Work · Science & Human Sciences
The Formation of the Scientific Mind
Subtitled “a contribution to a psychoanalysis of objective knowledge”: from eighteenth-century writings on electricity and chemistry Bachelard catalogues the “epistemological obstacles” – first experience, hasty generalisation, the lure of words and of substances – that a scientific mind has to overcome.
Introduction
The Formation of the Scientific Mind appeared in 1938 with the subtitle “contribution to a psychoanalysis of objective knowledge”. Bachelard divides the history of science into a pre-scientific age up to the eighteenth century, a scientific age, and the “new scientific spirit” that begins around 1905. Most of the book collects examples from eighteenth-century treatises on electricity, chemistry and medicine to show the “epistemological obstacles” that block thought from within: the fascination of first experience, premature generalisation, metaphors such as the sponge, the search for substances, animism and unconscious desires. A scientific culture, he concludes, has to be formed against these tendencies, and teaching has to correct errors rather than simply add knowledge. The book’s idea of the break with common experience was taken up by Canguilhem, Althusser and Bourdieu.
Connections
Builds on
- The New Scientific Spirit1934 · Gaston Bachelard
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