Alexandre Koyré
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Alexandre Koyré | |
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Born | Alexandr Vladimirovich (or Volfovich) Koyra 29 August 1892 Historical epistemology |
Notable ideas | Criticism of positivist philosophy of science |
Alexandre Koyré (
Life
Koyré was born in the city of
At
In 1914 he joined the French Foreign Legion as soon as the war broke out. In 1916 he volunteered for a Russian regiment fighting on the Russian front, following a cooperation agreement between the French and Russian governments.
In 1922 Koyré completed his two
During the years 1932–34, 1936–38, and 1940–41, Koyré taught in
During World War II, Koyré lived in New York City, and taught at the
He died in Paris on 28 April 1964.
Work
Though best known as a philosopher of science, Koyré started out as a historian of religion. Much of his originality for the period rests on his ability to ground his studies of modern science on the history of religion and metaphysics.
Koyré focused on Galileo, Plato and Isaac Newton. His most famous work is From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, a series of lectures given at Johns Hopkins University in 1959 on the rise of early modern science and the change of scientists' perception of the world during the period from Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno through Newton. Though the book has been widely heralded, it was a summation of Koyré's perspective rather than an original new work.
Koyré was suspicious of scientists' claims to prove natural or fundamental truths through experiments. He argued these experiments were based on complicated premises, and that they tended to prove the outlook behind these premises, rather than any real truth. He repeatedly critiqued Galileo's experiments, claiming that some of them could not have taken place, and disputed the results Galileo claimed and which modern historians of science had hitherto accepted.
According to Koyré, it was not the experimental or
Koyré was also interested in the correlations between scientific discoveries and religious or philosophical world views. Like
Koyré's work can be seen as a systematic analysis of the constitutive achievements that resulted in scientific knowledge, but with particular emphasis on the historical, and specifically human, circumstances that generate the scientists' phenomenal world and serve as foundation for all scientific constitutions of meaning.
Koyré influenced major European and American philosophers of science, most significantly Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Michel Foucault and Paul Feyerabend.
Criticism
In the course of his studies of Galileo, Koyré famously claimed that the experiments with weights falling and rolling on inclined planes that Galileo described in his writings probably had not been carried out in practice, but were instead thought experiments intended to illustrate his deductions. Koyré argued that the precision of the results reported by Galileo was not possible with the technology available to him and quoted the contemporary judgement of Marin Mersenne, who had questioned the feasibility of reproducing Galileo's results. Furthermore, according to Koyré, Galileo's science was largely a product of his Platonist philosophy and did not really derive from experimental observations.
Koyré's conclusions were first challenged in 1961 by Thomas B. Settle, who as a graduate student at Cornell University succeeded in reproducing Galileo's experiments with inclined planes using the methods and technologies described in Galileo's writing.[5] Later, Stillman Drake and others worked through Galileo's notes and demonstrated that Galileo was a careful experimentalist whose observations did play a pivotal role in the development of his scientific system that he later claimed in his published work.[citation needed] Koyré has been further criticised for his claim about Galileo's Platonism, which he saw as a synonym with mathematics and mathematization of nature. As the Italian scholar Lodovico Geymonat has proved, in fact, Platonism as a tradition does not helpfully illuminate the development of Galileo's mathematical studies which are mostly concerned with applied mathematics, engineering and mechanics fields that neither Plato nor Platonist authors were much interested in.
Writings (selection)
- La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme, Paris, J. Vrin, 1929.
- Études galiléennes, Paris: Hermann, 1939
- From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957
- La Révolution astronomique: Copernic, Kepler, Borelli, Paris: Hermann, 1961
- The Astronomical Revolution Methuen, London, 1973
- Introduction à la lecture de Platon, Paris: Gallimard, 1994
- Metaphysics & Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution Harvard University Press, 1968
- A Documentary History of the Problem of Fall from Kepler to Newton, pp. 329–395, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 45, 1955
- Newtonian Studies, Chapman & Hall, 1965
Honours
- General Secretary and Vice President, Institut International de Philosophie
- Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Sarton Medal, History of Science Society
- CNRS Silver Medal, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
References
- Jean-François Stoffel, Bibliographie d'Alexandre Koyré, Firenze : L.S. Olschki, 2000.
- Marlon Salomon. "Alexandre Koyré, historiador do pensamento". Goiânia: Almeida & Clément, Brazil, 2010.
External links
- Alexandre Koyré's Online Archives Project[CNRS)
- Mailing list about Alexandre Koyré's archives : A mailing list about A. Koyré archives
- Center Alexandre-KOYRE/CRHST, history of science and technologies center (Paris, France) supported by CNRS, EHESS, Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie and Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle.
- The Alexandre Koyre Prize at the International Academy of the History of Science.
Notes
- ^ José Lopez, Society and Its Metaphors: Language, Social Theory and Social Structure, Bloomsbury Academic, 2003, p. 117.
- ^ These lectures were first published in a 1931 French translation by Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas with advice from Koyré.
- Doctorat d'universitéfrom the Sorbonne.
- ^ Alan D. Schrift (2006), Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes And Thinkers, Blackwell Publishing, p. 146.
- PMID 17759858.