Abstract

What Ruyer and Bachelard have in common is that they both see the work of philosophy as essentially associated with science. However, while Bachelard does not go beyond epistemological reflections, Ruyer seeks to draw metaphysical conclusions from the findings of contemporary physics. He sets forth his views in two reports on Bachelard’s writings. According to Ruyer, the original structuring activities which characterise atoms and molecules enable us to compare them to the superior biological beings and argue for a panpsychist view of reality. The metaphysical imagination is thus able to propose what Ruyer calls a “reading of the world” which provides a unified and intensified vision of that world. The two opposing tendencies of Bachelard’s work, the concept and the image, could thus be reconciled.