The Origins of Alexandre Koyré’s History of Scientific Thought

Abstract

This chapter endeavors to reconstitute the set of conditions in the period between the two world wars that made Alexandre Koyré’s work on the history of science possible and general conditions concerning the intellectual context of the day and more specific ones regarding the Russian born French historian’s intellectual trajectory must be considered.

The first works on the history of science that Alexandre Koyré wrote and published date back to the 1930s. In 1934, he translated into French the text of the first chapters the first book of De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium for which he prepared an introduction (which he was to take up again in his own work, La révolution astronomique). It was that translation work that aroused his interest in Galileo. In the following year, he published À l’aurore de la science moderne: la jeunesse de Galilée, followed by his Études Galiléennes. Finally, in 1936, when he was a visiting professor in Cairo, he presented his Trois leçons sur Descartes which were published in the Egyptian capital 2 years later in a bilingual edition and reedited in 1944 in Paris and New York.

The first decades of the twentieth century in France and in Europe corresponded to a considerable extent with the moment of the emergence and promotion of the history of science and the attempts to institutionalize it. Specialized journals (Archeion, Thalès), study centers, international associations, and university chairs dedicated to the discipline were all created during that period. While since the nineteenth century scientists and philosophers had primarily concerned themselves with the study of science’s past from the perspective of a tradition that we can trace back to the Enlightenment movement, from the interwar period on, academic historians sought to appropriate the study to themselves. That involved not only those that based themselves on a traditional conception of history like Aldo Mieli (who was a qualified scientist) but also those who were in the vanguard of the discipline such as the founders of the Annales (Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre). Koyré’s work belongs to that context and its importance lies in its definition of an object for the history of science that was distinct from that of the philosophers and the scientists.

Nevertheless, he actually came to the history of science through philosophy. Having qualified as a philosopher, in the 1920s, he basically studied religious thought (Descartes, Saint Anselm) and mystic thought (Jacob Boehme). That was the path that led him to the history of science. In his Doctorat d’Etat thesis on the history of German mysticism, he understood that Boehme’s own Weltanschauung could only be entirely comprehensible if it were related to the radical transformation of the representation of the world that was implicit in the work of Copernicus. Just as with the past of other forms of thought, the study of the past of science, to Koyré, was fundamental insofar as it was a question of reconstructing the history of different Weltanschauungen, a term that he translated as “conceptions of the world.” During that same decade of the 1920s, he was strongly attached to the philosophy of science of Émile Meyerson. Every week, he and a group of young philosophers met with Meyerson to discuss the great issues that were agitating the science of those days.

That reminds us that the period was understood by its contemporaries to be one of profound crisis. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the new scientific theories (relativity and quantum physics) had been destroying the traditional representation of the world basically founded on Newtonian mechanics. Discussions addressed not only “the crisis of science” but also the crisis of Western civilization itself (Paul Valéry). The three studies mentioned above that Koyré wrote in the 1930s were strictly dialoguing with that context of “crisis.” The text on Descartes, above all, explicitly drew a parallel between the “crisis” experienced by the author of Discours de la Méthode in the seventeenth century with that in the interwar period. In his text, Koyré presented an explanation and a solution for the “crisis.” More importantly, he translated the concept of “crisis” as the concept of “revolution” and presented the past of science as having been constituted by a series of “revolutions” and radical transformations.