Leon Brunschvicg 1869 – 1944
Leon Brunschvicg was a French philosopher and the leading representative of French rationalist idealism in the first decades of the twentieth century. Long-time professor at the Sorbonne and a co-founder with Xavier Leon of the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, he taught a generation of French philosophers including Sartre, Beauvoir, Cavailles, and Levinas. His Stages of Mathematical Philosophy, Human Experience and Physical Causality, and The Progress of Consciousness in Western Philosophy articulated a philosophy in which the unity of mind reveals itself in the historical progress of mathematics and physics. Of Jewish origin, he died in hiding from the German occupiers in Aix-en-Provence.
Key facts
- Nationality
- French
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Continental, Rationalism
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Leon Brunschvicg:
“The history of mathematics is the autobiography of the human mind.”
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Attributed to Leon Brunschvicg:
“Reason is what the human spirit has done, not a faculty given once for all.”
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Attributed to Leon Brunschvicg:
“Self-knowledge is achieved in the works of intelligence, not in introspection.”
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Attributed to Leon Brunschvicg:
“Science is the laboratory in which philosophy meets reality.”
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Attributed to Leon Brunschvicg:
“Each great theory in physics widens our notion of what it is to be.”