Georges Canguilhem

Georges Canguilhem (Castelnaudary 1904-1995) was a French philosopher and member of the Academie_Francaise who specialized in the philosophy of science. He entered the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1924 as part of a class that included Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, and Paul Nizan. He agregated in 1927 and then taught throughout France while also studying medecine. He took up a post at the University of Strausbourg in 1941, and received his doctorate in 1943, in the middle of WWII. Canguihelm became active in the resistance, and served after the war as the inspecter general of national education. By 1948 he was the French equivalent of department chair in philosophy at Strausbourg as well. Seven years later, he was named a professor at the Sorbonne and succeeded Gaston Bachelard as the director of the Institue for the History of Science, a post he occupied until 1971.

More than just a great theoretician, Canguilhem was one of the few philosophers of the twentieth century to develop an approach that was shaped by a medical education. He helped define a method of studying the history of science which was practical and rigorous. His work focus on the one hand on the concepts of 'normal' and 'pathological' and, on the other, a critical history of the formation of concepts such as 'reflex' in the history of science. Canguilhem was also a mentor to several French scholars, most notably Michel Foucault.

After years of neglect, the past decade has seen a great deal of Canguilhem's writings translated into English. Among them are a collection of essays entitled A Vital Rationalist and his most celebrated work, The Normal and the Pathological.