Ludwik Fleck

Ludwik Fleck , born the July 31st 1896 and dead the July 5th 1961 (one writes sometimes its first name Ludwig ) is a doctor, biologist and Sociologue Polish, which created in the Années 1930 the concept of “collective thought”. This concept important in Philosophy of sciences assistance to include/understand how the scientific ideas can change one time; it is similar to the posterior concepts of Thomas Kuhn of Paradigme or with the épistème of Michel Foucault.

Biography

Ludwik Fleck was born with Lvov city mainly Polish under Russian division and grows in the province of Galicia belonging then to Austria. He studies with the Polish college then with the Université of Lvov, where he obtains his diploma for the occupation of doctor. In 1920, he becomes the assistant of Rudolf Weigl, specialist in the Typhus, and obtains a pulpit of biology at the university of Lvov. He works of 1923 to 1935 at the department of internal medicine at the hospital of Lvov, then becomes director of the laboratory of Bactériologie of the local Social Security. As from 1935, he works in a laboratory of bacteriology which he had founded.

With the occupation of Lvov by the Germans in 1941, it is off-set in the Jewish Ghetto, but continues its research at the hospital. It works there with the manufacture of a Vaccin starting from the urine of its patients reached of the Typhus. Its work is known of the German occupant, and it is stopped in December 1942 to be off-set with the Laokoon, a pharmaceutical factory, to produce a serum there. It is sent to the Concentration camp of Auschwitz on February 7th, 1943, where it is affected with the diagnosis of the Syphilis, of typhus and other serologic affections starting from tests. From December 1943 to the release of Poland, on April 11th, 1944, it is held with the camp of Buchenwald.

Bacteriological research

From 1945 to 1952, it is with the head of the Institute of Microbiologie of the medical school Maria Sklodowska-Curie of the Université of Lublin. He becomes director of the department of microbiology and Immunologie at the Institute of State of the mother and the child of Warsaw. He is elected with the Academy of Science of Poland in 1954. During this period, its research concentrates on the behavior of the Leucocyte S in a stressed and infected organization. Between 1946 and 1957, it publishes 87 articles in reviews Polish, French, English and Swiss.

Reached in the middle, he emigrates in Israel where he obtains a station at the biological Research institute of Israel.

Thought

Fleck wrote a book on the Genèse and development of a scientific fact . For him, the truth in science is an unattainable ideal (if she is not regarded as dynamics, and evolutionary) by scientific communities locked up in thoughts which theirs are clean. It estimates that the development of the systems of representation used by sciences is not continuous and one-way, and is not done by a successive accumulation of new laws, but also by the suppression of old. This approach is indicated today by the term of social Constructivisme. One of the principal aspects of the theory of the knowledge of Fleck is indeed that it proposes the primarily collective character of the scientific research. Any assumption, any knowledge and any scientific theory emergent according to him within what it calls a “style of thought”. This style of thought is something which corresponds to the whole of the standards, the principles, the concepts and the eigenvalues to the unit of the knowledge and the beliefs; it can thus be compared so that one calls a “style” in Art or Architecture, which corresponds in the same way to the unit of the rules and the eigenvalues to a given time. One also often compared this style of thought of the paradigm at Thomas Kuhn.

This concept of style of thought is indissociable of that of " collective of pensée" who is according to Fleck at the origin of the standards of thought suitable for the style of thought It acts of a system closed and arranged hierarchically which takes in particular the form of the scientific community, but which more largely includes the whole of the hierarchical structure of a company. There is thus at Fleck a form of Holisme which wants that each singular knowledge must be paid not only the whole of knowledge suitable for a given time, but still with the whole of the institutions and specific practices to this same time. Of this point of the sight, to say that science lies within the scope of a collective of thought, it is to say that science is what one could describe as " Makes social total ".

These designs are illustrated particularly through examples drawn from the Médecine and in particular from the history of the Syphilis. One in general regards the diseases and pathologies as scientific facts, i.e. here as of the objective entities which all the patients would have in common who are reached by it. However in the case of the Syphilis, Fleck realizes that the concept of this disease such as it was constituted since the 15° century is actually a cultural product, in charge of all kinds of collective representations related to the Sexualité or with the corruption of the Sang. That shows at which point the diseases are not facts but fictitious entities and girls of time.

Work

Genesis and development of a scientific fact . Paris: Beautiful Letters, 2005. 322p, (1st French edition), 1st edition in 1935 in German.

He obtains the Cross of officer of the Ordre of the Rebirth of Poland.

See too

Sources

anglophone article
article of Patrice Bollon. " Is science really objective? " Marianne, No 460, week from February 11th to 17th 2006, p 74-76
article of Jean-François Braunstein " Kuhn reader of Fleck " , Files of philosophy , 66,2003

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