisme .

From 1917 to 1920 he taught in Algiers, then until 1924 in Rome at the Lycée Chateaubriand di Roma . He received his first university teaching position in 1925 at the University of Besançon , where he worked with interruptions until his dismissal for political reasons in 1948. Other university stations were Cairo (1931 to 1936), the New School for Social Research in New York and the University of Montreal (1945). Rougier last taught at Caen University in 1954, where he retired in 1955 at the age of 66.

Rougier died childless in 1982 at the age of 94. He was married three times, most recently to Lucy Friedmann, born in 1942. Herzka, who did her doctorate in philosophy in Vienna. She had been an assistant to the philosopher and founder of the Vienna Circle , Moritz Schlick , until his untimely death by murder.

philosophy

Under the influence of Henri Poincaré and Ludwig Wittgenstein , Rougier developed a philosophy based on the idea that the logic systems are neither apodictic (that is, necessarily true and therefore deductive ) nor assertoric (that is, not necessarily true and therefore deductive) be. Instead, Rougier suggested that the various systems of logic should be understood simply as conventions that could be applied on the basis of contingent circumstances.

This view, which assumed that there were no objective a priori truths independent of the human mind , showed strong similarities with the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. Some members, including the physicist and philosopher Philipp Frank , admired Rougier's 1920 work, Les paralogismes du rationalisme . Rougier became the French ambassador of ideas and developed personal relationships with various members, such as Moritz Schlick (to whom Rougier dedicated the work Traité de la connaissance in 1955 ) and Hans Reichenbach . Rougier was also involved as a contributor to the Vienna Circle, including the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science . However, his own contributions to this encyclopedic work did not become part of the work due to disputes with the editor-in-chief of the project, Otto Neurath .

religion

Rougier's conventionalist- philosophical standpoint led him to oppose Neuthomism , which had already been the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church since the encyclical Aeterna Patris of 1879 and which gained in importance between 1920 and 1930 in particular. During this time, Rougier published some works with which he attacked this current revival of scholasticism , but thereby drew the personal hostility of Thomists such as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain .

Rougier's objections to Neuthomism were not purely philosophical, but they were part of a larger personal aversion to Christianity that had developed in his youth under the influence of Ernest Renan . This early resistance to Christianity also influenced his intellectual work as an adult, leading him to publish a translation of the ancient Platonist and anti- Christian Kelsos in 1926 , which is still in use today.

politics

Rougier was also a political philosopher in the liberal tradition of Montesquieu , Constant , Guizot , and Tocqueville . In keeping with his conventionalist epistemology , he believed that political power rested not on perpetual claims, but on conventions that he termed mystiques . The preference of one political system over another would depend on purely pragmatic reasons. In other words, political systems should not be chosen on the basis of how “true” they are, but rather on the basis of how well they work.

After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1932, supported by the French Ministry of Education, Rougier came to believe that a planned economy did not work as well as a market economy . As a result, he invited numerous intellectuals to rue Montpensier in Paris in 1938 and organized the Colloque Walter Lippmann , in honor of Walter Lippmann , who had published the influential work The Good Society in 1937. This colloquium is considered to be the birth of neoliberalism . In the same year, Rougier helped found the Center international d'études pour la rénovation du libéralisme . This political network that was established thereby ultimately led to the establishment of the liberal Mont Pèlerin Society , into which Rougier was elected in the 1960s with the personal support of the economist Friedrich von Hayek .

For Rougier's reputation and political and university career as a catastrophe turned out to be his problematic role in World War II, during which he had personally committed himself to the Vichy regime . In October 1940, President Philippe Pétain sent him on a secret mission to London to meet with the British government and Winston Churchill between October 21 and 25. Rougier later claimed in numerous publications that the meeting had led to an agreement between Vichy and Churchill, which he called the Pétain-Churchill accords . The British government later denied this claim in an official white paper . The activities in favor of Vichy and the publications mentioned led to the dismissal of Rougier from his teaching position in Besançon in 1948, but nonetheless he continued his activities in organizations that defended Pétain in the 1950s. In addition, Rougier published writings that attempted to brand the épuration , a kind of French equivalent to denazification in occupied Germany, as illegal and totalitarian. Finally, in 1951, Rougier developed activities for a petition to the United Nations , which sought to accuse the Allies of human rights violations and war crimes for their actions during the Liberation .

During the 1970s, Rougier formed another controversial political alliance with the right-wing Nouvelle Droite political movement by French author Alain de Benoist . Rougier's longstanding opposition to Christianity coincided with his conviction that “the West” possessed a superior mentality over other cultures, ideas that harmonized well with the views of the Nouvelle Droite . Benoist reissued numerous early works by Rougier and wrote new introductions for them. Finally, in 1974, Benoist's think tank GRECE published a completely new book by Rougiers: Le conflit du Christianisme primitif et de la civilization antique .

Works

• 1919. La matérialisation de l'Energie: essai sur la theory de la relativité et sur la theory des quanta. Paris: Gauthier-Villars. English translation ( Morton Masius ): 1921. Philosophy and the new physics; an essay on the relativity theory and the theory of quanta. Routledge, London
• 1920. La philosophie géométrique de Henri Poincaré. F. Alcan, Paris
• 1920. Les paralogismes du rationalisme: essai sur la theory de la connaissance. Felix Alcan, Paris Scan
• 1921. En marge de Curie, de Carnot et d'Einstein: études de philosophie scientifique. Chiron, Paris
• 1921. La structure des théories déductives; theory nouvelle de la déduction. F. Alcan, Paris
• 1924. La scolastique et le thomisme. Paris: Gauthier-Villars.
• 1929. La mystique démocratique, ses origines, ses illusions. Paris: E. Flammarion.
• 1933. L'origine astronomique de la croyance pythagoricienne en l'immortalité céleste des âmes. Cairo: L'institut français d'archéologie orientale.
• 1938. Les mystiques économiques; comment l'on passe des démocraties libérales aux états totalitaires. Paris: Librairie de Médicis.
• 1945. Les accords Pétain, Churchill: historie d'une mission secrète. Montréal: Beauchemin.
• 1945. Créance morale de la France. Montréal: L. Parizeau.
• 1947. La France Jacobine. Bruxelles: La Diffusion du livre.
• 1947. La défaite des vainqueurs. Bruxelles: La Diffusion du livre.
• 1947. La France en marbre blanc: ce que le monde doit à la France. Genève: Bibliothèque du Cheval ailé.
• 1948. De Gaulle versus De Gaulle. Paris: Éditions du Triolet.
• 1954. Les accord secrets franco-britanniques de l'automne 1940; histoire et imposture. Paris: Grasset.
• 1955. Traité de la connaissance. Paris: Gauthier-Villars.
• 1957. L'épuration. Paris: Les Sept couleurs.
• 1959. La religion astrale of Pythagoricia. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
• 1960. La métaphysique et le langage. Paris: Flammarion.
• 1966. Histoire d'une faillite philosophique: la Scolastique. Paris: J.-J. Pauvert.
• 1969. Le Génie de l'Occident: essai sur la formation d'une mentalité. Paris: R. Laffont. English translation: 1971. The genius of the West. Los Angeles: Nash.
• 1972. La genèse des dogmes chrétiens. Paris: A. Michel.
• 1980. Astronomie et religion en Occident. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

bibliography

• Maurice Allais : Louis Rougier, prince de la pensée . Les Terrasses de Lourmarin, Lourmarin de Provence 1990.
• Mathieu Marion: Investigating Rougier . In: Université du Québec à Montréal (ed.): Cahiers d'épistémologie . No. n ° 2004-02, 2004.
• Jeffrey Mehlman: Emigre New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-44 . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London 2000, ISBN 0-8018-6286-8 .
• Elisabeth Nemeth Ed .: Paris - Vienna. Comparison of encyclopedias. Publications of the Institute Wiener Kreis, 13. Springer, Vienna 2005; therein Mathieu Marion: Louis Rougier, the Vienna circle and the unity of science, pp. 151 - 178; Peter Schöttler : 13, rue du Four. The Encyclopédie française as a mediator of French science in the 1930s , pp. 179–205

Web links

• Presentation by Louis Rougier (French)