Georges Canguilhem

French philosopher, physician, and historian of science (1904–1995), author of The Normal and the Pathological (1943), and one of the central pedagogical and institutional figures of twentieth-century French thought — a "point of contact" connecting (and teaching or examining) Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilbert Simondon, and Jacques Derrida. In the wiki he enters as the author of the earliest of the three "Notable Commentaries" on Chapter III of Creative Evolution included in the Landes edition.

Key Points

• 1943 commentary on L'évolution créatrice Ch. III — drawn from a course taught in 1941–42 at the Université de Strasbourg (relocated to Clermont-Ferrand during the war), preparing students for the agrégation. Written in the same period as The Normal and the Pathological (1943).
• The détente reading. Canguilhem's central philological find: the "matter" of Creative Evolution does not "adhere" to the matter of Matter and Memory — the difference is the new middle term détente (relaxation), which CE inserts between tension and extension. He traces its entry through Bergson's 1904 homage to Ravaisson, and back to Plotinus's distension.
• "Interruption = inversion." Matter is not a positive substance but the inverse-by-interruption of spirit; the relevant causality is "deficient causality" (a term from Leibniz, via Jankélévitch), not efficient causality. Matter is "the product of oblivion [l'oubli]."
• The personality as "sharp edge" (pointe). Reads Bergson's images of cone and knife: "the brain is the sharp tip by which consciousness penetrates into the compact fabric of events."
• From anti-Bergsonism to a positive reading. Canguilhem had been shaped by the anti-Bergsonian atmosphere of the early 1930s; his late-1930s reappraisal culminated in this course, and Bergson (esp. CE) remained an influence on his philosophy of biology.

Connections

• is a reader of bergson-1907-creative-evolution — the 1943 Ch. III commentary.
• contributed the détente / interruption-as-inversion reading to ideal-genesis-of-matter.
• reads henri-bergson — alongside maurice-merleau-ponty and gilles-deleuze, one of the three post-war French commentators on CE Ch. III.
• is a point of contact for Foucault, Althusser, Simondon, Derrida — the mid-century French philosophy-of-science lineage (entities not yet on the wiki).

Open Questions

• The relation between Canguilhem's philosophy of the normal/pathological (the organism setting its own norms) and Bergson's élan vital / creative evolution — the influence is noted but not audited.
• Canguilhem's place relative to the wiki's existing mechanism-vitalism problem-space (his concept of biological normativity is another non-mechanism / non-vitalism position).

Sources

• bergson-1907-creative-evolution — "Commentary on Chapter III of L'évolution créatrice" (1943), included in the Landes edition; introduced there via Giuseppe Bianco's account of the 1941–42 course.