Gaston Bachelard Quotes on Knowledge
Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) gave the French historical epistemology of the twentieth century its most influential instruments in works such as The New Scientific Spirit (1934), The Formation of the Scientific Mind (1938), and The Philosophy of No (1940). The doctrine of the "epistemological obstacle" — the cognitive sediment of pre-scientific common sense whose displacement is the precondition of genuine scientific advance — and the parallel doctrine of the "epistemological break" between the everyday and the scientific concept frame the analysis of how mathematical physics actually proceeds against the empiricist images of knowledge then prevalent in Anglophone philosophy of science.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Gaston Bachelard:
“Science is the empire of the new.”
-
Attributed to Gaston Bachelard:
“There is no first knowledge; all knowledge is the result of struggle against earlier error.”
-
Attributed to Gaston Bachelard:
“The mind is essentially a factory of mistakes.”
-
“Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.”
The Psychoanalysis of Fire , ch. 2, "Fire and Reverie" (1938) -
“The Psychoanalysis of Fire , ch. 2, "Fire and Reverie" (1938)”
Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need. -
“To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water.”
Introduction -
“A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.”
Introduction -
“Clear Waters, Springtime Waters”
The reflected world is the conquest of calm