Georges Canguilhem

A reprint of the translation (1978, D. Reidel) of the 1966 French original (Presses Internationales). Explores how the definitions of health and disease are linked throughout history with the requirements of institutional power. Introduction by Michael Foucalt. No subject index. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

The Normal and the Pathological

At the time of his death in 1995, Georges Canguilhem was a highly respected historian of science and medicine, whose engagement with questions of normality, the ideologization of scientific thought, and the conceptual history of biology had marked the thought of philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and Gilles Deleuze. This collection of short, incisive, and highly accessible essays on the major concepts of modern medicine shows Canguilhem at the peak of his use of historical practice for philosophical engagement. In order to elaborate a philosophy of medicine, Canguilhem examines paramount problems such as the definition and uses of health, the decline of the Hippocratic understanding of nature, the experience of disease, the limits of psychology in medicine, myths and realities of therapeutic practices, the difference between cure and healing, the organism's self-regulation, and medical metaphors linking the organism to society. Writings on Medicine is at once an excellent introduction to Canguilhem's work and a forceful, insightful, and accessible engagement with elemental concepts in medicine. The book is certain to leave its imprint on anthropology, history, philosophy, bioethics, and the social studies of medicine.

Writings on Medicine

Cet ouvrage, qui appartient à la décennie la plus brillante de la vie intellectuelle française au cours du siècle dernier, fit événement. Il consacrait de manière définitive la réputation de Georges Canguilhem maître théoricien de l'épistémologie historique, il articulait une lecture aujourd'hui canonique de la pensée bachelardienne et il offrait une série d'études bientôt tenues pour exemplaires. Aux spécialistes il proposait, dans des écrits appelés à devenir des références obligées, une réflexion sur l'objet et les exigences de la pratique de l'histoire des sciences. Il leur soumettait aussi, requises par les progrès alors éclatants de la nouvelle biologie moléculaire, des méditations sur la nature du vivant et sur les ressorts de son activité. Acte intrépide, car s'y trouvaient mis en examen les fondements même de la philosophie biologique qui avait conféré à la pensée de Canguilhem son originalité propre. Ce livre offrait aussi une douzaine d'études accessibles à un public beaucoup plus large, illustrant les audaces, les difficultés et les accomplissements de grandes figures du passé de la science, Galilée, Claude Bernard, Auguste Comte ou Darwin. Aptes, du fait de leur parfaite lisibilité, à servir d'initiation au domaine de l'histoire des sciences et d'introduction à la pensée de leur auteur, ces études pourtant n'ont cessé d'alimenter aussi la réflexion de chercheurs chevronnés tant elles recèlent, sous leur simplicité d'approche, aperçus inattendus et profondeur de pensée. Pensée réflexive, la philosophie de Canguilhem s'affirme toujours militante, souvent polémique même. Plusieurs de ses écrits réunis ici, notamment des additions des années 1970 et 1980, voulues par lui, s'avèrent effectivement de véritables interventions philosophiques qui questionnent l'identité de la psychologie, la responsabilité du chercheur, de l'expérimentateur et, éminemment, les valeurs du médecin. Canguilhem, pour qui la méthode expérimentale elle-même est "une idée pour une éthique", n'attendait pas moins de l'histoire des sciences et de la philosophie. Comme il écrivait à propos de Galilée : le compromis n'est pas une méthode recevable; plutôt une source d'inquiétude.

Études d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences

Gary ed Guting

New readers and non-specialists will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Foucault currently available.

The Cambridge Companion to Foucault

Un esfuerzo por integrar a la especulación filosófica algunos de los métodos y adquisiciones de la medicina, contribuyendo a la renovación de conceptos metodológicos en la historia de la ciencia. Cada ciencia tiene su aspecto, su ritmo y su temporalidad específica. Lo importante es reconocer, a través de la sucesión de las teorías, la persistencia del problema.

Lo normal y lo patológico

Georges Canguilhem is one of France's foremost historians of science. Trained as amedical doctor as well as a philosopher, he combined these practices to demonstrate to philosophersthat there could be no epistemology without concrete study of the actual development of the sciencesand to historians that there could be no worthwhile history of science without a philosophicalunderstanding of the conceptual basis of all knowledge. A Vital Rationalist brings together for thefirst time a selection of Canguilhem's most important writings, including excerpts from previouslyunpublished manuscripts and a critical bibliography by Camille Limoges.Organized around the majorthemes and problems that have preoccupied Canguilhem throughout his intellectual career, thecollection allows readers, whether familiar or unfamiliar with Canguilhem's work, access to a vastarray of conceptual and concrete meditations on epistemology, methodology, science, and history.Canguilhem is a demanding writer, but Delaporte succeeds in marking out the main lines of histhought with unrivaled clarity; readers will come away with a heightened understanding of thecomplex and crucial place he holds in French intellectual history.Georges Canguilhem is ProfessorEmeritus at the Sorbonne and former director of the Institut d'Histoire des Sciences et desTechniques de l'Université de Paris. His works include La Connaissance de la Vie, Ideology andRationality in the History of the Life Sciences, and The Normal and the Pathological. FrançoisDelaporte is a Research Associate at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Medicalein Paris. He is the author of Disease and Civilization and The History of Yellow Fever.

Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem

A Vital Rationalist

As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, François Jacob, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem has exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and French philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology. How do transformations in biology and modern medicine shape conceptions of life? How do philosophical concepts feed into biological ideas and experimental practices, and how are they themselves transformed? How does knowledge undo the experience of life so as to help man remake what life has made without him, in him or outside of him? Knowledge of Life is Canguilhem's effort to explain how the movements of knowledge and life come to rest upon each other. Published at the dawn of the genetic revolution and still pertinent today, the book tackles the history of cell theory, the conceptual moves toward and away from mechanical understandings of the organism, the persistence of vitalism, and the nature of normality in science and its objects.

Georges Canguilhem

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