Alexandre Koyré (; ; born Alexandr Vladimirovich (or Volfovich) Koyra; 29 August 1892 – 28 April 1964), also
anglicized as Alexander Koyre, was a French philosopher of
Russian origin who wrote on the
history
History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the Human history, human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened. Some t ...
and
philosophy of science
Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. Amongst its central questions are the difference between science and non-science, the reliability of scientific theories, ...
.
Life
Koyré was born in the city of
Taganrog, Russia, on 29 August 1892 into a
Jewish
Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...
family. His original name was Alexandr Vladimirovich (or Volfovich) Koyra. In Imperial Russia he studied in
Tiflis
Tbilisi ( ; ka, თბილისი, ), in some languages still known by its pre-1936 name Tiflis ( ), ( ka, ტფილისი, tr ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Georgia (country), largest city of Georgia ( ...
,
Rostov-on-Don and
Odessa
ODESSA is an American codename (from the German language, German: ''Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen'', meaning: Organization of Former SS Members) coined in 1946 to cover Ratlines (World War II aftermath), Nazi underground escape-pl ...
, before pursuing his studies abroad.
At
Göttingen
Göttingen (, ; ; ) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. According to the 2022 German census, t ...
, Germany (1908–1911) he studied under
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (; 8 April 1859 – 27 April 1938) was an Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of Phenomenology (philosophy), phenomenology.
In his early work, he elaborated critiques of histori ...
and
David Hilbert. Husserl did not approve of Koyré's dissertation, whereupon Koyré left for
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
, to study at the
Collège de France and the
Sorbonne during the period 1912–1913 under
Bergson,
Brunschvicg,
Lalande,
Delbos and
Picavet. Following Husserl's ''
Cartesian Meditations'', a series of lectures given in Paris in February 1929 (and one of the more important of Husserl's later works), Koyré met again with Husserl repeatedly.
In 1914 he joined the
French Foreign Legion as soon as the war broke out. In 1916 he volunteered for a Russian regiment fighting on the Russian front, following a cooperation agreement between the French and Russian governments.
In 1922 Koyré completed his two
State doctorate (then called ''
Doctorat ès lettres'') theses.
[Alan D. Schrift (2006), ''Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes And Thinkers'', Blackwell Publishing, p. 146.] The same year he started teaching in Paris at the
École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), and became a colleague of
Alexandre Kojève, who eventually replaced him as lecturer on
Hegel. In 1931, he helped found the philosophical journal ''Recherches philosophiques''. In 1932 the EPHE created a Department of History of Religious Thought in Modern Europe for him to chair. He retained this position until his death.
During the years 1932–34, 1936–38, and 1940–41, 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
Abdel Rahman Badawi (1917–2002) who is considered the first systematic modern Arab philosopher. Koyré later joined the Egyptian National Committee of the Free French.
During World War II, Koyré lived in New York City, and taught at the
New School for Social Research
The New School for Social Research (NSSR), previously known as The University in Exile and The New School University, is a graduate-level educational division of The New School in New York City, United States. NSSR enrolls more than 1,000 stud ...
, including a course on Plato's ''
Theaetetus'', together with
Leo Strauss and
Kurt Riezler, in the fall of 1944. After World War II, he was a frequent visitor to the United States, spending half a year at the
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...
at
Princeton each year from 1955 to 1962 and also teaching as a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, and Johns Hopkins. His lectures at Johns Hopkins would form the nucleus of one of his best known publications, ''From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe'' (1957).
He died in Paris on 28 April 1964.
Work
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
The history of religion is the written record of human religious feelings, thoughts, and ideas. This period of religious history begins with the invention of writing about 5,200 years ago (3200 BCE). The Prehistoric religion, prehistory of reli ...
and
metaphysics
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the basic structure of reality. It is traditionally seen as the study of mind-independent features of the world, but some theorists view it as an inquiry into the conceptual framework of ...
.
Koyré focused on
Galileo
Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei ( , , ) or mononymously as Galileo, was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a poly ...
,
Plato
Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...
and
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton () was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author. Newton was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment that followed ...
. His most famous work is ''From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe'', a series of lectures given at
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University (often abbreviated as Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1876 based on the European research institution model, J ...
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 prove natural or fundamental truths through experiments. He argued these experiments were based on complicated premises, and that they tended to prove the outlook behind these premises, rather than any real truth. He repeatedly critiqued Galileo's experiments, claiming that some of them could not have taken place, and disputed the results Galileo claimed and which modern historians of science had hitherto accepted.
According to Koyré, it was not the experimental or
empirical
Empirical evidence is evidence obtained through sense experience or experimental procedure. It is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law.
There is no general agreement on how t ...
nature of
Galileo
Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei ( , , ) or mononymously as Galileo, was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a poly ...
's and
Newton's discoveries that carried the
Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution was a series of events that marked the emergence of History of science, modern science during the early modern period, when developments in History of mathematics#Mathematics during the Scientific Revolution, mathemati ...
of the 16th and 17th centuries, but a shift in perspective, a change in theoretical outlook toward the world. Koyré strongly criticised what he called the "
positivist" notion that science should only discover given phenomena, the relations between them and certain laws that would help to describe or predict them. To Koyré science was, at its heart, theory: an aspiration to know the truth of the world, of uncovering the essential structures from which phenomena, and the basic laws that relate them, spring.
Koyré was also interested in the correlations between scientific discoveries and religious or philosophical world views. Like
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (; 8 April 1859 – 27 April 1938) was an Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of Phenomenology (philosophy), phenomenology.
In his early work, he elaborated critiques of histori ...
in his later studies, Koyré claimed that modern science had succeeded in overcoming the split, inherent in traditional
Aristotelian science, between Earth and Space, since these were now both seen as governed by the same laws. On the other hand, another split had now been created, between the phenomenal world inhabited by man and the purely abstract,
mathematical
Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...
world of science. Koyré aimed to show how this "first world", the world of human dwelling (personal and historical), apparently irrelevant to modern naturalistic research, was by no means irrelevant for the very constitution and development of this research. Koyré consistently sought to show how scientific truth is always discovered in correlation with specific historical, even purely personal, circumstances.
Koyré's work can be seen as a systematic analysis of the constitutive achievements that resulted in scientific knowledge, but with particular emphasis on the historical, and specifically human, circumstances that generate the scientists' phenomenal world and serve as foundation for all scientific constitutions of meaning.
Koyré influenced major European and American philosophers of science, most significantly
I. Bernard Cohen,
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American History and philosophy of science, historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' was influential in both academic and ...
,
Imre Lakatos,
Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault ( , ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French History of ideas, historian of ideas and Philosophy, philosopher who was also an author, Literary criticism, literary critic, Activism, political activist, and teacher. Fo ...
and
Paul Feyerabend.
Criticism
In the course of his studies of Galileo, Koyré famously claimed that the experiments with weights falling and rolling on inclined planes that Galileo described in his writings probably had not been carried out in practice, but were instead
thought experiment
A thought experiment is an imaginary scenario that is meant to elucidate or test an argument or theory. It is often an experiment that would be hard, impossible, or unethical to actually perform. It can also be an abstract hypothetical that is ...
s intended to illustrate his deductions. Koyré argued that the precision of the results reported by Galileo was not possible with the technology available to him and quoted the contemporary judgement of
Marin Mersenne, who had questioned the feasibility of reproducing Galileo's results. Furthermore, according to Koyré, Galileo's science was largely a product of his
Platonist philosophy and did not really derive from experimental observations.
Koyré's conclusions were first challenged in 1961 by Thomas B. Settle, who as a graduate student at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...
succeeded in reproducing Galileo's experiments with inclined planes using the methods and technologies described in Galileo's writing.
Later,
Stillman Drake and others worked through Galileo's notes and demonstrated that Galileo was a careful experimentalist whose observations did play a pivotal role in the development of his scientific system that he later claimed in his published work. Koyré has been further criticised for his claim about Galileo's Platonism, which he saw as a synonym with mathematics and mathematization of nature. As the Italian scholar
Lodovico Geymonat has argued, in fact, Platonism as a tradition does not helpfully illuminate the development of Galileo's mathematical studies which are mostly concerned with applied mathematics, engineering and mechanics fields that neither Plato nor Platonist authors were much interested in.
Honours
* General Secretary and Vice President, Institut International de Philosophie
* Member,
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...
*
Sarton Medal,
History of Science Society
*
CNRS Silver Medal,
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe.
In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...
Writings (selection)
* ''La Philosophie de
Jacob Boehme'', Paris, J. Vrin, 1929.
* ''Études galiléennes'', Paris: Hermann, 1939
* “The Political Function of the Modern Lie” (1945) ''The Contemporary Jewish Record'' 8(1) pp. 290–300; reprinted in ''
October'' vol. 160 (spring 2017),
* ''From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe'', Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957
* ''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" (1955) ''Transactions of the American Philosophical Society'', 45, pp. 329–395
* ''Newtonian Studies'', Chapman & Hall, 1965
Notes
References
Sources
* Jean-François Stoffel, ''Bibliographie d'Alexandre Koyré'', Firenze : L.S. Olschki, 2000.
* Marlon Salomon. "Alexandre Koyré, historiador do pensamento". Goiânia: Almeida & Clément, Brazil, 2010.
External links
Alexandre Koyré's Online Archives Project(papers, manuscripts, notes, etc.) established by Center Alexandre- KOYRE/CRHST in partnership wit
CN2SV CNRS)
Mailing list about Alexandre Koyré's archives: A mailing list about A. Koyré archives
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.
The Alexandre Koyre Prizeat the
International Academy of the History of Science.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Koyre, Alexandre
1892 births
1964 deaths
Writers from Taganrog
People from Don Host Oblast
Russian Jews
Historians of science
French Jews
Jewish philosophers
Scientific Revolution
French philosophers of science
University of Paris alumni
Soldiers of the French Foreign Legion
20th-century French historians
20th-century French philosophers
20th-century Russian writers
French male writers
Newton scholars
Phenomenologists
French epistemologists