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Chapitre d'ouvrage Année : 2023

The Case of Life in the Historiography of Modern Science: Canguilhem’s “Biophilosophy”

Résumé

Thanks notably to the work of Georges Canguilhem, the approach to the history and philosophy of science known as “historical epistemology” turned its attention away from its standard objects like physics and astronomy and reoriented toward the life sciences. But what exactly is a historical epistemology of the life sciences? In recent years, it seems to mean (with Rheinberger) a historicized reflection on concept construction in, e.g., molecular biology, with attention paid to instrumental contexts. But was this Canguilhem’s approach? We suggest that Canguilhemian épistémologie (i.e., historical epistemology) is at bottom a philosophy of life, of the living. Canguilhem sometimes terms this “philosophie biologique,” a project that is by no means identical with “philosophy of biology” as practiced in the anglophone world since the 1960s. Canguilhem himself likes to play one identity against another, denying that he was a real philosopher but also at times acknowledging that his project in the history of science was at bottom a philosophical project, one also fascinated with questions of truth and error. Canguilhem could present himself as a kind of philosopher, one interested primarily in concepts, without proposing a metaphysical foundation for the life sciences, but also in knowledge, understood as a way of overcoming the obstacles that the subject comes across in her relationship with the environment: knowledge is a normative and therefore vital activity. This kind of biophilosophical approach can also be seen in his best-known work, The Normal and the Pathological. But with respect to historical epistemology, the question remains: To what extent is a historical (genealogical, excavating, contextualizing) project subservient to, or implicitly overdetermined by, if not a metaphysics of Life, then a philosophy of Life? That is the question we seek to address in this chapter.

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Dates et versions

halshs-04243069, version 1 (15-10-2023)

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Charles T. Wolfe, Giulia Gandolfi. The Case of Life in the Historiography of Modern Science: Canguilhem’s “Biophilosophy”. M. Condé, M. Salomon. Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Springer International Publishing, pp.63-82, 2023, Historiographies of Science, 978-3-031-27509-8. ⟨10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_4⟩. ⟨halshs-04243069⟩
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Dernière date de mise à jour le 20/04/2024
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