Alexandre Koyré

Infobox Philosopher
region = Western Philosophy
era = 20th-century philosophy
color = #B0C4DE


name = Alexandre Koyre
birth = 1892
death = 1964
school_tradition = Phenomenology Historical epistemology
main_interests = History of science History of religion
notable_ideas =
influences = E.A. Burtt
influenced = Thomas Kuhn

Alexandre Koyré (August 29, 1892, Taganrog – April 28, 1964, Paris), sometimes anglicised as Alexander Koiré [For example: Giuseppe Candela, "An Overview of the Cosmology, Religion and Philosophical Universe of Giordano Bruno", "Italica", Vol. 75, No. 3. (Autumn, 1998), pp. 348-364; p. 349.] , was a French philosopher of Russian origin who wrote on history and the philosophy of science.

Life

Koyré was born in the city of Taganrog on 29 August 1892 into a Jewish family. In Russia he studied in Tiflis and Odessa, before pursuing his studies abroad.

In Göttingen, Germany (1908-1911) he studied under Edmund Husserl and David Hilbert. Husserl did not approve of Koyré's dissertation, whereupon Koyré left for Paris, to study from 1912 under Bergson, Brunschvig, Lalande, Delbos and Picavet. After Husserl's "Cartesian Meditations", a series of lectures given in Paris and one of the more important of Husserl's later works, Koyré met with him repeatedly and influenced his understanding of Galileo.

In 1914 he joined the Foreign Legion in France as soon as the war broke out, and in 1916 volunteered in a Russian regiment fighting on the Russian front, following a cooperation agreement between the French and Russian governments.

From 1922 Koyré taught in Paris at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), and became a colleague of Alexandre Kojève, who eventually replaced him as lecturer on Hegel. In 1932 the EPHE created a Department of History of Religious Thought in Modern Europe for him to chair. During the years 1932-1934, 1936-1938, 1940-1941 Koyré taught in Fuad University (later Cairo university) where, along with André Lalande and others, he introduced the study of modern philosophy to Egyptian academia. His most important student in Cairo was Abd al-Rahman al-Badawi (1917-2002) who is regarded the first systematic modern Arab philosopher. Koyré later joined the Egyptian National Committee of the Free French and leaves for the United States to teach as visiting professor at the New School for Social Research of New York. From then his career will mostly span over EPHE and the USA (University Johns Hopkins) His conferences at this college will form the nucleus of one of his best known publications "From the closed world to the infinite universe" (1957). He became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton in 1956. He died in Paris on 28 April 1964.

Though best known as a philosopher of science, Koyré started out as a historian of religion. Much of his originality for the period rests on his ability to ground his studies of modern science on the history of religion and metaphysics.

Koyré focused on Galileo, Plato, and Isaac Newton. His most famous work is "From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe", a series of lectures given at The Johns Hopkins University in 1959 on the rise of early modern science and the change of scientists' perception of the world during the period from Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno through Newton. Though the book has been widely heralded, it was a summation of Koyré's perspective rather than an original new work.

Koyré was suspicious of scientists' claims to be proving natural or fundamental truths through their experiments. He argued these experiments were based on complicated premises, and that they tended to prove the outlook of these premises, rather than any real truth. He repeatedly criticized Galileo's experiments, claiming that some of these experiments could not have taken place and brought into question the results Galileo claimed and modern historians of science had heretofore accepted.

According to Koyré, it was not the experimental or empirical nature of Galileo's and Newton's discoveries that made the "Scientific Revolution" of the 17th Century, but a shift in perspective, a change in the theoretical outlook on the World. Koyré strongly criticized what he called the “positivist” notion that science should only discover given phenomena, relations between them and establish certain laws that help describing, or better, predicting them. For Koyré science was primary Theory: the aspiration of knowing the truth of the World, of unfolding the essential structures from which phenomena and the basic laws relating them spring.

Koyré was also interested in the correlations between scientific discoveries and religious and philosophic worldviews. Not dissimilarly from Husserl’s later studies, Koyré claimed that the modern sciences managed to overcome the split inherent to Aristotelian science between the Earth and the Space, since they were now both seen as governed by the same laws. But on the other hand, it created another split, that between the phenomenal World inhabited by man and the mathematic, purely abstract World of Science. Koyré’s aim was to show how this “first world”, the world of human dwelling (personal and historic), apparently irrelevant to modern scientific naturalistic research, was by no means irrelevant for its very constitution and development: in his works he shows how scientific truth is always discovered in correlation with specific historical or even purely personal circumstances.

Koyré’s work can be thus seen as a systematic analysis of the constitutive achievements that resulted in scientific knowledge, with a particular emphasis on historical and specifically human circumstances that create the scientists’ phenomenal world and serve as the foundation of all scientific constitutions of meaning.

Koyré influenced major European and American philosophers of science, most famously Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. In 1961 he was awarded the Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society.

Writings (selection)

*"La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme", Paris, J. Vrin, 1929.
*"Études galiléennes", Paris: Hermann, 1939
*"From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe", New York: Harper, 1958
*"La Révolution astronomique: Copernic, Kepler, Borelli", Paris: Hermann, 1961
* "The Astronomical Revolution" Methuen, London 1973
*"Introduction à la lecture de Platon", Paris: Gallimard 1994
* "Metaphysics & Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution" Harvard University Press 1968
* "A Documentary History of the Problem of Fall from Kepler to Newton", pp329-395 Transactions of the American Philosophical Society vol 45 1955
* "Newtonian Studies" Chapman & Hall 1965

Bibliography

*Jean-François Stoffel, "Bibliographie d'Alexandre Koyré", Firenze : L.S. Olschki, 2000. ( [http://www.koyre.cnrs.fr/fondskoyre/ you can download this bibliography on the Alexandre Koyré's Archives Project] )

References

External links

* [http://www.koyre.cnrs.fr/fondskoyre/ Alexandre Koyré's Online Archives Project] (papers, manuscripts, notes, etc.) realised by Center Alexandre- KOYRE/CRHST in partnership with [http://www.cn2sv.fr CN2SV] /CNRS)
* [http://www.services.cnrs.fr/wws/info/fondskoyre Mailing list about Alexandre Koyré's archives] : A mailing list about A. Koyré archives
* [http://www.koyre.cnrs.fr/ Center Alexandre-KOYRE/CRHST] , history of science and technologies center (Paris, France) supported by CNRS, EHESS, Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie and Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle.