Many historical studies tend to underline two central Kantian themes frequently emerging in Georges Canguilhem’s works: (1) a conception of activity, primarily stemming from the Critique of Pure Reason, as a mental and abstract synthesis of judgment; and (2) a notion of organism, inspired by the Critique of Judgment, as an integral totality of parts. Canguilhem was particularly faithful to the first theme from the 1920s to the first half of the 1930s, whereas the second theme became important in the (...) early 1940s. With this article, I will attempt to show that a third important theme of technique arose in the second half of the 30s also in the wake of Kant’s philosophy, especially Sect. 43 of the Critique of Judgment. This section, which states that technical ability is distinguished from a theoretical faculty, led Canguilhem to a more concrete and practical conception of activity. I will then suggest that it was by considering technique that the concept of normativity, which characterizes Georges Canguilhem’s philosophy of life, also took shape. (shrink)

In the 1950s, George Canguilhem became known in France as a vocal exponent of the philosophy of the concept, an approach to epistemology that treated science as the highest expression of human rationality and scientific concepts as the necessary preconditions for the manifestation of scientific truth. Philosophers of the concept, Canguilhem included, viewed concepts as the key to the study of science; and science, in turn, as the key to a substantive theory of reason. This article explains what concepts are (...) for Canguilhem, how they are extracted from the history of the sciences, and why they continue to matter for contemporary debates in the History and Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

The article explores theoretical convergences between the work of Georges Canguilhem and Lucien Febvre on the theme of science and technique. In comparing the scholarship of both authors from the 1920s through 1940s, we endeavor to show that their critique of mechanistic determinism was rooted in the concept of the genres of life and its creative interaction with the environment.

Auguste Comte’s classical status in sociology and social theory is routinely taken to mean outdated. Coupled with this perception, there has been a pervasive tendency within contemporary discourse to presume a positivism that is largely rationalistic or scientistic and therefore critically and analytically useless. This paper explores how some of Comte’s lesser acknowledged perspectives on science, history, ‘progress’ and what it is to be human may yet compel us to reexamine our ideas about the kind of positivism we think we (...) have inherited and therefore need to renounce. I focus my reading of Comte through the lens of genealogies of thought not normally associated with his work, for instance, science and technology studies (STS) and posthumanist social theory. (shrink)