Philosophy of Science
Following debates concerning the foundation of mathematics around the mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), who opposed Bertrand Russell and Frege, various French philosophers started working on philosophy of science, among them Gaston Bachelard, who developed a discontinuist view of science, Jean Cavaillès (1903–1944), or Georges Canguilhem, who would be a strong influence of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and Jules Vuillemin. In his introduction to Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological, Foucault wrote:
Take away Canguilhem and you will no longer understand much about Althusser, Althusserism and a whole series of discussions which have taken place among French Marxists; you will no longer grasp what is specific to sociologists such as Bourdieu, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Passeron and what marks them so strongly within sociology; you will miss an entire aspect of the theoretical work done by psychoanalysts, particularly by the followers of Lacan. Further, in the entire discussion of ideas which preceded or followed the movement of '68, it is easy to find the place of those who, from near or from afar, had been trained by Canguilhem.
Starting in the 1980s, Bruno Latour (b. 1947), teacher at the engineering school École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris, would develop the actor-network theory, a distinctive approach to social theory and research, best known for its controversial insistence on the agency of nonhumans.
Read more about this topic: 20th-century French Philosophy
Famous quotes containing the words philosophy of, philosophy and/or science:
“The very hope of experimental philosophy, its expectation of constructing the sciences into a true philosophy of nature, is based on induction, or, if you please, the a priori presumption, that physical causation is universal; that the constitution of nature is written in its actual manifestations, and needs only to be deciphered by experimental and inductive research; that it is not a latent invisible writing, to be brought out by the magic of mental anticipation or metaphysical mediation.”
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“A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.”
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“By an application of the theory of relativity to the taste of readers, to-day in Germany I am called a German man of science, and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be regarded as a bête noire the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English!”
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955)