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Definition: Bachelard, Gaston from Chambers Biographical Dictionary

1884-1962

French philosopher

Born in Bar-sur-Aube, he had an unusual range of interests and influence in the history of science, psychoanalysis and literary criticism, which were connected in such works as La Psychoanalyse du feu (1937, "Psychoanalysis of Fire") and La Flamme d'une chandelle (1961, "The Flame of a Candle").

Bachelard, Gaston

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
(gästôN' bäshlär'), 1884–1962, French philosopher. He held degrees in physics, mathematics, and philosophy and taught at Dijon (1930–40) and the Univ. of Paris (1940–54). Bachelard regarded knowing as a result of the interaction between reason and experience. He rejected the notion of the empirical world as entirely random or senseless. At the same time he rejected the Cartesian idea that the larger view of reality is preordained and progressively uncovered through the accumulation of new scientific facts. Bachelard argued that new scientific knowledge may lead to a fundamental reformulation of reality, just as the preexisting formulation of reality that the observer imposed on the natural world may have predisposed him to entertain some hypotheses but not others. Given the dialectic of reason and experience, reformulation of reality involves not the rejection but rather the recasting of previous formulations. Bachelard was not, despite his scientific orientation, a thorough-going…
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Full text Article BACHELARD, GASTON

From The Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics
Gaston Bachelard started out as a philosopher of science, writing in France at the time of relativity theory and QUANTUM MECHANICS , and ended up as an iconoclastic critic of literary theory. His original argument, anticipating both Karl POPPER and Thomas KUHN , was that science cannot be understood…
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Full text Article Bachelard, Gaston (1884–1962),

From Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
French philosopher of science and literary analyst. His philosophy of science (developed, e.g., in The New Scientific Spirit , 1934, and Rational Materialism , 1953) began from reflections on the relativistic and quantum revolutions in twentieth-century physics. Bachelard viewed science as…
| 424 words
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Full text Article Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962)

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Balzac said that bachelors replace feelings by habits. In the same way, academics replace research by teaching. La formation de l'ésprit scientifique 1938 Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event. Fragments of a Poetics of Fire ch. 1 Man is a…
| 134 words

Full text Article SCIENCE, WORK OF

From Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations
French philosopher Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation . Translated by…
| 260 words
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Full text Article GASTON BACHELARD 1884–1962

From Big Ideas Simply Explained: The Philosophy Book
| 89 words
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Full text Article Canguilhem, Georges (1904-1995)

From Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology
He is known mainly as the intellectual éminence grise lurking behind some of the most influential post-World War II French social theorists, notably Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu . Although he was an influential teacher and thinker, he published few major texts and, to date, these are not…
| 273 words
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Full text Article PROBLEMATICS

From Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms
Problems, like British buses, usually come in series (or better, clusters). These formations have been termed ‘problematics’ - a translation from the French problématiques as elaborated by theorists such as Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) and Georges Canguilhem (1904-95). Hence a problematic is a…
| 469 words
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Full text Article DIRECTORY

From Big Ideas Simply Explained: The Philosophy Book
DIRECTORY
Though the ideas already presented in this book show the broad range of philosophical thought expressed by some of history's best minds, there are many more people who have helped to shape the story of philosophy. Some of these thinkers—such as Empedocles, Plotinus, or William of Ockham—have had…
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Full text Article Bachelard, Gaston

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
(gästôN' bäshlär'), 1884–1962, French philosopher. He held degrees in physics, mathematics, and philosophy and taught at Dijon (1930–40) and the Univ. of Paris (1940–54). Bachelard regarded knowing as a result of the interaction between reason and experience. He rejected the notion of the empirical…
| 206 words
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Full text Article Bourdieu, Pierre (1930-2002)

From Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology
Bourdieu's work was always concerned with the relationship between the ordinary behavior of people in everyday life and the discourses constructed by social scientists to explain that behavior. Bourdieu made important contributions to the philosophy of the social sciences , but he insisted that…
| 1,096 words
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