Alexandre Koyre Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to Alexandre Koyre, organized by topic.
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Alexandre Koyre on Knowledge
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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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“Newtonian Studies (1965).”
There is something for which Newton — or better to say not Newton alone, but modern science in general — can still be made responsible: it is splitting of our world in two. I have been saying that modern science broke down the barriers that separated the heavens and the earth, and that it united and unified the universe. And that is true. But, as I have said, too, it did this by substituting for o
Alexandre Koyre on Mind
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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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“The belief in creation as the background of empiricomathematical [sic] science–that seems strange. Yet the ways of thought, human thought, in its search for truth are, indeed, very strange.”
Newtonian Studies (1965), p. 114.
Alexandre Koyre on Nature
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“From the closed world to the infinite universe.”
The infinite Universe of the New Cosmology, infinite in Duration as well as Extension, in which eternal matter in accordance with eternal and necessary laws moves endlessly and aimlessly in eternal space, inherited all the ontological attributes of Divinity. Yet only those — all the others the departed God took with him... The Divine Artifex had therefore less and less to do in the world. He did n -
“What the founders of modern science … had to do, was not criticize and to combat certain faulty theories, and to correct or to replace them by better ones. They had to do something quite different. They had to destroy one world and replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and to reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, a new concept of knowledge, and a new concept of science — and even to replace a pretty natural approach, that of common sense, by another which is not natural at all.”
Galileo to Plato" in the Journal of the History of Ideas (1957).
Alexandre Koyre on Time
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“Galileo to Plato" in the Journal of the History of Ideas (1957).”
What the founders of modern science … had to do, was not criticize and to combat certain faulty theories, and to correct or to replace them by better ones. They had to do something quite different. They had to destroy one world and replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and to reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, a new concep
Alexandre Koyre on Truth
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Attributed to Alexandre Koyre:
“We do not see facts; we see facts in the light of theory.”