College gaston bachelard biography

Arguably the central figure in twentieth-century French epistemology, Gaston Bachelard pursued a rich career composed of inquiries into poetics as well as philosophy of science. Born in Dijon, Bachelard worked as a postmaster and studied physics before becoming interested in philosophy and influenced by the anti-positivism and rationalism of Léon Brunschvicg.

College gaston bachelard biography

He was a professor in Dijon from 1930 to 1940 before becoming the inaugural chair in the history and philosophy of sciences at the Sorbonne. Through a series of works in the 1930s and 40s, Bachelard developed his unique assessment of the history of science as comprised of a series of epistemological obstacles and epistemological breaks, or ruptures.

Mobilizing a dialectical rationalism against positivism and realism, Bachelard argued that scientific progress proceeds along historically constructivist lines, wherein the scientist’s rational confrontation with the ‘raw material’ of scientific objects, itself imbued with the conce