Alexandre Koyre Quotes on Knowledge
Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964), the Russian-French historian whose Galileo Studies (1939) and From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957) decisively reshaped the mid-twentieth-century historiography of the scientific revolution, defended an explicitly conceptualist epistemology of scientific change. The transformation of European thought between Copernicus and Newton was on Koyré's account not the patient accumulation of empirical discoveries but a wholesale reorganization of the conceptual framework within which the natural world was describable at all — the abandonment of the closed, hierarchically ordered cosmos for the homogeneous infinite space of mathematical physics. The framework prepared the ground for Kuhn's later analysis of paradigm shift.
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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“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 -
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.”
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“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). -
“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