A vital rationalist. Selected writings from Georges Canguilhem Auteur : Delaporte, François.

Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995) was one of France’s leading philosophers and historians of science. Trained both as a medical doctor and a philosopher, Canguilhem overlapped these practices to demonstrate that there could be no epistemology without concrete study of the actual development of the sciences and no worthwhile history of science without a philosophical understanding of the conceptual basis of knowledge.
A Vital Rationalist brings together for the first time some of Canguilhem’s most important writings, including excerpts from previously unpublished manuscripts. Organized around the major themes and problems that have preoccupied Canguilhem throughout his intellectual career, this collection allows readers, both familiar and unfamiliar with Canguilhem’s work, access to a wide range of conceptual and concrete meditations on epistemology, methodology, science and history. Although Canguilhem is a demanding writer, Delaporte succeeds in identifying the main lines of his thought with unrivaled clarity and maps out of the complex and crucial place this thinker holds in the history of twentieth-century French thought.
“This volume is a superb and remarkably representative collection of Canguilhem’s seminal contribution to the history and philosophy of science. Stoutly antireductionist but equally resistant to sentimental vitalism, Canguilhem’s profound contributions to the sciences of life are particularly relevant to our own contemporary rediscovery of the life sciences and to our re-evaluation of the meanings of modernity in modern science. Canguilhem’s epistemological stance and his sharp focus on the philosophy of the biosciences will also prove an essential guide to identifying the critical problems that make the sciences of life of such interest and challenge today”. Everett Mendelsohn, co-author of Nineteen Eighty-Four : Science Between Utopia and Dystopia


A Vital Rationalist. Selected Papers from Georges Canguilhem.
Edited by François Delaporte,
With an introduction by Paul Rabinow
and a critical bibliography by Camille Limoges
Translated by Arthur Glodhammer

Zone books, New York, 1994

Le Normal et le pathologique Auteur : Canguilhem, Georges.

« C’est par référence à la polarité dynamique de la vie qu’on peut qualifier de normaux des types ou des fonctions. S’il existe des normes biologiques c’est parce que la vie, étant non pas seulement soumission au milieu mais institution de son milieu propre, pose par la même des valeurs non seulement dans le milieu mais aussi dans l’organisme même. C’est ce que nous appelons la normativité biologique.
L’état pathologique peut être dit, sans absurdité, normal, dans la mesure où il exprime un rapport à la normativité de la vie. Mais ce normal ne saurait être dit sans absurdité identique au normal physiologique car il s’agit d’autres normes. L’anormal n’est pas tel par absence de normalité. Il n’y a point de vie sans normes de vie, et l’état morbide est toujours une certaine façon de vivre »

Georges Canguilhem

Le Normal et le pathologique (1966), PUF, Collection Quadrige, Paris.