Ferdinand Gonseth

Ferdinand Gonseth is a philosopher born with Sonvilier the September 22nd 1890, eighth of a family of nine children. It is deceased the December 17th 1975, with Lausanne.

Biography

Its thought is called the Idonéisme, term formed on the basis of suitable word in connection with the dual aim of the Vérité and the Réalité.

It followed the secondary school to Saint-Imier, then the Gymnasium (College) with La Chaux-de-Fonds. Blind man as of his adolescence, it continued nevertheless his studies to obtain the diploma of the federal Polytechnic school of Zurich (EPFZ), in mathematical and physical section. He was honoured, in 1915, of a title of privat docent. From 1919 to 1929, he taught mathematics at the University of Bern, of 1920 to 1929. With 1929 to 1960, it was charged by the EPFZ with teaching with the analysis with the bases with the Géométrie and the Philosophie with sciences.

Worried very early by the relations between sciences and the Philosophy, Ferdinand Gonseth was involved in the controversy which the mathematicians maintained around “the crisis the bases”. Its reputation of philosopher of sciences goes back to 1926, year of publication of its first great work " Bases of the mathématiques". It presents to it its own views in a methodological prospect.

Its work will make it reflect on the modern science whose existence is essential on philosophy like a fact. Ferdinand Gonseth estimates that only science and the scientist as such can found the new humanism which the world needs. If philosophy remained equal to science, this one would find there some elements of wisdom in spite of the violence to which it too often provides weapons.

Philosophy and science do not deal of two different realities, but with only one and even reality. With the eyes of Gonseth, the realistic philosopher must subject himself to at the same time theoretical processes and techniques of science, i.e. to admit like clean principle of his step at least two of the principles of open philosophy:

the principle of the revisibility of any acquired knowledge, which all in all expresses only the dynamism of a knowledge assuming the risk of the error explicitly;
the principle of technicality, which expresses the fact that any scientific knowledge is structured not only by the object itself but also by the mode of its subjective seizure.

Ferdinand Gonseth published several other important works: " Geometry and the problem of the espace" (1945-55), " The problem of the temps" (1964), " The référentiel" (1975), like more than two thousand pages of articles in various scientific magazines.

Ferdinand Gonseth created in 1947, with Gaston Bachelard and Paul Bernays, an international review of Philosophie of knowledge, entitled “Dialectica”.

See too

Idonéisme Condensed its designs.

External bonds

Site of the AFG Association F. Gonseth, founded in 1971 in Bienne, and which proposes to continue and to develop its work.
'' Vidéo: '' Ferdinand Gonseth in 1969, a discussion with the mathematician and philosopher, a file of the French-speaking Switzerland Television

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