Gaston Bachelard e lo stile della provocazione in filosofia delle scienze

Abstract

Bachelard’s style is sui generis from the outset, as he immediately began to use writing to provoke the epistemology and philosophy of science of his time. As a scholar outside the academy, he was as free in his expression as he was in his ideas. Whether his way of thinking influenced his writing or vice versa cannot be established with certainty: he was certainly close to Surrealism, which made writing and thinking inseparable. For this reason, Bachelard is considered as one of the pioneers of a “French” epistemology, which, however, he has developed in an original way, thanks to his attention to history, his poetic sensitivity and the characteristically fundamental double nature of all his work, that alternate between day and night, between the rational clarity of scientific knowledge and the poetry of oneirism. It was only thanks to this double bind that Bachelard’s philosophical criticism was able to acquire an originality that influenced French philosophy in the second half of the 20th century.