By Georges Canguilhem
Georges Canguilhem is one in all France's most efficient historians of technology. expert as a physician in addition to a thinker, he mixed those practices to display to philosophers that there may be no epistemology with out concrete learn of the particular improvement of the sciences and to historians that there may possibly be no necessary historical past of technology with out a philosophical knowing of the conceptual foundation of all wisdom. a necessary Rationalist brings jointly for the 1st time a variety of Canguilhem's most crucial writings, together with excerpts from formerly unpublished manuscripts and a severe bibliography by way of Camille Limoges.Organized round the significant subject matters and difficulties that experience preoccupied Canguilhem all through his highbrow profession, the gathering permits readers, even if standard or surprising with Canguilhem's paintings, entry to an enormous array of conceptual and urban meditations on epistemology, method, technological know-how, and heritage. Canguilhem is a challenging author, yet Delaporte succeeds in marking out the major strains of his idea with unequalled readability; readers will come away with a heightened realizing of the advanced and the most important position he holds in French highbrow history.Georges Canguilhem is Professor Emeritus on the Sorbonne and former director of the Institut d'Histoire des Sciences et des thoughts de l'Universit? de Paris. His works contain l. a. Connaissance de l. a. Vie, Ideology and Rationality within the background of the lifestyles Sciences, and the traditional and the Pathological. Fran?ois Delaporte is a learn affiliate on the Institut nationwide de los angeles Sant? et de l. a. Recherche Medicale in Paris. he's the writer of illness and Civilization and The background of Yellow Fever.
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Extra resources for A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings of Georges Canguilhem
Example text
This is precisely what the iatromechanics (or iatromathematicians) of the seventeenth and l'ighteenth centuries tried to do in order to explain muscular contraction, digestion and glandular secretion. " In other words, mechanism is a theory that tells us hmv machines (living or not) \vork once they are built, but it tells us nothing about hovv to build them. In practice, mechanism contributed little to subjects such as embryology. The use of the microscope, which became common in the second half of the seventeenth century, made it possible to observe the "seeds" of living things, living things in the earliest stages of development.
But the very influence of Newtonian to go further. In his Eloge of the surgeon Jean Mery (d. 1722), science still fostered dogmatic attitudes in many minds of philo- rontencllc remembered one of Mhy's frequently quoted statc- ~ophical bent. ments: "\A/e anatomists are like the deliverymen of Paris, who Vitalism \vas one reaction to this dogmatism. Far too much knmv even the smallest, most out-of-the-way streets but have no ill has been spoken of vitalism. " tion or the formulation of new concepts in neurophysiology; on 91 EPI<;TEMOL,OGY the contrary, it encouraged progress.
Blainville and Maupied's Histoire is also different from, even diametrically opposed to, that of Cuvier when it comes both to determining the method, or ways and means, of the science of THE HISTORY OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE living things, and to appreciating the eflects of seventeenth-century philosophies on the development of that science. " A rather sweeping judgment, it might seem, although it was current at the time in one form or another. Blainville and Maupied's judgment is equally broad, as well as considerably more prolix: Descartes, Bacon and all the others (sic), they say, are merely the logical consequence, the elaboration, of Aristotle; 47 Bacon's philosophy is nothing but Aristotle's; 4 X Descartes worked in an Aristotelian direction;4 9 Descartes built on the work of the great Stagirite;SO and so on.