Gaston Bachelard ( ; French: [baʃlaʁ]; 27
June 1884 – 16 October 1962) was a French
philosopher.
He made contributions in the fields of poetics
and the philosophy of science.
To the latter he introduced the concepts of
epistemological obstacle and epistemological
break (obstacle épistémologique and rupture
épistémologique).
He influenced many subsequent French philosophers,
among them Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser,
Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida, as
well as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
== Life and work ==
Bachelard was a postmaster in Bar-sur-Aube,
and then studied physics before finally becoming
interested in philosophy.
He was a professor at Dijon from 1930 to 1940
and then became the inaugural chair in history
and philosophy of the sciences at the Sorbonne.
In 1958 he became a member of the Royal Academy
of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium.
=== Bachelard's psychology of science ===
Bachelard's studies of the history and philosophy
of science in such works as Le nouvel esprit
scientifique ("The New Scientific Spirit",
1934) and La formation de l'esprit scientifique
("The Formation of the Scientific Mind", 1938)
were based on his vision of historical epistemology
as a kind of psychoanalysis of the scientific
mind.
In the English-speaking world, the connection
Bachelard made between psychology and the
history of science has been little understood.
Bachelard demonstrated how the progress of
science could be blocked by certain types
of mental patterns, creating the concept of
obstacle épistémologique ("epistemological
obstacle").
One task of epistemology is to make clear
the mental patterns at use in science, in
order to help scientists overcome the obstacles
to knowledge.
=== Epistemological breaks: the discontinuity
of scientific progress ===
Bachelard was critical of Auguste Comte's
positivism, which considered science as a
continual progress.
To Bachelard, scientific developments such
as Einstein's theory of relativity demonstrated
the discontinuous nature of the history of
sciences.
Thus models that framed scientific development
as continuous, such as that of Comte and Émile
Meyerson, seemed simplistic and erroneous
to Bachelard.
Through his concept of "epistemological break",
Bachelard underlined the discontinuity at
work in the history of sciences.
However the term "epistemological break" itself
is almost never used by Bachelard, but became
famous through Louis Althusser.
He showed that new theories integrated old
theories in new paradigms, changing the sense
of concepts (for instance, the concept of
mass, used by Newton and Einstein in two different
senses).
Thus, non-Euclidean geometry did not contradict
Euclidean geometry, but integrated it into
a larger framework.
=== The role of epistemology in science ===
Bachelard was a rationalist in the Cartesian
sense, although he recommended his "non-Cartesian
epistemology" as a replacement for the more
standard Cartesian epistemology.
He compared "scientific knowledge" to ordinary
knowledge in the way we deal with it, and
saw error as only illusion: "Scientifically,
one thinks truth as the historical rectification
of a persistent error, and experiments as
correctives for an initial, common illusion
(illusion première)."The role of epistemology
is to show the history of the (scientific)
production of concepts; those concepts are
not just theoretical propositions: they are
simultaneously abstract and concrete, pervading
technical and pedagogical activity.
This explains why "The electric bulb is an
object of scientific thought… an example
of an abstract-concrete object."
To understand the way it works, one has to
take the detour of scientific knowledge.
Epistemology is thus not a general philosophy
that aims at justifying scientific reasoning.
Instead it produces regional histories of
science.
=== Shifts in scientific perspective ===
Bachelard saw how seemingly irrational theories
often simply represented a drastic shift in
scientific perspective.
For instance, he claimed that the theory of
probabilities was just another way of complexifying
reality through a deepening of rationality
(even though critics like Lord Kelvin found
this theory irrational).One of his main theses
in The New Scientific Mind was that modern
sciences had replaced the classical ontology
of the substance with an "ontology of relations",
which could be assimilated to something like
a process philosophy.
For instance, the physical concepts of matter
and rays correspond, according to him, to
the metaphysical concepts of the thing and
of movement; but whereas classical philosophy
considered both as distinct, and the thing
as ontologically real, modern science can
not distinguish matter from rays: it is thus
impossible to examine an immobile thing, which
was precisely the condition for knowledge
according to classical theory of knowledge
(Becoming being impossible to be known, in
accordance with Aristotle and Plato's theories
of knowledge).
In non-Cartesian epistemology, there is no
"simple substance" as in Cartesianism, but
only complex objects built by theories and
experiments, and continuously improved (VI,
4).
Intuition is therefore not primitive, but
built (VI, 2).
These themes led Bachelard to support a sort
of constructivist epistemology.
=== Other academic interests ===
In addition to epistemology, Bachelard's work
deals with many other topics, including poetry,
dreams, psychoanalysis, and the imagination.
The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938) and The
Poetics of Space (1958) are among the most
popular of his works, and the latter had a
wide reception in architectural theory circles.
Jean-Paul Sartre cites the former and Bachelard's
Water and Dreams in his Being and Nothingness.
== Bibliography ==
His works include:
Essai sur la connaissance approchée (1928)
Étude sur l'évolution d'un problème de
physique: la propagation thermique dans les
solides (1928)
La valeur inductive de la relativité (1929)
La pluralisme cohérent de la chimie moderne
(1932)
L'Intuition de l'instant (1932)
Les intuitions atomistiques: essai de classification
(1933)
Le nouvel esprit scientifique (1934)
La dialectique de la durée (1936)
L'expérience de l'espace dans la physique
contemporaine (1937)
La formation de l'esprit scientifique: contribution
à une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective
(1938)
La psychanalyse du feu (The Psychoanalysis
of Fire, 1938)
La philosophie du non: essai d'une philosophie
du nouvel esprit scientifique (1940), publisher
Pellicanolibri, 1978
L'eau et les rêves (Water and Dreams, 1942)
L'air et les songes (Air and Dreams, 1943)
La terre et les rêveries du repos (Earth
and Reveries of Repose, 1946)
La terre et les rêveries de la volonté (Earth
and Reveries of Will, 1948)
Le Rationalisme appliqué (Applied Rationalism,
1949)
L'activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine
(1951)
Le matérialisme rationnel (1953)
La poétique de l'espace (The Poetics of Space)
English translation ISBN 0-8070-6473-4 (1958)
La poétique de la rêverie (1960)
La flamme d'une chandelle (1961)
L'engagement rationaliste (The Rationalist
Engagement, 1972)
=== English translations ===
Though most of Bachelard's major works on
poetics have been translated into English,
only a few of his works on the philosophy
of science have been translated.
The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the
New Scientific Mind.
Orion Press, New York, 1968.
Translation by G.C.
Waterston.
(La philosophie du non)
The New Scientific Spirit.
Beacon Press, Boston, 1985.
Translation by A. Goldhammer.
(Le nouvel esprit scientifique)
Dialectic of Duration.
Clinamen, Bolton, 2000.
Translation by M. McAllester Jones.
(La dialectique de la durée)
The Formation of the Scientific Mind.
Clinamen, Bolton, 2002.
Translation by M. McAllester Jones.
(La formation de l'esprit scientifique)
Intuition of the Instant.
Northwestern University Press, 2013.
Translation by Eileen Rizo-Patron (L'intuition
de l'instant)
== See also ==
== References ==
== Sources ==
Dominique Lecourt, L’épistémologie historique
de Gaston Bachelard (1969).
Vrin, Paris, 11e édition augmentée, 2002.
Dominique Lecourt, Pour une critique de l’épistémologie
: Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault (1972, réed.
Maspero, Paris, 5e éd. 1980).
D. Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard,
Canguilhem and Foucault, New Left Books, London
(1975).
Dominique Lecourt, Bachelard, Epistémologie,
textes choisis (1971).
PUF, Paris, 6e édition, 1996.
Dominique Lecourt, Bachelard, le jour et la
nuit, Grasset, Paris, 1974.
Didier Gil, Bachelard et la culture scientifique,
Presses Universitaires de France, 1993.
Didier Gil, Autour de Bachelard – esprit
et matière, un siècle français de philosophie
des sciences (1867–1962), Les Belles Lettres,
Encre marine, 2010.
Hommage à Gaston Bachelard.
Etudes de philosophie et d'histoire des sciences,
by C. Bouligand, G. Canguilhem, P. Costabel,
F. Courtes, François Dagognet, M. Daumas,
Gilles Granger, J. Hyppolite, R. Martin, R.
Poirier and R. Taton
Actes du Colloque sur Bachelard de 1970 (Colloque
de Cerisy).
L'imaginaire du concept: Bachelard, une épistémologie
de la pureté by Françoise Gaillard, MLN,
Vol. 101, No. 4, French Issue (Sep 1986),
pp. 895–911.
Gaston Bachelard ou le rêve des origines,
by Jean-Luc Pouliquen, L'Harmattan, Paris,
2007.
== Further reading ==
Cristina Chimisso.
(2001).
Gaston Bachelard: Critic of Science and the
Imagination, Routledge.
Dagognet, F. (1970).
"Bachelard, Gaston".
Dictionary of Scientific Biography.
1.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
pp. 365–366.
ISBN 0-684-10114-9.
Smith, James L. (2012).
"New Bachelards?: Reveries, Elements and Twenty-First
Century Materialisms".
Other Modernities: 156–167.
doi:10.13130/2035-7680/2418.
== External links ==
Website of the Association of Friends of Gaston
Bachelard (in French)
Centre Gaston Bachelard de Recherche sur l'Imaginaire
et la Rationalité, Université de Bourgogne
(in French)
Works of Bachelard on-line (in French)
