Bachelard, Gaston

(b. Bar-sur-Aube, France, 27 June 1884; d. Paris, France, 16 October 1962)

philosophy of science, epistemology.

Bachelard became a philosopher late in life. He had previously taught physics and chemistry in the collège of his native city. His knowledge of physics later enabled him to determine the epistemological change brought about by modern science and, particularly, to gauge the growing distance between it and classical physics, which had suddenly become only relative.

As early as 1928, in the Essai sur la connaissance approchée, Bachelard penetrated to the heart of hte new mathematical physics and began to simplify its methods of measuring (calculus of errors), experimenting, and generalizing. A complementary study, Étude sur I’évolution d’un problème de physique (1928), was designed to show how thermodynamics was both established by and liberated from its early, very poor intuitions (such as that a metal bar heated at one end will become longer). His study of conductibility in anisotropic media, and the mathematical theory of Poisson and Fourier, facilitated the integration of thermodynamics with mechanics, especially since heat was not linked to an isolated molecule but was determined within a rather large volume (the quantitative view).

As early as 1930 Bachelard’s work branched out in several directions. One was pedagogical, concerned with how to arouse the mind and modernize it so that it could participate in the formulation of scientific concepts. This led to La formation de I’esprit scientifique (1938), in which Bachelard examines mental resistances and prejudices anthropologically and methodologically, in order to expose them. His original objective was to apply Freud’s psychoanalytic method to epistemology and to science itself, and to draw up a highly systematic list of complexes that paralyze intelligence.

Bachelard’s work was also historical: he became the historian of scientific changes. He did not give a chronological description of the evolutionary stages of thought as it grappled with reality, but clarified its tensions and expressed its breakdowns. These tensions and breakdowns occurred because modern physics attacked what had previously been considered basic principles.

A vast prescientific or, as it were, prehistroic universe underlies the period of concentrated scientific discovery—the revolution that substituted the surrationalism of the twentieth century for the rationalism of the nineteenth. If this rationalism conditions our view of the science of the eighteen and, a fortiori, the preceding centuries, it by no means invalidates it. Bachelard used earlier, naive physics as a subject for a new study of elemental pstchology. Alchemy represented for him the projection of the soul’s desries the magic lantern that enlarged derams. From this belife came his celebrated analyses of the classical four elements and of derams, space, time, and imagination.

Bachelard was never satisfied merely to point out obstructive archaisms. He went further, introducting the reader to the most abstract categories of contemporary science. From generalities, he moved on to make specialized analyses on the point, the corpuscle, movement, space, and the simultaneous. Bachelard also simplified the dialectic contained in apparatus that embodied a theory and the Wilson could chamebr also simplified the dialectic contained in apparatus thatembodied a theory: the Wilson could chamber, the spectroscope and the particle accelerator, “Phenomenotechnology” replaced instruments based on calculating systems; probabilism replaced realism: the discursive replaces the intuitive.

Bachelard attempted to renew the traditional questions of philosophy and physical reality. He sought to base metaphysics upon the new physics and to resume the work of Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz.

All these avenues of endeavor cut across each other. With Bachelard the past became the poetry of the world; classical science, a basis for exploration and enlargement; and modern science, a phenomenon that must constantly be reviewed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Original Works. Bachelard’s writings are Essai sur la connaissance approchée (Paris, 1928); Étude sur l’évolution d’un probléme de physique: La propagation thermique dans les solides (Paris, 1928): La valeur inductive de la relativité (Paris, 1929); Le pluralisme cohérent de la chimiernoderne (Paris, 1932): Le nouvel esprit scientifique (Paris 1934); Les intuitions atomistiques (Paris. 1935): L’intuition de I’instant (Paris, 1935): La dialectique de la durèe (Paris, 1936); La dialectique de la durée (Paris, 1936); L’expérience de I’espace clans let physique contemporaine (Paris, 1937); La formation de l’esprit scientifique Contribution à une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective (Paris, 1938); La psychanalyse du feu (Paris, 1938); La philosophie du non (Paris, 1940); Lautréamont (Paris, 1940); L’eau et les réves. Essai sur l’imagination de la matiére (Paris, 1942); L’air et les songes. Eassai sur l’imagination de mouvement (Paris, 1943); La treer les réveries de la volonté. Essai sur l’imagination des forces (Paris, 1948); La terra et les rationalisme rationalime appliqué (Paris, 1949); L’activié réveries du repos. Essai sur l’imagimation de l’intimité (Paris, 1948); Le rationlisme des forces (Paris, 1949); L’avtivité materialisme rationnel (Paris, 1953); La poétique de l’espace (Paris, 1957); La flamme d’une chandelle (Paris, 1961); and La poétique de la ré verie (Paris, 1961).

II. Secondary Literature. Three essential studies on Bachelard’s epistemology are in Vrin, ed., Problemes d’histoire et c/c philosophic des sciences (Paris, 1968); Georges Canguilhem, “L’histoire des sciences clans l’oeuvre epistemologique de Gaston Bachelard,” originally in Annales de l’Université de Paris (1968); “Gaston Bachelard et les philosophes,” originally in Sciences (March 1963); and “Dialectique et apilosophie du non chez Gaston Bachelard,” originally in Revenue internationale de philosophie (1963).

See also François Dagoget, Gaston Bachelard (Paris, 1965); Hommage à Gaston Bachelard (Paris, 1957), consisting mainly of articles by Georges Canguilhem and Jean Hyppolite; Jean Hyppolite, “L’épisetémologie de Gaston Bachelard,” in Revue d’historie des sciences (January 1964); R. Martin, “dialectique et esprit scientifique chez Gaston Bachelard,” in Les études philosophiques (October 1963); and Pierre Quillet, Bachelard (Paris, 1964).

F. Dagognet