‘Meyerson a chemist turned philosopher',

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (1)

1 IRePh - Institut de Recherches Philosophiques

Meyerson is known as a philosopher who displayed an impressive erudition both in history of
science and philosophy, some one who spent his lifetime in reading and writing. His readers
can testify (and sometimes complain) that his philosophical claims were based on and tested
against a wide range of historical episodes taken from a variety of sciences.
Moreover it is clear that he had an intellectualist approach to science, as he was more
concerned with theories than with scientific practices.
Therefore it does not really matter that he was trained as a laboratory chemist and that he had practised industrial chemistry in his early career. These aspects are biographical details hardly mentioned as mere anecdotes. I would like to question the standard view that chemistry did not really matter or did act as an anti-model in Meyerson‘s philosophy. I will argue that not only chemistry provided a kind of entrance hall in the history and philosophy of science, as Meyerson himself often acknowledged, but it also shaped his philosophy.

Mots clés: history of chemistry; philosophy of science; epistemology

Domaines: Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. ‘Meyerson a chemist turned philosopher',. Annual Conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, Apr 2006, Cambridge, United Kingdom. ⟨halshs-00350853⟩