Jacques Bouveresse (1940–2021). How to Remain Rationalist in a Postmodern World?

Abstract

With the passing of Jacques Bouveresse on May 9th, 2021, France has lost one of its most original philosophers. Although he was little known to the general public because he preferred to evade the figure of the militant intellectual, he nevertheless exerted a determining influence on a whole generation of French philosophers, not through debates on TV sets or in the newspapers but in the classrooms at the University, in Paris and Geneva, and later in his career at the prestigious Collège-de-France, as well as in colloquia and seminars or in discussions with his students and colleagues. In the 1980s, he was the head of the Institut d’histoire des sciences et des techniques, a position Abel Rey, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Suzanne Bachelard had held before him. His most abundant writings are devoted to a wide range of authors, from Wittgenstein and Nietzsche to Lichtenberg and Popper, and to a wide range of topics, from the philosophy of science to music and from the philosophy of perception to literature. His style of thought and his approach to philosophical problems, often based on quotations he liked to elaborate on, profoundly influenced, for more than fifty years, the students who followed his courses, many of whom became professors themselves. In the country of Bergson and Sartre, he was among the very few philosophers who introduced the thought of Frege, Russell, Carnap and Dummett, great figures who were largely unknown to the French philosophical community in the early 1980s.