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Born in Bar-sur-Aube, France, in 1884, Gaston Bachelard received his doctorate in 1927. He became professor of philosophy at the University of Dijon in 1930, and held the chair in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris from 1940 to 1954. In epistemology and the philosophy of science, Bachelard espoused a dialectical rationalism, or dialogue between reason and experience. He rejected the Cartesian conception of scientific truths as immutable; he insisted on experiment as well as mathematics in the development of science. Bachelard described the cooperation between the two as a philosophy of saying no, of being ever ready to revise or abandon the established framework of scientific theory to express the new discoveries. In addition to his contributions to the epistemological foundations of science, Bachelard explored the role of reverie and emotion in the expressions of both science and more imaginative thinking. His psychological explanations of the four elements-earth, air, fire, water-illustrate this almost poetic aspect of his philosophy. (Bowker Author Biography) — biography from The Poetics of Space… (more)
The Poetics of Space 2,443 copies, 19 reviews
The Psychoanalysis of Fire (Author) 401 copies, 5 reviews
The New Scientific Spirit 133 copies, 3 reviews
La flamme d’une chandelle 108 copies, 2 reviews
Intuition of the Instant 100 copies, 2 reviews
Lautréamont 47 copies
Épistémologie 42 copies, 2 reviews
Le Rationalisme appliqué 29 copies, 1 review
Le matérialisme rationnel 18 copies, 1 review
Études 15 copies
SeÇmeler 2 copies
Einstein e i filosofi (Author) 2 copies
Bachelard 1 copy
Études 1 copy
Critical Theory Since Plato (Contributor, some editions) 386 copies, 1 review
Histoire de la campagne française (Afterword, some editions) 19 copies, 1 review
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Short biography
A founding figure in historically-oriented philosophy of science. Viewed science as a struggle against ideological obstacles, and benefiting from reverie and imagination as much as from Reason. Many Americans first discovered Bachelard's work behind the famous "paradigm shifts" described by Thomas S. Kuhn. Bachelard described the products of science and imagination as epistemological structures -- "all is constructed" -- and the shifts from one answer to another as "ruptures". Alexander Koyre interpreted these as "shifts".
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