Abstract
In the introduction to the Normal and the Pathological, Canguilhem’s doctoral dissertation in medicine, defended in 1943, he claimed, “philosophy is a reflection for which all unknown material [matière étrangère] is good.” In this case the “unknown material” was precisely medicine; “a technique or art at the crossroads of several sciences” which was supposed to provide “an introduction to concrete human problems.” Canguilhem had started studying medicine six years before, while he was a high-school professor in Toulouse. At the time he was distancing himself from the philosophical framework that had marked his studies and writings during the previous decade. This framework implied an anti-vitalist, Kantian and Cartesian approach to man, strongly influenced by his mentor Emile Chartier, also known as Alain. In this chapter, I try to provide concrete explanations concerning his decision to study medicine. I will not rely on those proposed by the existent scholarship, which frequently relate his decision to his interest in technology and technique. On the contrary, by examining unpublished material, such as a series of lectures given between 1933 and 1935, I claim that the motivation of his turn has to be related to the readings of works in psychology and ethology undertaken during this period.
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Notes
- 1.
See Limoges, “Introduction,” in Canguilhem (2015), 15.
- 2.
See Canguilhem, 2011, 221–226.
- 3.
See Roth, 2013.
- 4.
Brunschvicg was always praised by Canguilhem. For instance, in the 1988 conference “La problématique de la philosophie de l’histoire au début des années 30” [“The problem of philosophy of history at the beginning of the 1930s”] Canguilhem (2018, 1123–1141) considers Brunschvicg as the academic philosopher who, during the 1920s, was the most respected by him and his school fellows.
- 5.
For the history of the oppositional couple concrete/abstract, see Bianco, 2023a.
- 6.
See Fabiani, 2010.
- 7.
The term “human sciences” [sciences de l’homme] become common only at the end of the 1940s, as a translation of Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911) Geisteswissenschaften.
- 8.
See Bianco, 2024.
- 9.
- 10.
See Bianco, 2024.
- 11.
- 12.
For this, see Braunstein, 1999.
- 13.
Canguilhem would go on to criticize this approach in his Ph.D. dissertation on the notion of reflex (Canguilhem, 1994).
- 14.
See Canguilhem (1929–1932, 25): “Generally speaking, any vitalist doctrine that maintains the originality of life and instinct does so only by negations, by exposing the difficulties and limits that any positive method of explanation encounters. But, in addition to the fact that faculties and limits are necessarily relative facts which must not be transformed into principles, one can consider unacceptable an attitude which amounts to attributing as a proper character to the object of one’s research the very fact that nothing can be said about it”.
- 15.
For this see Bianco and Wolfe (2023b).
- 16.
for this, see Bianco and Wolfe (2023b).
- 17.
The agrégation is the selective test a graduate in philosophy had to pass if she wanted to teach this discipline in secondary and higher education.
- 18.
For this, see Bianco, 2019.
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Bianco, G. (2023). “Unknown Material”? Georges Canguilhem, French Philosophy and Medicine. In: Bianco, G., Wolfe, C.T., Van de Vijver, G. (eds) Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20529-3_5
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