Talk:Gaston Bachelard
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I will get a username soon....This article seems to be a little more than a stub at the moment although it is a good start. Considering his phenomenology and the epistemological arguments he made in greater detail would be helpful for English-speaking readers who do not know French and perhaps are not current on the difference between an empirical approach to knowledge and the Cartesian. And does the article not seem to reduce him to "mere" Cartesianism (the direct grasping of truth through Reason (which I am perhaps mistaking for Cartesianism? I'm on a long research trip now and not near a library)), while his phenomenology emphasized the _mediation_ of ideation in all scientific enquiry?--in _The Psychoanalysis of Fire_, for example, he makes the compelling argument that scientific endeavor, while progressively deconstructing the earlier substantive notion of "fire" into "oxidation" has always been accompanied by poetic ideation (such as spontaneous combustion) for scientists themselves. He counters the notion of a ideation- or culture-free science which can and has been taken in many directions by other scholars, although not usually acknowledging his rather early move here. It should be noted that he was making these arguments in the 50s, well before most science studies people believe their critical field to have begun.
He was also involved with arguments against Bergsonism (still generally unknown in the English-speaking world although formerly deeply influential in France) and moved towards seeing the notion of time expressed in Bergsonism (of the deep continuity of experience versus marked "time") as a metaphor which did not fit with either phenomenological or empirical experience. In Dialectique de l´instant (I know I'm writing down the name wrong here) he pushes the notion of the negative and of complete non-existence (not even traces or "radiations" or the thought of nothing) as an absolute pre-condition of any existence or presence, be it of time, space or matter. There is a resonance with Madhyamika Buddhist philosophy here although Bachelard was most likely pushing hard the Hegelian negation. All of these themes could be put into the article, as well as his influence on Bourdieu (who has acknowledged him somewhere), Derrida and other French thinkers.
[edit] cleanup tag
This article is rather sloppy. Take for example: "He argued against positivism andNewton had been left behind by the Theory of Relativity." I have no idea what this means, except that the article is in serious need of attention. beekman 14:12, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
Citation needed! This paraphrase of Bachelard makes no sense to me: "To understand the way it works, one has to pass by the detour of scientific knowledge." How do you pass by the detour? Surely you take the detour, or you don't. If you don't take a detour, why mention it? Presumably, Bachelard means that you need to understand how scientific knowledge developed to understand the way a light bulb works.
== He "proned" a non-Cartesian epistemology? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.77.219.253 (talk) 10:13, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
