Georges Canguilhem: o devir de um pensamento

Abstract

This thesis recomposes the whole trajectory of Georges Canguilhem's thought, seeking to demonstrate the unpredictability of the mutations occurred in his work, as well as the originality of each reformulation with which he solved the problems posed, without ever erasing the conservation of an inheritance from previous periods. It is divided into four chapters, each of which has prioritized an external event as the index of modification of his philosophy. The first chapter (1926-1939) begins by reconstituting the influence of Alain and the Wertphilosophie on him, having as a mark of change the political events that led to the World War II, which will lead Canguilhem to break with the pacifism of his first master and to constitute an axiological pluralism that goes beyond the neo-kantism. The second chapter (1940-1956) chooses as an event his incursion in the medical field, which had been initiated a few years before, but that will have its consequences with the publication of his three theses (1943, 1952, 1955), in which he reelaborates his philosophy of values inserting now the life as value coordinating other values. Between the second and the third analyzed periods, Canguilhem begins to use concepts of the bachelardian epistemology in the practice of the history of sciences, which will allow him to approach the event that we will analyze in the third chapter in a new way. Thus, the third chapter (1957-1966) prioritizes the rupture resulted from the advent of genetics in the field of life sciences, which will require a rectification of the concept of life by Canguilhem and that he will do by conceiving this novelty in biology as an “epistemological rupture”. The fourth and last chapter (1966-1995) analyzes an event in the sphere of social and human sciences in France, especially with the works of Althusser and Foucault. Canguilhem formulates a last concept of “scientific ideology”, which will allow him to respond to his young colleagues and reinvigorate the loan he had already made to Bachelard's historical epistemology, and also to reexamine his entire past work. In this way, the philosophy in which Canguilhem's work culminates can be defined as: a pluralism of values (Chapter 1), coordinated in terms of a rationalist vitalism (Chapter 2), which draws on the results gathered from a historical epistemology of the life sciences (Chapter 3), with the purpose of reformulating the philosophical status of man as a living being, investigating the practical conditions of possibility for a pedagogy of healing (Chapter 4).