Alexandre Koyré (August 29, 1892, Taganrog – April 28, 1964, Paris) was a French philosopher
of Russian origin who wrote on history and the
philosophy of science.
Life
Koyré was born in the city of Taganrog into a Russian family of Jewish origin. His original
name was Александр Владимирович Койракский - Alexandr Vladimirovich Koyrakskiy.(see here)
In Göttingen, Germany he studied under Edmund
Husserl and David Hilbert. Husserl did not approve of Koyré's dissertation,
whereupon Koyré left for Paris. After Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, a series of lectures given in Paris and one of the
more important of Husserl's later works, Koyré met with him repeatedly and influenced his understanding of Galileo.
In Paris Koyré taught at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and became a colleague of Alexandre Kojève, who eventually replaced him as lecturer on Hegel. Though best known as a philosopher of science, Koyré started out as a historian of
religion. Much of his originality for the period rests on his ability to ground his studies of modern science on the history of
religion and metaphysics.
Koyré focused on Galileo, Plato, and Isaac Newton. His most famous work is From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, a series of
lectures given at The Johns Hopkins University in 1959 on the rise of early
modern science and the change of scientists' perception of the world during the period from Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno through Newton. Though the book has been widely heralded, it was a summation of Koyré's perspective rather than an
original new work.
Koyré was suspicious of scientists' claims to be proving natural or fundamental truths through their experiments. He argued
these experiments were based on complicated premises, and that they tended to prove the outlook of these premises, rather than
any real truth. He repeatedly criticized Galileo's experiments, claiming that some of these experiments could not have taken
place and brought into question the results Galileo claimed and modern historians of science had heretofore accepted.
According to Koyré, it was not the experimental or empirical nature of Galileo's and Newton's discoveries that made the
"Scientific Revolution" of the 17. Century, but a shift in perspective, a change in the theoretical outlook on the World. Koyré
strongly criticized what he called the “positivist” notion that science should only discover
given phenomena, relations between them and establish certain laws that help describing, or better, predicting them. For Koyré
science was primary Theory: the aspiration of knowing the truth of the World, of unfolding the essential structures from which
phenomena and the basic laws relating them spring.
Koyré was also interested in the correlations between scientific discoveries and religious and philosophic worldviews. Not
dissimilarly from Husserl’s later studies, Koyré claimed that the modern sciences managed
to overcome the split inherent to Aristotelian science between the Earth and the Space, since they were now both
seen as governed by the same laws. But on the other hand, it created another split, that between the phenomenal World inhabited
by man and the mathematic, purely abstract World of Science. Koyré’s aim was to show how
this “first world”, the world of human dwelling (personal and historic), apparently irrelevant to modern scientific naturalistic
research, was by no means irrelevant for its very constitution and development: in his works he shows how scientific truth is
always discovered in correlation with specific historical or even purely personal circumstances.
Koyré’s work can be thus seen as a systematic analysis of the constitutive achievements that resulted in scientific knowledge,
with a particular emphasis on historical and specifically human circumstances that create the scientists’ phenomenal world and
serve as the foundation of all scientific constitutions of meaning.
Koyré influenced major European and American philosophers of science, most famously Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. In 1961 he was awarded the
Sarton Medal by the History of Science
Society.
Writings (selection)
- La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme, Paris, J. Vrin, 1929.
- Études galiléennes, Paris: Hermann, 1939
- From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, New York: Harper, 1958
- La Révolution astronomique: Copernic, Kepler, Borelli, Paris: Hermann, 1961
- The Astronomical Revolution Methuen, London 1973
- Introduction à la lecture de Platon, Paris: Gallimard 1994
- Metaphysics & Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution Harvard University Press 1968
- A Documentary History of the Problem of Fall from Kepler to Newton, pp329-395 Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society vol 45 1955
- Newtonian Studies Chapman & Hall 1965
Bibliography
- Jean-François Stoffel, Bibliographie d'Alexandre Koyré, Firenze : L.S. Olschki, 2000.
External links
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