गैस्टन बैचलर्ड

कृतियाँ

• 1934नया वैज्ञानिक चित्त

  अ-यूक्लिडीय ज्यामिति, सापेक्षता और क्वांटम भौतिकी दिखाते हैं कि विज्ञान अपनी ही नींवों को संशोधित करके आगे बढ़ता है; अंतिम अध्याय सरल विचारों को आरंभ-बिंदु बनाए बिना “अ-देकार्तीय ज्ञानमीमांसा” का आह्वान करता है।

• 1938वैज्ञानिक चित्त का निर्माण

  उपशीर्षक “वस्तुनिष्ठ ज्ञान के मनोविश्लेषण में योगदान”: अठारहवीं सदी के विद्युत और रसायन पर लेखन से बैचलर्ड उन “ज्ञानमीमांसीय अवरोधों” की सूची बनाते हैं – पहला अनुभव, उतावली सामान्यीकरण, शब्दों और पदार्थों का आकर्षण – जिन पर वैज्ञानिक चित्त को विजय पानी होती है।

मत

Bachelard argued that science does not continue everyday knowledge but breaks with it. In The New Scientific Spirit (1934) he took non-Euclidean geometry, relativity and quantum mechanics as evidence that science advances by revising its own principles, and called for a “non-Cartesian” epistemology that does not start from simple, self-evident ideas. The Formation of the Scientific Mind (1938) names what stands in the way: “epistemological obstacles” lie not outside thought but within it – in first impressions, hasty generalisations, images and words, and the wish to find substances behind phenomena. In his view nothing is self-evident, nothing simply given, everything constructed. Scientific concepts are corrected errors, and the historian of science has to judge the past from the standpoint of present science, separating what is outdated from what is still valid. In modern physics he saw a “phenomenotechnique”: instruments are theories made material, and the phenomena of the laboratory are produced, not merely found. Against Bergson’s continuous duration he stressed discontinuity, of instants in time and of breaks in knowledge. In his books on fire, water, air and earth and on the poetics of space and reverie he turned to the other side of the mind: the images that science has to set aside are the material of poetry. Through Canguilhem, Althusser, Foucault and Bourdieu – whose Craft of Sociology (1968, with Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron) begins with the break with common-sense notions – the idea of an epistemological break became one of the main currents of French thought.

जीवन और संदर्भ

Gaston Bachelard was born on 27 June 1884 in Bar-sur-Aube in Champagne, the son of a shoemaker. After school he worked for the postal and telegraph service from 1903 to 1913, first in Remiremont and then in Paris, and studied mathematics and physics in his spare time. He spent thirty-eight months in the trenches of the First World War and received the Croix de guerre. His wife Jeanne died in 1920, a year after the birth of their daughter Suzanne, who later became a philosopher herself. From 1919 to 1930 he taught physics and chemistry at the collège of Bar-sur-Aube, while taking a degree in philosophy and, in 1922, the agrégation. In 1927 he received his doctorate at the Sorbonne with a thesis on approximate knowledge, supervised by Abel Rey and Léon Brunschvicg. He then lectured at the University of Dijon, and in 1940 he succeeded Abel Rey in the chair of history and philosophy of science at the Sorbonne and as director of its Institut d’histoire des sciences et des techniques. Louis Althusser wrote his master’s thesis on Hegel (1947) under his supervision. Bachelard retired in 1954; Georges Canguilhem succeeded him. Alongside his books on the sciences he published, from The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938) to The Poetics of Space (1957), a series of studies of the poetic imagination. He died in Paris on 16 October 1962.

अन्य प्रमुख कृतियाँ

• Essay on Approximate Knowledge (Essai sur la connaissance approchée, 1928)
• The Intuition of the Instant (L’Intuition de l’instant, 1932)
• The New Scientific Spirit (1934)
• The Dialectic of Duration (La Dialectique de la durée, 1936)
• The Formation of the Scientific Mind (1938)
• The Psychoanalysis of Fire (La Psychanalyse du feu, 1938)
• The Philosophy of No (La Philosophie du non, 1940)
• Water and Dreams (L’Eau et les rêves, 1942)
• Applied Rationalism (Le Rationalisme appliqué, 1949)
• The Poetics of Space (La Poétique de l’espace, 1957)
• The Poetics of Reverie (La Poétique de la rêverie, 1960)