Schmidgen Henning
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2014;36(2):232-53. doi: 10.1007/s40656-014-0030-1.
Twelve years after his famous Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological (1943), the philosopher Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995) published a book-length study on the history of a single biological concept. Within France, his Formation of the Reflex Concept in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1955) contributed significantly to defining the "French style" of writing on the history of science. Outside of France, the book passed largely unnoticed. This paper re-reads Canguilhem's study of the reflex concept with respect to its historiographical and epistemological implications. Canguilhem defines concepts as complex and dynamic entities combining terms, definitions, and phenomena. As a consequence, the historiography of science becomes a rather complex task. It has to take into account textual and contextual aspects that develop independently of individual authors. In addition, Canguilhem stresses the connection between conceptual activities and other functions of organic individuals in their respective environments. As a result, biological concepts become tied to a biology of conceptual thinking, analogical reasoning, and technological practice. The paper argues that this seemingly circular structure is a major feature in Canguilhem's philosophical approach to the history of the biological sciences.
在其著名的《关于正常与病理的若干问题》（1943年）发表十二年后，哲学家乔治·康吉莱姆（1904 - 1995）出版了一本关于单一生物学概念历史的长篇研究著作。在法国国内，他的《17世纪和18世纪反射概念的形成》（1955年）对界定科学史写作的“法国风格”贡献显著。在法国之外，这本书在很大程度上未被注意到。本文从其史学和认识论意义的角度重新审视康吉莱姆对反射概念的研究。康吉莱姆将概念定义为结合了术语、定义和现象的复杂且动态的实体。因此，科学史编纂成为一项相当复杂的任务。它必须考虑到独立于个体作者发展的文本和语境方面。此外，康吉莱姆强调概念活动与有机个体在其各自环境中的其他功能之间的联系。结果，生物学概念与概念思维、类比推理和技术实践的生物学联系在一起。本文认为，这种看似循环的结构是康吉莱姆对生物科学史的哲学方法的一个主要特征。
