Canguilhem

Stuart Elden

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509528783, 9781509528776
• eBook ISBN: 9781509528813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

Georges Canguilhem (1904–95) was an influential historian and philosopher of science, as renowned for his teaching as for his writings. He is best known for his book The Normal and the Pathological, originally his doctoral thesis in medicine, but he also wrote a thesis in philosophy on the concept of the reflex, supervised by Gaston Bachelard. He was the sponsor of Michel Foucault's doctoral thesis on madness. However, his work extends far beyond what is suggested by his association with these thinkers. Canguilhem also produced a series of important works on the natural sciences, including studies of evolution, psychology, vitalism and mechanism, experimentation, monstrosity and disease.

Stuart Elden discusses the whole of this important thinker's complex work, including recently rediscovered texts and archival materials. Canguilhem always approached questions historically, examining how it was that we came to a significant moment in time, outlining tensions, detours and paths not taken. The first comprehensive study in English, this book is a crucial guide for those coming to terms with Canguilhem's important contributions, and will appeal to researchers and students from a range of fields.

1
Foundations

Preface

Georges Canguilhem was a significant twentieth-century thinker, usually described as a historian and philosopher of science. He wrote extensively on politics, medicine, biology, history and epistemology. Some of his work concentrates on the formation of specific medical and biological concepts, such as the reflex, bacteria, evolution, regulation and psychology. There are also historical studies of science, including essays on figures such as Gaston Bachelard, Claude Bernard, Jean Cavaillès, Auguste Comte and Charles Darwin. His relation to Bachelard is especially important, and he develops Bachelard's research on physics and mathematics to apply his ideas to the life sciences, as well as developing his epistemological claims, particularly concerning obstacles and ruptures. Canguilhem edited some of Bachelard's work for publication, and regularly wrote prefaces to other people's works.¹ In his work on biology, he developed accounts of milieu and experience, or examined themes in natural history. For Canguilhem, these broad questions have important political and social consequences: they relate to concrete human problems.

He published five single-authored books in his lifetime: The Normal and the Pathological (1943), Knowledge of Life (1952), La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles [The formation of the concept of reflex in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries] (1955), Études d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences [Studies in the history and philosophy of the sciences] (1968) and Ideology and Rationality (1977).² Some of the earlier works included additional essays when re-edited for later editions. He also led a collaborative project in his Paris seminars entitled Du développement à l'évolution au XIXe siècle [From development to evolution in the nineteenth century], first published in 1962.

His most famous book is his first, The Normal and the Pathological, written in 1943 as his doctoral thesis in medicine, and revised in 1966 with some additional essays. His doctoral thesis in philosophy was La formation du concept de réflexe, and for this degree Knowledge of Life was also submitted as the minor thesis. In a sense, La formation du concept de réflexe and The Normal and the Pathological are the only books he wrote. All his other books are collections of essays or lectures. A posthumous collection, Writings on Medicine (2002), brought together some late essays, and a six-volume Oeuvres complètes [Complete works] is under way. This is an invaluable project, since many other articles, chapters and prefaces first appeared in a diverse range of outlets, which are often hard to find.

This study is an introduction to his work as a whole, drawing on the entirety of his writings, including the Oeuvres complètes, and to some extent on archival material housed at the Centre d'Archives en Philosophie, Histoire et Édition des Sciences (CAPHÉS) at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. This archive holds all of Canguilhem's surviving papers, as well as his personal library. While, therefore, it is thoroughly researched in terms of his familiar and more obscure writings, its aim is to make Canguilhem's important and sometimes difficult ideas accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

The book is organized in a thematic and partly chronological way. Chapter 1, ‘Foundations’, examines Canguilhem's life and career as a whole, especially the years of his intellectual formation. Chapter 2 discusses The Normal and the Pathological, both in its original and revised form, and some later essays on its themes. This remains Canguilhem's most influential work, and it established his status as a major thinker. Yet Canguilhem's work was broader than this study alone would suggest.

Chapter 3 focuses on a series of early lectures on philosophical biology, which set out many of the topics he was to discuss in future work. These lectures discussed the questions of vitalism and mechanism in relation to living beings, and the situation of organisms within a milieu or environment. Their importance to his overall career cannot be overestimated. They were published, along with some more specific studies, in Knowledge of Life in 1952. In later writings, Canguilhem utilized some of these insights, along with his keen historical sense, to examine a number of questions in the history of the life sciences. Chapter 4 looks at the question of physiology, focusing on the role of experimentation in science, and his major study of the concept of the reflex. Chapter 5 explores some of his other historical studies on regulation and psychology. Chapter 6 looks at his work on evolution and monstrosity. These three chapters draw on both his book-length study La formation du concept de réflexe and the Knowledge of Life collection, but also on his multiple essays, many of which were collected in Études d'histoire.

Yet Canguilhem was significant not just as a historian, but as a philosopher of history, through his disc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations for Works by Georges Canguilhem
• 1: Foundations
• 2: The Normal and the Pathological
• 3: Philosophy of Biology
• 4: Physiology and the Reflex
• 5: Regulation and Psychology
• 6: Evolution and Monstrosity
• 7: Philosophy of History
• 8: Writings on Medicine
• 9: Legacies
• Timeline
• Index
• End User License Agreement