Bachelard Gaston (1884–1962), French philosopher of science and literary analyst. His philosophy of science (developed, e.g., in The New Scientific Spirit, 1934, and Rational Materialism, 1953) began from reflections on the relativistic and quantum revolutions in twentieth-century physics. Bachelard viewed science as developing through a series of discontinuous changes (epistemological breaks). Such breaks overcome epistemological obstacles: methodological and conceptual features of commonsense or outdated science that block the path of inquiry. Bachelard’s emphasis on the discontinuity of scientific change strikingly anticipated Thomas Kuhn’s focus, many years later, on revolutionary paradigm change. However, unlike Kuhn, Bachelard held to a strong notion of scientific progress across revolutionary discontinuities. Although each scientific framework rejects its predecessors as fundamentally erroneous, earlier frameworks may embody permanent achievements that will be preserved as special cases within subsequent frameworks. (Newton’s laws of motion, e.g., are special limit-cases of relativity theory.) Bachelard based his philosophy of science on a ‘non-Cartesian epistemology’ that rejects Descartes’s claim that knowledge must be founded on incorrigible intuitions of first truths. All knowledge claims are subject to revision in the light of further evidence. Similarly, he rejected a naive realism that defines reality in terms of givens of ordinary sense experience and ignores the ontological constructions of scientific concepts and instrumentation. He maintained, however, that denying this sort of realism did not entail accepting idealism, which makes only the mental ultimately real. Instead he argued for an ‘applied rationalism,’ which recognizes the active role of reason in constituting objects of knowledge while admitting that any constituting act of reason must be directed toward an antecedently given object.
Although Bachelard denied the objective reality of the perceptual and imaginative worlds, he emphasized their subjective and poetic significance. Complementing his writings on science are a series of books on imagination and poetic imagery (e.g., The Psychoanalysis of Fire, 1938; The Poetics of Space, 1957) which subtly unpack the meaning of archetypal (in Jung’s sense) images. He put forward a ‘law of the four elements,’ according to which all images can be related to the earth, air, fire, and water posited by Empedocles as the fundamental forms of matter.
Together with Georges Canguilhem, his successor at the Sorbonne, Bachelard had an immense impact on several generations of French students of philosophy. He and Canguilhem offered an important alternative to the more fashionable and widely known phenomenology and existentialism and were major influences on (among others) Althusser and Foucault.
See also ALTHUSSER, FOUCAULT, FRANK- FURT SCHOO. G.G.
