Posts com a Tag ‘ALMEIDA Fábio Ferreira de (Org d)’

Georges Canguilhem was born under the sign of Gemini on July 4, 1904 in Castelnaudary in Southwest France. A student at the Lycée Henri IV where he became a fervent disciple of Alain, he later enrolled at the École Normale Superieure in 1924 and in 1927 obtained an ‘aggregation’-type degree in philosophy. In the early 1930s, his enthusiasm for Alainism began to wane and became profoundly imbued with a spirit of pacifism that proved to be increasingly incompatible with the inter-world wars context. Appointed to the post of professor of philosophy, first in Béziers and later in Toulouse, he began to study medicine. The rupture with the figure that had been the great philosophical inspiration of his youth became definitive and with France under occupation by the German troops he enrolled in the faculty of medicine while at the same time taking an active part in the French Resistance movement which he joined alongside Jean Cavaillès. From his new academic qualification in medicine resulted a thesis entitled Essay on some problems concerning the normal and the pathological published in 1943. The introduction of that work became famous for a passage in which he declared that what philosophy expected from medicine was “an introduction to the concrete human problems”. He became a National Inspector of Education in 1948 and, in 1955, a professor at the Sorbonne where he was the successor of Gaston Bachelard as director of the History of Science Institute, a post he held up until 1971. Georges Canguilhem’s vast and powerful work unfolded in a markedly discreet way and yet even so, as Michel Foucault insists, one will understand little or nothing of the French intellectual environment up to the 1970’s if one ignores it and it could even be said that it has still not stopped diffusing its influence. One concept taken from the work of Gaston Bachelard under whose supervision he who had developed the Thesis on the Formation of the Reflex Concept in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, also defines Canguilhem’s philosophy. It was the concept of engagement whereby the spirit seeks whatever is typically human in experience; that which drives and affects the reflex. That, and no other, is the reason why philosophy must fundamentally interest itself in that which is strange to it (see Canguilhem 2009, 7). That engagement envisages an integrality which, returning from the concrete gets back to the idea; one which in the end re-establishes whatever there is of the spiritual in every action, in every practice. That was the standpoint which the philosopher never tired of praising and emphasizing in his life and in the works of individuals like Jean Cavaillés. Canguilhem died in September 1995. Leia Mais