Philosophy of Science
Following debates concerning the foundation of mathematics around the mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), who opposed Bertrand Russell and Frege, various French philosophers started working on philosophy of science, among them Gaston Bachelard, who developed a discontinuist view of science, Jean Cavaillès (1903–1944), or Georges Canguilhem, who would be a strong influence of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and Jules Vuillemin. In his introduction to Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological, Foucault wrote:
Take away Canguilhem and you will no longer understand much about Althusser, Althusserism and a whole series of discussions which have taken place among French Marxists; you will no longer grasp what is specific to sociologists such as Bourdieu, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Passeron and what marks them so strongly within sociology; you will miss an entire aspect of the theoretical work done by psychoanalysts, particularly by the followers of Lacan. Further, in the entire discussion of ideas which preceded or followed the movement of '68, it is easy to find the place of those who, from near or from afar, had been trained by Canguilhem.
Starting in the 1980s, Bruno Latour (b. 1947), teacher at the engineering school École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris, would develop the actor-network theory, a distinctive approach to social theory and research, best known for its controversial insistence on the agency of nonhumans.
Read more about this topic: 20th-century French Philosophy
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