Stéphane Lupasco
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Stéphane Lupasco (born Ștefan Lupașcu; 11 August 1900 – 7 October 1988) was a
Early years
Stéphane Lupasco was born in Bucharest on 11 August 1900. His family belonged to the old Moldavian aristocracy. His father was a lawyer and politician, but it was his mother, a pianist and student of César Franck, who established the family in Paris in 1916. After high school at the Lycée Buffon, he studied philosophy, biology and physics at the Sorbonne and, briefly, law. He participated fully in the artistic and intellectual life of Paris in the 20s and 30s and defended his State Doctoral Thesis in 1935.
Academic career
In 1946, he was named research assistant at the
Summary of work
This section possibly contains original research. (March 2011) |
Lupasco’s style as an author is not an easy one, and requires the uninterrupted attention of the reader. It is not infrequent to find sentences of almost a page in length, containing multiple nested clauses. His writing is extremely dense in terms of the ideas and meaning of each successive phrase, with only occasional illustrative examples. Lupasco makes many references to his prior publications, unfortunately, often without adequate indexation. As Nicolescu has remarked, Lupasco’s exclusion from French academic life had both advantages and disadvantages: Lupasco was freed from the constraints of teaching and publication of research papers in a rigid format, and he obviously did not find it necessary to apply the discipline of providing references to his sources. In the Psychic Universe, published when Lupasco was seventy-nine, one sees nothing about current work in psychiatry. (Lupasco unfortunately did not read English well, and hence no references to the “anti”-psychiatry of R. D. Laing and Gregory Bateson, close in spirit to his work, are to be found.) A recent study by Brenner (2008) up-dates Lupasco’s work and shows its relevance to current issues in science and philosophy, as well as logic.
Influence
Lupasco was not well served by the (few) exegetes that had looked closely at his work. Only one book, by the sociologist
In his introduction to Lupasco’s The Principle of Antagonism and the Logic of Energy, Nicolescu points out that once the reader gets beyond the (relatively few) mathematical formulas in this book, Lupasco’s language is perfectly accessible. “It exemplifies, in a self-referential manner, the ternary aspects of actualization, potentialization and included middle which give it the charm and the privilege of incantations that are at the same time scientific, philosophical and poetic.”
Summarizing briefly, stimulated by
Recent studies
A key reference in French is the compendium of 1999, "Stéphane Lupasco -The Man and the Work" by H. Badescu and B. Nicolescu. The first comprehensive update and comparison of Lupasco's thought in English is the 2008 book by J. E. Brenner, "Logic in Reality". Other useful new references are the combined papers of a Symposium on Lupasco in 2009 "At the Confluence of Two Cultures: Lupasco Today," in French and a biographical paper by Brenner, "The Philosophical Logic of Stéphane Lupasco (1900 - 1988)" in English.
Works
- Logique et contradiction, P. U. F., Paris, 1947.
- Le principe d'antagonisme et la logique de l'énergie. Prolégomènes à une science de la contradiction, Hermann & Co., Paris, 1951.
- Du devenir logique et de l’affectivité ; Vol. 1 : Le dualisme antagoniste ; Vol. 2 : Essai d’une nouvelle théorie de la connaissance. Paris : Vrin, 1935 ; 2nd edition 1973.
- Les trois matières. Paris : Julliard, 1960 (LTM)
- Qu’est-ce qu’une structure? Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1967
- La tragédie de l'énergie. Paris: Casterman, 1970
- L’univers psychique. Paris: Editions Denoël/Gonthier, 1979.
- L’énergie et la matière vivante. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher. (Originally published in Paris: Julliard, 1962.), 1986
- La topologie énergétique. In Pensées hors du Rond, La Liberté de l’esprit. 12: 13-30. Paris: Hachette, 1986
- L’Homme et ses trois éthiques. Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1986
- L’énergie et la matière psychique. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher. (Originally published in Paris: Julliard, 1974.), 1987.
See also
References
- Badescu, Horia and Nicolescu, Basarab (eds.), "Stéphane Lupasco - L'homme et l'oeuvre". Monaco: Editions Rocher, 1999.
- Brenner, Joseph E., Logic in Reality. Dordrecht: Springer, 2008.
- Beigbeder, Marc, Contradiction et Nouvel Entendement. Paris : Bordas, 1972.
- Fondane, Benjamin, L’être et la connaissance ; Essai sur Lupasco. Paris : Éditions Paris-Méditerranée, 1998.
- Melhuish, George, The Paradoxical Universe. Bristol: Rankin Bros., 1959.
- Basarab Nicolescu in Stéphane Lupasco, Le principe d’antagonisme et la logique de l’énergie. Paris : Éditions Hermann, 1951. Re-edited by Éditions le Rocher, 1987.
- Nicolescu, Basarab (ed.). "A la confluence de deux cultures - Lupasco aujourd'hui. Paris: Oxus, 2010.
- Brenner, Joseph E., The Philosophical Logic of Stéphane Lupasco (1900–1988), In "Logic and Logical Philosophy, 19, 2010, pp. 243–284.
External links
- French articles
- Stéphane Lupasco meeting Salvador Dali, 1978, on Ina.fr, in French.