Canguilhem,Georges

Abstract

Georges Canguilhem was a major French philosopher and one of the three main contributors to the French tradition of “historical epistemology” established by Gaston Bachelard and developed, under Canguilhem's direct influence, by Michel Foucault. It is often said, following Foucault, that Canguilhem's oeuvre shaped all the major intellectual movements emerging in France in the 1960s, from Althusserian Marxism to Lacanian psychoanalysis and Bourdieusian critical sociology. Developed against what Bachelard called “the philosophy of philosophers,” historical epistemology is grounded in a non‐positivist and non‐idealist history of the sciences (in the plural) that rejects the notion of a universal and uniform science, and rather focuses on the specific historical trajectories, genealogies, and evolutions of scientific knowledges, concepts, and practices that pertain to specific scientific disciplines.