Meyerson, Emile

Merz, John Theodore. A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Volume II. William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh. 1903. Meyerson, Emile. Identity Reality. Translated by Kate Loewenberg. 

Meyerson, Emile (1921) De Texplication dans les sciences, Paris, Payot, trans. M. Sipfle and D.A. Sipfle, Explanation in the Sciences, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1991. 

The rise of Bachelard s philosophy of science in the 1940s eclipsed the idealist philosophy of Emile Meyerson which was influential in France in the 1920s and 30s. Bachelard s view of the discontinuity of scientific development and its materialization in instruments and institutions opposed Meyerson s idealist emphasis on the unity and continuity of thought and its foundation in the human mind. Meyerson regarded the tendency of science to reduce the apparent diversity and multiplicity of nature to a deeper, causal reality of permanence and identity as a secret propensity of the human mind , which requires conceptual abstraction and theory construction. He saw in the history of science not a terrain of paradigmatic diversity and theoretical pluralism, but constant and recurring forms of scientific reasoning based on principles of identity and conservation. Part of a broader anti-positivist movement in Europe, which included the neo-Kantianism... 

This physical conception of substance was questioned by scientific philosophers like F.W. Schelling, Charles Sanders Peirce, Emile Meyerson, and Alfred North Whitehead.10 With Bachelard, one might say that their critical questions introduce a chemical conception of substance into philosophy. For the chemist, the term substance designates first and foremost the particular elementary or compound stuff that stands at the beginning and at the end of a chemical process (cf. Bachelard 1968, 45,49, 60,70). As such, chemical substance is no hypothetical substrate but presents itself in chemical practice. Questions regarding its reality concern not its existence but how it makes itself known. Since chemical substance presents itself at different levels of laboratory experience, Bachelard posits a laminated reality for chemical substance— substance does not have, at all levels, the same coherence (Bachelard 1968, 46) ... 

Bachelard s epistemology is often presented as a philosophy based on mathematics and physics, like the mainstream of the French tradition of philosophy of science. Indeed such leading figures as Henri Poincare, Gaston Milhaud, Edouard Le Roy, Emile Brunschvicg and Andre Lalande did take their inspiration from mathematics and physics [Brenner, 2003]. The role of chemistry in this tradition has been underestimated. In the works of Pierre Duhem, Emile Meyerson, Helene Metzger and Bachelard, chemistry and its history helped shape a number of key epistemological concepts [Bensaude-Vincent, 2005]. 

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