Hypotheses and Perspectives in the History and Philosophy of Science: Homage to Alexandre Koyré, 1892–1964

497 Pages·2017·7.23 MB·English

by  Raffaele Pisano

Raff aele Pisano
Joseph Agassi
Daria Drozdova Editors
Hypotheses and
Perspectives in
the History and
Philosophy of
Science
Homage to Alexandre Koyré 1892-1964
Hypotheses and Perspectives in the History
and Philosophy of Science
Raffaele Pisano • Joseph Agassi
Daria Drozdova
Editors
Hypotheses and Perspectives
in the History and
Philosophy of Science
Homage to Alexandre Koyré 1892-1964
Editors
Raffaele Pisano Joseph Agassi
Lille University Tel Aviv University
Villeneuve d’Ascq, France Tel Aviv, Israel
Daria Drozdova
National Research University Higher
School of Economics
Moscow, Russian Federation
ISBN 978-3-319-61710-7 ISBN 978-3-319-61712-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-61712-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952599
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Foreword
A Scholar Without Borders
Like Einstein, Alexandre Koyré could have thought of himself as a citizen of the
world.1 He was one of those scholars who went through the turmoil of two world
wars clearly aware of their civic allegiance and deeply concerned about the future
of civilization, without ever endorsing nationalistic claims. Born in tsarist Russia in
the early years of the oil boom in Baku, Koyré took his secondary education in
present-day Georgia and went to Göttingen University in 1908 (Zambelli 2016).
Three years later, he moved on to Paris, where he started his PhD research at the
École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1914, although he was still a foreigner in
France, he first enlisted in the French army and then soon volunteered to fight in a
Russian regiment. However, during the October 1917 Revolution, he did not join
any of the rival movements and came back to Paris.
Koyré never really settled in France, although he got a number of teaching posi-
tions and became a French citizen.2 He traveled all over Europe, in the Middle East,
in Argentina, and in the United States. In 1940, during the German invasion of
France, he was lecturing in Cairo. He quickly decided to rally the Free French
Troops, and de Gaulle sent him to the United States. After a long journey via India,
the Pacific Ocean, and San Francisco, the Koyrés arrived in New York. There,
Alexandre joined the New School of Social Research and became dean of the École
Libre des Hautes Études, a consortium of Belgian and French scholars in exile
(Gillispie 2008).
Koyré could feel at ease everywhere, but he really belonged to nowhere. As he
was fluent in many languages – at least Russian, German, French, and English – he
could study and teach in many countries, including France, Egypt, Lebanon, and the
1 Einstein is famous for this humorous remark in his address to the French Philosophical Society at
the Sorbonne (6 April 1922): “If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim
me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove
untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew” (French
press clipping, 7 April 1922 [Einstein Archive 36–378], and Berliner Tageblatt, 8 April 1922
[Einstein Archive 79–535]).
2 It seems that he got the French citizenship on November 23, 1922, thanks to a decree of “admis-
sion at home” which had to be renewed every five year.
v
vi Foreword
United States. Thanks to his good command of classical Latin, he could also
immerse himself in medieval and Renaissance studies. He developed such a remark-
able intellectual flexibility that he could read and empathically interpret early mod-
ern mystics (Koyré 1929), as well as Descartes’ metaphysics, Galileo’s physics, and
Newton’s dynamics. Among his students and collaborators, he was famous for his
sharp understanding of subtle nuances in text analysis and translation (Koyré 1943;
Cohen 1987).
Across Disciplinary Boundaries
Although at the turn of the twentieth century a disciplinary organization came to
prevail in academic research, Koyré never fully embraced a disciplinary identity.
For example, he studied philosophy under Edmund Husserl in Göttingen, but, what-
ever the deep influence the founder of phenomenology had upon him, he was not
brainwashed by his first mentor, nor was he converted to the then-booming field of
axiomatization of mathematics by David Hilbert’s lectures in Göttingen. When he
completed his philosophical training in Paris, he attended Henri Bergson’s lectures
at the Collège de France, which attracted crowds of the Parisian intellectual elite
(Azouvi 2007). He also attended the Sorbonne courses of André Lalande and Emile
Brunschvicg, two of the leading figures of the Société Française de Philosophie. Yet
Koyré was not really attracted by mainstream and star philosophers. Rather, he
became a disciple of a more marginal philosopher of science, Emile Meyerson, who
was an immigrant in France, like himself. Meyerson, who was already in his sixties,
invited Koyré and his wife Dora to his home and even occasionally supported them
financially when Alexandre was jobless. Until Meyerson’s death in 1933, Koyré
used to call him “mon cher maître” and visited him every Thursday in his salon
(Meyerson 2009, pp. 226–253).
More surprisingly, Koyré did not dedicate his earlier scholarship to the history or
the philosophy of science. He was primarily interested in early modern religious
thought and theology. Following his PhD on St. Anselm, he moved on to Descartes’
proof of the existence of God (Koyré 1922, 1923). He got a temporary lectureship
in history of religious thought at the École Pratique. When it was turned into a ten-
ured position of directeur d’études in 1932, Koyré lectured about the relations
between science and faith. He did not give up the history of philosophy, for that
matter. In 1929, as he was appointed lecturer in philosophy at Montpellier University,
he tried to introduce his students (“mes gosses” as he referred to them) to Hegel’s
system. He subsequently wrote a state-of-the-art report and an introduction to
Hegel’s doctrine. At the same time, he diligently paid tribute to his mentors, editing
Husserl’s Recherches Philosophiques and dedicating reviews and articles to
Meyerson in various languages (Koyré 1926, 1927, 1931, 1933). Indeed, this was a
characteristic feature of Koyré’s career: while he was building up his own philo-
sophical framework, he was keen to spread the views of the thinkers who mattered
for him. Sharing knowledge was his priority. He also studied Russian intellectual
Foreword vii
history for a course at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the University of Paris and
published two major volumes on this topic (Koyré 1929, 1950).
Given the variety of domains of expertise that Koyré displayed in his career, how
are we to understand that he is mainly considered as a historian of science?
Galileo and Koyré
In 1941, Koyré arrived in the United States with the three volumes of his Etudes
Galiléennes in his suitcase (Koyré 1939). The book, recently published in Paris,
provided the basis of his courses in New York and Cambridge in 1942–1943. The
history of science, as it developed in the United States in the interwar period under
the influence of George Sarton, the founder of Isis, was seen above all as a chrono-
logical series of descriptions of discoveries, carefully detached from their social and
intellectual contexts. Arnold Thackeray later characterized this early period of insti-
tutionalization of the history of science in the United States as the prehistory
(Thackray 1980). Against this background, Koyré’s lectures on Galileo created a
great impression on a dozen scholars. Isaac Bernard Cohen, among them, was
immediately attracted by Koyré’s approach to the history of science. What Koyré
offered was nothing like a boring linear chronology of great discoveries supposedly
made due to crucial experiments. Koyré’s attempt to analyze Galileo’s thinking pro-
cess and to outline the inner coherence of his system revealed an exciting battle of
ideas about natural phenomena. “From Koyré we learned about the inner dynamic
quality of scientific thought” (Cohen 1987, p. 56). It is fair to say that Koyré invented
a new Galileo, a Platonist Galileo who, in turn, invented Koyré as a post-positivist
historian of modern science.
Not all students were convinced by Koyré’s portrait of Galileo. Giorgio de
Santillana and Leonardo Olschki could not agree that Galileo did not actually per-
form the experiments that he presented. In addition, they raised objections. Still, the
long controversy that ensued with Olschki and later with Stillman Drake enhanced
the aura surrounding Koyré in the United States.
Unlike other French refugees, Koyré did not leave his country of exile in the
aftermath of World War II. Indeed, he came back to Paris to resume his position at
the École Pratique and his lectures on religious thought, but he shared his time
between the United States and Paris. In 1951–1952, he was elected a fellow at the
Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and he spent half of the years there. But
he did not stay quietly in Princeton when he was in the United States. Always on the
move, Koyré lectured in Chicago, at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and at the
University of Wisconsin in Madison, thus attracting an increasing number of young
scholars at a crucial moment when history of science was being promoted as a
profession in the US university system (Aurières 2017).
Koyré’s intellectual approach to science, emphasizing the unity of thought
through the close interaction between science, religion, and metaphysics, was par-
ticularly attractive in the heyday of the Cold War. It potentially provided US histo-
viii Foreword
rians of science with a robust armor against the increasing influence of the Marxist
interpretations of history of science, such as that developed in Britain by John
D. Bernal and his followers. Koyré’s intellectual history was a good antidote for
addressing what was identified as perhaps the most “critical problem” in the field –
the intense philosophical debate about the impact of economic and social structures
on scientific change. This question pervaded the Conference on the History of
Science held in Madison in 1957, the year of Sputnik, and was reflected in the
resulting widely read volume edited by Marshall Clagett (Clagett 1959; Fuller
2000).
Through its widespread circulation in the right places at the right moment, the
Etudes Galiléennes became a landmark book, one of those books which opened up
new research pathways for decades. In a minor key, Koyré’s Études Galiléennes
anticipated the later grand impact of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific
Revolutions. In this volume, published 2 years before Koyré’s death, Kuhn acknowl-
edged Koyré’s influence on his vision of scientific change (Kuhn 1962, p. v–vi,
1977, p. 11; Conant and Haugeland, pp. 286).
Ambiguous Heritage in France
The contrast between the impact of Koyré’s works in the United States and in France
is striking. While he influenced an entire generation of historians of science and thus
greatly contributed to professionalizing and dignifying the history of science in
American universities, in France, his courses at the École Pratique des Hautes
Études attracted few students. I.B. Cohen, in keeping with a remark by Gillispie,
contrasted the image of Koyré as a historian of science in the United States with his
reputation as a philosopher in Europe (Cohen 1987, p. 64). However, this is not
exactly the case, since Koyré has never been recognized as a philosopher in France
and his sphere of influence there in the history of science remained more limited
than in the United States.
In the 1950s, when the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique was estab-
lished, history of science was integrated into the philosophy section, and Koyré was
part of it. The coupling of philosophy and history of science is a major feature of the
French system and has long favored the practice of intellectual history focused on
scientific concepts and ideas. Yet Koyré did not benefit from this situation. To be
sure, the students he recruited at the École Pratique gradually assisted him and later
became professional historians of science or technology (Taton 1987). But Koyré
was rebuffed in 1951, when he applied for a position at the Collège de France, just
as Meyerson had been turned down 30 years before. Both of them remained at the
periphery of the French system, because they did not follow the standard cursus of
French academics (Chimisso 2008).
Moreover, Koyré’s program of a history of scientific ideas was rivaled by the
overarching influence of Gaston Bachelard’s historical epistemology. Well estab-
lished at the Centre of History of Science and Technology of the Sorbonne,
Foreword ix
Bachelard attracted large audiences and created a research school of philosophers
cum historians of science, including Georges Canguilhem. In 1958, an alternative
Centre of History of Science and Technology was created for Koyré by the École
Pratique des Hautes Études, which in 1966 was rechristened the Centre Alexandre
Koyré. For decades, there were virtually no interactions between the two centers
respectively located on the left bank and the right bank of the river Seine. Canguilhem
nevertheless later boldly claimed that Koyré was part of the “French tradition of
epistemology,” on the assumption that Koyré’s interpretation of the scientific revo-
lution exemplified Bachelard’s “epistemology of rupture” (Canguilhem 1968,
p. 14). Although this view distorts Koyré’s much more sophisticated history of
ideas, it has been widely spread and has become a kind of golden legend among
French epistemologists (Bensaude-Vincent 2016). Still, the golden legend about the
“French tradition of epistemology” hardly conceals the cleavage between two rival
traditions of history of science and the subsequent marginalization of Koyré.
Remarkably, it was an Italian scholar, Pietro Redondi, member of the Centre
Alexandre Koyré, who edited the volume of Koyré’s lectures (Redondi 1986).
The time has come to reconsider Koyré’s works in a broad international perspec-
tive and the present volume will hopefully pave the way for a reassessment of his
influence.
CETCOPRA, Université Paris 1 Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
Panthéon Sorbonne
Paris, France
[email protected]
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