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Alexandre Koyré | |
|---|---|
| Born | Alexandr Vladimirovich (or Volfovich) Koyra 29 August 1892 |
| Died | 28 April 1964 (1964-04-29) (aged 71) Paris, France |
| Education | |
| Education | University of Göttingen (1908–1911) Collège de France (1912–1913) University of Paris (1911–1914) |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Continental philosophy Phenomenology French historical epistemology[1] |
| Institutions | École pratique des hautes études (1931–1962) The New School (1941) Johns Hopkins University (1946–1952) |
| Main interests | History of science Philosophy of science Historical epistemology |
| Notable ideas | Criticism ofpositivistphilosophy of science |
Alexandre Koyré (/kwɑːˈreɪ/;French:[kwaʁe]; bornAlexandr Vladimirovich (orVolfovich)Koyra;[a] 29 August 1892 – 28 April 1964), alsoanglicized asAlexander Koyre, was a French philosopher ofRussian origin who wrote on thehistory andphilosophy of science.
Koyré was born in the city ofTaganrog, Russia, on 29 August 1892 into aJewish family. His original name was Alexandr Vladimirovich (or Volfovich) Koyra. In Imperial Russia he studied inTiflis,Rostov-on-Don andOdessa, before pursuing his studies abroad.
At theUniversity of Göttingen, Germany (1908–1911), he studied underEdmund Husserl andDavid Hilbert. Husserl did not approve of Koyré's dissertation, whereupon Koyré left forParis, to study at theCollège de France and theSorbonne during the period 1912–1913 underBergson,Brunschvicg,Lalande,Delbos andPicavet. Following Husserl'sCartesian Meditations, a series of lectures given in Paris in February 1929 (and one of the more important of Husserl's later works),[2] Koyré met again with Husserl repeatedly.
In 1914, he joined theFrench 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 twoState doctorate (then calledDoctorat ès lettres) theses.[3][4] The same year he started teaching in Paris at theÉcole pratique des hautes études (EPHE), and became a colleague ofAlexandre Kojève, who eventually replaced him as lecturer onHegel. In 1931, he helped found the philosophical journalRecherches philosophiques. In 1932, the EPHE created a Department of History of Religious Thought in Modern Europe for him to chair. He retained this position until his death.
During the years 1932–34, 1936–38, and 1940–41, Koyré taught inFuad University (later Cairo University) where, along with André Lalande and others, he introduced the study of modern philosophy to Egyptian academia. His most important student in Cairo wasAbdel Rahman Badawi (1917–2002), who is considered the first systematic modern Arab philosopher. Koyré later joined the Egyptian National Committee of the Free French.
During World War II, Koyré lived in New York City, and taught at theNew School for Social Research, including a course onPlato'sTheaetetus, together withLeo Strauss andKurt Riezler, in the fall of 1944. After World War II, he was a frequent visitor to the United States, spending half a year at theInstitute for Advanced Study atPrinceton each year from 1955 to 1962 and also teaching as a visiting professor atHarvard,Yale, theUniversity of Chicago, theUniversity of Wisconsin, andJohns Hopkins. His lectures at Johns Hopkins would form the nucleus of one of his best-known publications,From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957).
He died in Paris on 28 April 1964.
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 thehistory of religion andmetaphysics.
Koyré focused onGalileo,Plato andIsaac Newton. His most famous work isFrom the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, a series of lectures given atJohns Hopkins University in 1959 on the rise of early modern science and the change of scientists' perception of the world during the period fromNicholas of Cusa andGiordano 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, which modern historians of science had hitherto accepted.
According to Koyré, it was not the experimental orempirical nature ofGalileo's andNewton's discoveries that carried theScientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, but a shift in perspective, a change in theoretical outlook toward the world. Koyré strongly criticised what he called the "positivist" notion that science should only discover given phenomena, the relations between them, and certain laws that would help to describe or predict them. To Koyré, science was, at its heart, theory: an aspiration to know the truth of the world, of uncovering the essential structures from which phenomena, and the basic laws that relate them, spring.
Koyré was also interested in the correlations between scientific discoveries and religious or philosophical world views. LikeEdmund Husserl in his later studies, Koyré claimed that modern science had succeeded in overcoming the split, inherent in traditionalAristotelian science, between Earth and Space, since these were now both seen as governed by the same laws. On the other hand, another split had now been created, between the phenomenal world inhabited by man and the purely abstract,mathematical world of science. Koyré aimed to show how this "first world", the world of human dwelling (personal and historical), apparently irrelevant to modern naturalistic research, was by no means irrelevant for the very constitution and development of this research. Koyré consistently sought to show how scientific truth is always discovered in correlation with specific historical, even purely personal, circumstances.
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 the foundation for all scientific constitutions of meaning.
Koyré influenced major European and American philosophers of science, most significantlyI. Bernard Cohen,Thomas Kuhn,Imre Lakatos,Michel Foucault andPaul Feyerabend.
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 insteadthought 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 ofMarin Mersenne, who had questioned the feasibility of reproducing Galileo's results. Furthermore, according to Koyré, Galileo's science was largely a product of hisPlatonist 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 atCornell University succeeded in reproducing Galileo's experiments with inclined planes, using the methods and technologies described in Galileo's writings.[5] Later,Stillman Drake and others (e.g., James MacLachlan)—through the replication of other experiments of Galileo's, and the exhaustive working-through of his notes—demonstrated that Galileo had been a careful experimentalist, whose observations likely did play the pivotal role that he had claimed for them in the development of his scientific system.[6] Koyré has been further criticised for his claim about Galileo's Platonism, which he saw as a synonym for mathematics and mathematization of nature; for example, Italian scholarLodovico Geymonat has argued that consideration of 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—i.e., fields that neither Plato, nor subsequent Platonist authors, generally evinced much interest in.[citation needed]
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