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Gaston bachelard Biography

Gaston Bachelard

(Bar-sur-Aube, 1884-Paris, 1962) French philosopher.He was a professor at the Sorbonne (1940-1954) and specialized in epistemology ( The formation of the scientific spirit , 1938).He also studied poetic imagination in relation to the four elements, in works such as Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), Water and Dreams (1941) and Poetics of space (1957).

Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard received his doctorate in exact sciences in 1912 and, after being employed post and telegraph clerk for several years, he taught physics and chemistry at a secondary school in his hometown.In 1930 he served as professor of philosophy at the University of Dijon, and was finally awarded the chair of History and Philosophy of Science at the Sorbonne University, which he ran until his retirement.He collaborated with F.Gouseth and P.Bernays in the direction of the journal Dialectica , and was also director of the Institut d'Histoire des Sciences.

His activity, which resulted in an important production of works, constantly presents a double character: on the one hand, a work of reflection on the sciences, especially on modern physics and chemistry, to develop a theory of science or epistemology; on the other, his work as an essayist and writer dedicated to showing the centrality in man of "imagination" and dream activity.He was inspired by both scientific rationalism and Freud's psychoanalysis and the vitalist interpretations that the latter had had in France.

His own production is quite clearly divided into two groups.On the one hand, his fundamental Essay on approximate knowledge (1928), The new scientific spirit (1934), The formation of the scientific spirit.Contribution to a psychoanalysis of objective knowledge (1938), The rationalist activity of contemporary physics (1951) and The philosophy of no.Essay of a philosophy of the new scientific spirit (1940), which together with other minor essays (on chemistry or on the problem of time and space in modern physics), constitute the nucleus of his epistemology.

On the other, his main writings on literature and imagination: Psychoanalysis of fire (1938), Lautréamont (1939), Water and the dreams (1941), The air and the dreams (1943) and The earth and the dreams of the will (1948); the influence of Carl Gustav Jung can be seen in them in some respects.Between 1949 and 1953 his interest in epistemology reappeared with force, with titles such as Applied Rationalism (1949) and Rational Materialism (1953), while in the latter period the world of "rêverie" prevails in his life: The Poetics of Space (1957), The Poetics of Dreaming (1961) and The Flame of a candle (1961).

But his works on science and writings on the imagination have a common root for him, in that they constitute two responses to the situation of man.The answer of science is based on a new relationship between scientific thought and philosophy, thanks to which scientific thought frees itself from the false concepts (or naturalizations) that philosophy produces spontaneously, since science must construct its own concepts with full theoretical autonomy.

According to Gaston Bachelard, this work is favored by the great leap that physics has made, especially with the contributions of Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.But man is instinctively drawn into unscientific naturalization, which is reflected in the activity of imagination, fantasy, and dream, or in poetic activity.Science and imagination are equally valid, and even complementary, paths, and represent two ways to rise above the confused daily life of the concrete.Much of Bachelard's epistemological contributions have been taken up by Louis Althusser and his school.

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