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. (shrink)

The idea of nature in medical theory and practice -- Diseases -- Health: popular concept and philosophical question -- Is a pedagogy of healing possible? -- The problem of regulation in the organism and in society.

Em 1973, Georges Canguilhem publica, na Encyclopédie Universalis, um extenso verbete histórico do conceito “Vida” na biologia e nas ciências da vida. A seguinte tradução do verbete é baseada na segunda edição, reimpressão publicada em 1989, nas páginas 546-553.

D'ordinaire, pour un philosophe, entreprendre d'écrire une morale, c'est se préparer à mourir dans son lit. Mais Cavaillès, au moment même où il faisait tout ce qu'on peut faire quand on veut mourir au combat, composait une logique. Il a donné ainsi sa morale, sans avoir à la rédiger.

Les philosophes du siècle des Lumières ont conçu le Progrès comme manifestation de la perfectibilité naturelle de l'humanité. Le XIXe siècle a vu se ternir cette image d'avenir sous l'effet de ruptures épistémologiques et de surprises techniques. Conséquences imprévisibles de l'invention et de l'emploi de la machine à vapeur, les principes de dégradation énergétique en physique, les analyses révolutionnaires des rapports d' inégalité socioéconomique dans les sociétés industrielles ont entraîné la dislocation d'une idée qui avait joué le rôle d'un principe (...) de conservation des valeurs. Chez Freud et chez Lévi-Strauss le principe de Carnot est devenu principe de jugement de l'histoire. The philosophers of Enlightenment conceived Progress as evidence of mankind's natural perfectibility. In the 19 th C. this image of the future was tarnished by abrupt epistemological changes and technical surprises. An unforeseen consequence of the invention and use of the steam engine was the breaking up of an idea that had acted as a principle for preserving values, caused by the principles of the dissipation of energy in physics and the revolutionary analyses of the relations of socioeconomic inequality in industrial societies. With Freud and Lévi-Strauss, Carnot's principle became the principle for judging history. (shrink)