Gaston Bachelard was one of the most significant modern thinkers-dreamers of France.
Bachelard
GASTON BACHELARD
Brief biography
Gaston Bachelard was one of the most significant modern thinkers-dreamers of France. From 1929 to 1962 he wrote twenty-three books, both scientific works, and, beginning in the 1950's, poetic works as the analysis of the imagination of matter. His teaching posts included the College de Barsur-Aube, the University of Dijon, and from 1940 to 1962 the chair of history and philosophy of science at the Sorbonne. One of the amphitheatres of the Sorbonne is called 'l'amphi Gaston Bachelard,' an honor Bachelard shared with Descartes and Richelieu. He received the
Grand Prix National des Lettres in 1961 -one of only three philosophers ever to have achieved this honor.
His twenty-three books included twelve on the philosophy of modern science, two on time and consciousness, nine on poetic imagination, and a tenth book on poetry left unfinished when he died. His scientific writings outline the 'new scientific mind' which Bachelard dated from 1905, and Einstein's special theory of relativity. Mary McAllester Jones wrote, "His twelve books on modern science examine its impact on philosophy, showing how science has undermined our familiar epistemologies, so that neither rationalism nor realism, idealism nor materialism will serve as philosophies adequate to twentieth-century science. The year 1905 saw the break not just with all previous science, but with all previous philosophy. Bachelard's notion of the 'epistemological break' is probably what is best known and most widely quoted from his work." (
Gaston Bachelard: Subversive Humanist, Mary McAllester Jones, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, p.5) In 1940, in his book
The Philosophy of No, Bachelard wrote about the work of Alfred Korzybski (see above). He wrote, "The psychological and even physiological conditions of a non-Aristotelian logic have been resolutely faced in the great work of Count Alfred Korzybski,
Science and Sanity, An introduction to non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (New York, 1933). This volume of almost 800 pages is the prelude to an encyclopedia whose plan aims at the reform, in a non-Aristotelian direction of a great many sciences."
In that same book, Bachelard first presented his notion of an 'epistemological profile'. It was a scale of philosophical doctrines from realism to surrationalism. J.S. Bois (see above) later adapted Bachelard's profile and made it a scale of the evolution of methods of evaluation, and how they operate in the life of an individual, or a culture. Bois did not limit its use to philosophical thinking. In his later works he turned from the scientific concept to the poetic image in such books as
The Psychoanalysis of Fire,
The Poetics of Reverie,
The Poetics of Space,
Air and Dreams, and
Water and Dreams. These books are works of great beauty and wisdom.
English Translations of Gaston Bachelard's Work:
Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement. Translated by Edith and Frederick Farrell.
Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications, 1988.
Earth and Reveries of Will. Translated by Liliana Zancu. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications, forthcoming.
The Flame of a Candle. Translated by Joni Caldwell. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications, 1988.
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire. Translated by Kenneth Haltman. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications, 1990.
Lautreamont. Translated by Robert Dupree. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications, 1984.
The New Scientific Spirit. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.
On Poetic Imagination and Reverie: Selections from the Works of Gaston Bachelard. Translated with an introduction by Colette Gaudin. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1971.
The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind. Translated by G. C. Waterston. New York: Orion Press, 1968.
The Poetics of Reverie. Translated by Daniel Russell. New York: Orion Press, 1969. With the title The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. New York: Orion Press, 1964; Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Translated by Alan C. M. Ross. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.
The Right to Dream. Translated by J. A. Underwood. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications, 1988.
Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Translated by Edith Farrell. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications, 1983.
The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications books can be seen at: The Dallas Institute Publications.
