Alexandre Koyre 1892 – 1964
Alexandre Koyre was a Russian-born French historian and philosopher of science whose work helped to inaugurate the modern internalist history of science. After studies under Husserl at Gottingen and Bergson at Paris, he produced detailed studies of Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton in which the scientific revolution is presented as a transformation in the very structure of thought rather than as the accumulation of new observations. His From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe is a celebrated short history of the cosmological revolution. He shaped Thomas Kuhn and the wider history-and-philosophy-of-science tradition.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Russian-French
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Alexandre Koyre:
“Galileo's revolution was a revolution of the mind, not of the eye.”
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Attributed to Alexandre Koyre:
“From the closed world to the infinite universe.”
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Attributed to Alexandre Koyre:
“The history of science is the history of human thought.”
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Attributed to Alexandre Koyre:
“Without metaphysics there is no physics worth doing.”
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Attributed to Alexandre Koyre:
“We do not see facts; we see facts in the light of theory.”