Gaston Bachelard 1884 – 1962

Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher of science and imagination whose work spanned both rigorous epistemology and a phenomenology of poetic reverie. After self-taught studies he held chairs of philosophy of science at Dijon and at the Sorbonne. His epistemological writings, including The Formation of the Scientific Mind and The New Scientific Spirit, articulated the doctrine of epistemological breaks and the conviction that science advances by overcoming earlier obstacles in our own thought. His later books on the elements, particularly The Poetics of Space, opened a new field of phenomenological aesthetics.

Gaston Bachelard was born in 1884 at Bar-sur-Aube in the Champagne, the son of a shoemaker. After his baccalaureat he worked as a postal clerk while preparing his licence in mathematics; the First World War interrupted his scientific studies, and he was wounded and decorated. Returning to teaching, he took the agregation in philosophy at the late age of thirty-eight and his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1927.

He held the chair of philosophy at Dijon and from 1940 the chair of history and philosophy of science at the Sorbonne until his retirement in 1954. His writings divide into two streams: the philosophy of science of The New Scientific Spirit (1934), The Formation of the Scientific Mind (1938), Rationalism Applied (1949), and the posthumously published works on contemporary physics; and the poetic and oneiric series of The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), Water and Dreams (1942), Air and Dreams (1943), Earth and Reveries of Will, The Poetics of Space (1957), and The Poetics of Reverie (1960).

Bachelard argued for an 'epistemological break' between common sense and the discontinuous rationalities of modern science, supplied Althusser and Foucault with the concept of an epistemic rupture, and in his poetic works developed a phenomenology of the imagination organized by the four elements. He won the Grand Prix National des Lettres in 1961 and died at Paris in October 1962.