Alexandre Koyré - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

Alexandre Koyré (1882, Taganrog, Russia - 1964, Paris) is a philosophical French of Russian origin. Koyré leaves Russia in 1898. Göttingen, it attends with the courses of the philosopher Edmund Husserl and the mathematician David Hilbert. It settles then with Paris to study the history of philosophy.

Its work of epistemology and Histoire of sciences concerns Galileo like on the Cosmologie in XVIe and XVIIe centuries. He sees in the birth of modern physics at the 17th century a “scientific revolution”. This expression is characteristic of the design discontinuist of the history of sciences which it shares with Gaston Bachelard. To pass from the “closed world” of cosmology aristotelician to the theory of a “infinite universe” thus supposes a radical transformation of the bases Métaphysique S on which physics rests.

Brief biography

1882 : born with Taganrog (Russia), on April 29th and given the name АлександрВладимировичКойракский.
1908-1909: studies with Gottingen (Husserl, Hilbert), follows work of the circle of Gottingen.
1912-1913: studies with Paris, follows the courses of Bergson to the Collège de France.
1914: engage in the army.
1917: armed with the Tsar, then chooses the Soviet revolution.
1920: return to Paris, prepares its first thesis.
1922: thesis
1929: thesis of State
1931: philosophical research.
1934: translated Nicolas Copernic
1939: publish the Studies galiléennes
1941: engaged for free France
1945: publish Introduction to the reading of Plato
1946: study in Princeton
1950: publish Russian Philosophy
1951: rejection of its candidature for the Collège de France
1952: named with the international Academy of history of sciences.
1955: publish its work on the mystics.
1957: publish world closed with the infinite Universe
1961: publish the astronomical revolution
1964: dies out in Paris, on April 29th
1965: posthumous publication of the Newtonian Études
Several congresses will be devoted to him.

Curriculum vitae vitæ

Written in February 1951, undoubtedly for its candidature for the Collège de France: it expresses there its conviction of the unit of the human thought; from where impossibility of separating, in tight compartments, history of the philosophical thought and that of the religious thought in which always the first bathes, either to be inspired some, or to be opposed to it. Conviction fertilizes for the intellection of the medieval and modern thought (even for the study of Spinoza).

The influence of the scientific thought is present at Descartes or Leibniz, certainly, but also in mystical doctrines: the mystic of Bœhme is rigorously incomprehensible without reference to the new cosmology created by Copernic.

These considerations brought it, or, rather, brought back it, being studied of the scientific thought: astronomy initially, then physical and mathematics, knowing that the connection which is carried out between celestial and physical physics terrestrial is at the origin of modern science. The evolution of the scientific thought is very closely related to that of the ideas transscientific, philosophical, metaphysics, nuns. Astronomy copernician is not an economy of the " cercles" : it raises the Earth with the row of planets. The work of Kepler is union between Christian and thought theology of Proclus: loss of circularity of the spheres, but against Giordano Bruno, it remains in a closed world. Descartes brings the infinite one in mathematics and sciences. Finally arrives Leibniz with its design of possible, the intermediate between the being and nothing , which had blocked Pascal. From where publications: 1933, studies on Paracelse, 1934, studies on Copernic, 1940, studies galiléennes. There was major upheaval of the executives of our thought. This is why the discovery of very simple laws, the such law of gravity, cost very great geniuses of so long efforts which were not always crowned success. Thus, the concept of inertia, as obviously absurd for Antiquity and the Middle Ages as it appears plausible to us, even obvious, today, could not be released in all its rigor even by the thought of Galileo and was it only by Descartes, following Baliani.

During the war, absorbed by other tasks, it could not devote time as much that it would have wished it with theoretical work. But since 1945, he undertook a series of new research on the formation, starting from Kepler, of the great Newtonian synthesis. This research will form the continuation of its work on the work of Galileo. The philosophy of Newton account with its mathematical genius. It succeeds where others fail, philosophical fault of insufficiency (Boyle and Hooke), and in fact deep philosophical divergences nourished the opposition of Huygens and Leibniz to Newton: conferences with Chicago, Yale, Harvard, Congress of Paris (1949), Congress of Amsterdam (1950). He studied the transition from the “world of the approximation to the universe of the precision”, the development of the concept and the techniques of exact measurement, the creation of the scientific instruments which one made possible the passage of the qualitative experiment to the quantitative experimentation of traditional science, finally, origins of the infinitesimal calculus.

It is essential to replace the Works studied in their intellectual and spiritual medium, to interpret them according to the mental practices, of the preferences and the aversions of their authors. II is necessary to resist temptation, to which succumb too much of historians of sciences, to make more accessible the often obscure, clumsy and even confused thought from Old, by translating it into a modern language which clarifies it, but at the same time deforms it: nothing, on the contrary, is more instructive only the study of the demonstrations of the same theorem given by Archimedes and Cavalieri, Roberval and Barrow. One could not underestimate the interest of the polemics of Guldin or Tacquet against Cavalieri and Evangelista Torricelli. One must, finally, study the errors and the failures with as much of care than the successes .

The description of an ambitious work program follows, on the History of the scientific thought, until the 20th century.

Alas, its not-nomination, then its untimely death will leave this large-work unfinished.

(text paraphrased of Études of history of the scientific thought , ED Gallimard, 1973, splendid posthumous work, gathering also splendid texts (inter alia) that:

Galileo and the experiment of Pisa: a legend .
Of motu gravium of Galileo: experiment of thought and its abuse ).

The legend of the experiment of Pisa

(in Yearly of the University of Paris , 1937)

Koyré shows the inexistence of this experiment (reported sobrement by Viviani in the biography of Galileo), by objecting that, since Benedetti, of which Galileo knew work, Galileo knew that a large clay ball would fall more quickly than small a in the air . What it describes in Discorsi. Under these conditions, one would include/understand badly how Galileo could have affirmed something contrary with his opinion, after an experiment which justified its opinion. Galileo affirmed well, a contrario , that in the vacuum , any body (even a feather) falls with the same law from fall.

Koyré in addition announces the experiments tried elsewhere by Baliani to Savone, Renieri in Pisa, finally Riccoli in Bologna). Its work of historical research and its analysis are very thorough and carry the conviction.

It is remarkable that in the experiments of the year 2000 on the fall of a single atom through two holes of Young, the quantum interferences follow the law of Galileo well, rewritten in quantum mechanics!

Reference quoted by Koyré: Lane Cooper, Aristote and the tower off Rammed , Ithaca, N.Y., 1935.

The article on the gedankenexperimente of motu gravium of Galileo (Re-examined of history of sciences and their applications, PUF, XIII, 1960, p. 197-245) also weighs heavy in epistemological training in history of sciences.

Works

Koyré (Alexandre), Studies galiléennes . Paris: Hermann, 1939.
Koyré (Alexandre), Of the world closed with the infinite universe , transl. Raissa Tarr. Paris: Gallimard; 3rd ED. 1988. (Such; 129). 350p. ISBN 2-07-071278-8.
Koyré (Alexandre), Studies of history of the scientific thought , Paris: Gallimard, 1966; 3rd ED. : 1985. (Such; 92). 412p. ISBN 2-07-070335-5.
Koyré (Alexandre), Mystical, spiritual, alchemists of the 16th German century . Paris: Gallimard, 1970. (Library of the ideas; 233). 184p. ISBN 2-07-035233-1.
Koyré (Alexandre), Studies of history of the philosophical thought . Paris: Gallimard, 1971; 3rd ED. 1990. (Such; 57). 364p. ISBN 2-07-023981-0.
Koyré (Alexandre), Fall of the bodies and earthmoving of Kepler to Newton. History and documents of a problem . Paris: J. Vrin, 1973. (History of sciences. Texts and studies). 220p. ISBN 2-7116-0446-2.
Koyré (Alexandre), the philosophy of Jacob Boehme. Study on the origins of German metaphysics ; 3rd ED. Paris: J. Vrin, 1979. (Library of history of philosophy). xvii-526p. ISBN 2-7116-0445-4.
Koyré (Alexandre), Newtonian Studies . Paris: Gallimard, 1991. (Library of the ideas). 353p. ISBN 2-07-027142-0.
Koyré (Alexandre), Of the mystic to science. Course, conferences and documents. 1922-1962 ; ED. Pietro Redondi. Paris: EHESS, 1986. (History of sciences and technology; 2). ISBN 2-7132-0873-7.
Stoffel (Jean-François), Bibliography of Alexandre Koyré . Firenze, L. Olschki, 2000. 195 p. ISBN 88-222-4914-3.
Jorland (Gerard), science in philosophy. Epistemological searchs for Alexandre Koyré . Paris: Gallimard, 1981. (Library of the ideas). 372p.

Texts published by Alexandre Koyré

Anselme (holy), Fidens quaerens intellectus ; transl. Alexandre Koyré. Paris, J. Vrin, 1930; reprinting 1992. (Library of the philosophical texts). ISBN 2-7116-0673-2.

Copernic (Nicolas), Of the revolutions of the celestial spheres ; transl. by Alexandre Koyré . Paris, A. Blanchard, 1970; rééd. Paris, Diderot, 1998. (Pergame). ISBN 2-84352-086-X.

Newton (Isaac), Isaac Newton' S Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica /assembled and ED. by Alexandre Koyré and Isaac Bernard Cohen, with the assistance off Anne Whitman.

Volume 1, Text. Cambridge: Harvard University Near, 1972. xl-547p. ISBN 0-674-66475-2.
Volume 2, Introduction to Newton' S Principia. Cambridge: Harvard University Near, 1971; rééd. 1978. ISBN 0-674-46193-2.

Spinoza (Baruch), Treated reform of the understanding ; transl. Alexandre Koyré. Paris, J. Vrin, 1974; reprinting 1990. (Library of the philosophical texts). ISBN 2-7116-0687-2.

External bonds

Center Alexandre-Koyré/CRHST, research laboratory in history of sciences of CNRS, the EHESS, the City of sciences and the national natural history museum of natural history: * Files: * The Lie (text on line):

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