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ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF
PHILOSOPHY OF
EDUCATION
Georges Canguilhem
James Marshall
University of Auckland
Georges Canguilhem was born on 4 June, 1904, at Castelnaudary near Toulouse, in South
Western France. He died on 11 September 1995 at the age of 91.
Success at Castelnaudary Lyc ee (where he was a boarder), and the award of a scholar-
ship to study at the prestigious Lyc ee Henri IV in Paris, enabled him to gain entrance to
the

Ecole Normale Sup erieure in 1924. In his cohort were Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond
Aron, and Paul Nizan. Later there were Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Cavaill` es. He
was inuenced by his teacher Alain (Emile Chartier) at Henri IV, by Cavaill` es whom he
succeeded at the University of Strasbourg in 1941, and by Gaston Bachelard, whom he
succeeded as Professor of History and Philosophy of Sciences at the Sorbonne, and as Di-
rector of the Institut dHistoire des Sciences and Techniques, in 1955. In addition to his
qualications in philosophy he gained a Doctorate in Medicine at the University of Stras-
bourg in 1943. His doctoral thesis was to be republished several times, and translated
into English as The Normal and the Pathological in 1978 (with an introduction by Michel
Foucault). He also occupied the important administrative post of Inspecteur G en eral de
Philosophie between 1948 and 1955, having initially refused it at the time of the Libera-
tion. In this post he was responsible for the teaching of philosophy in lyc ees. His writing
was austere and he was noted as an exacting if not intimidating examiner. Nor was he
the typical French intellectual, pronouncing on almost anything and prepared to occupy a
radical political platform. If he was on the left he was not on the radical or revolutionary
left. For full bibliographical details and accompanying biographic comments see Camille
Limoges (1994). For a fuller historic account in English of Canguilhems life see David
Macey (1998).
His friend Jean Cavaill` es, who was to be assassinated by the Nazis in January 1944, had
encouraged himinto the resistance (if encouragement were needed given his rebellious
stances at ENS and his early opposition to events in Germany). After the Gestapo raid on
M. Peters, P. Ghiraldelli, B.

Zarni c, A. Gibbons (eds.)
Encyclopaedia of Philosophy of Education
http://www.ffst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA
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the Facult e des Lettres at the University of Strasbourg (by then in Clermont-Ferrand) in
1943, and in which two professors were killed, and many students and professors deported
to Germany (but which he managed to evade), he was forced underground where he took
a major part as a doctor in the Auvergne Maquis (code name Lafont). He was awarded
the Military Cross and the M edaille de la R esistance in 1944. Later, in 1976, he was to
publish a study of his former student, colleague and co-member of the resistance Jean
Cavaill` es: Vie et Mort de Jean Cavaill` es.
Unlike Bachelard, who took physics and chemistry as historical examples of scientic
rationality, he took as his major sources, biology and medicine. It could be said that
in selecting biology and medicine, and in rejecting great scientic events such as the
Copernican Revolution, that he forged a change of course in French History of Science.
Biology and medicine were not as rigorous as physics and chemistry and are inextricably
intertwined with non-discursive practices. Foucault is to extend this displacement further
to the human sciences.
If Canguilhelm was an historian of science rather than a philosopher of science then he
was also an historian who was extremely sensitive to philosophical issues. According to
Dominique Lecourt (1975: 165f.): There is probably no better denition of the history of
the sciences as it is conceived and practised by Georges Canguilhem himself. . . it seems
completely justied to make him Bachelards heir. But his history is also epistemolog-
ical. For Canguilhem , the history of science is the history of an object discourse
that is a history and has a history, whereas science is the science of an object that is not a
history, that has no history( Canguilhem in Delaporte, 1994: 26). Thus (ibid.):
. . . the object of the history of science has nothing in common with the object
of science. The scientic object, constituted by methodological discourse, is
secondary to, although not derived from, the initial natural object. . . The his-
tory of science applies itself to these secondary, non-natural, cultural objects.
It is a discursive project about scientic objects. But it is also concerned with
the progress of the discursive project, a progress which may meet with ac-
cidents, be delayed or diverted by obstacles, or be interrupted by crises, that
is moments of judgement and truth
The objects of the history of science are then very different from the objects of science.
For Canguilhem science arrests time, construing its objects as non-temporal, and as not
having a history. The full reality of the scientic object is in principle available to the
scientist in the present. It is of course true that these objects exist in time and change
through time. However the objects of history of science are regarded themselves as part
of an historical development which has not yet nished. The objects of history of science
are incomplete. Whereas the objects of geology can be treated as complete, as givens
open to analysis, the objects of history of science cannot, as their value and meaning are
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determined rst by an epistemological and normative judgement and, second, are always
in principle open to re-evaluation as to their value and meaning in accordance with the
progress of science.
Canguilhems epistemological concern then is with the history of concepts. The philoso-
phers aim is to identify the order of conceptual progress that is visible only after the fact
and of which the present notion of scientic truth is the provisional point of culmination
(Canguilhem, 1988: 9). But this history of concepts is not the history of ideas. Nor is it
a history of terms, or of phenomena, or even of theories. Perhaps the elimination of these
possibilities can make clearer his view of the history of science.
If there were such a thing as a history of terms then it might concern itself with exploring
the use of a term from its historical antecedents to more modern usages. For example,
the term atom in current use in modern science was also employed by the pre-Socratics.
However whilst the same term or word was used by both pre-Socratics and contemporary
scientists, the referents of these terms have almost nothing in common. Such a history
was not Canguilhems.
Nor is the history of concepts to be identied with a history of phenomena. For exam-
ple someone might produce a history of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes in, say, New
Zealand. What would be crucial here for Canguilhem is not what is observed - the phe-
nomena - but the interpretation of those phenomena. It is not enough then for someone to
observe and describe phenomena no matter how new, or unexpected (perhaps as the result
of a Baconian experiment), for that person to have a scientic concept, or to be doing
science, or to be writing the history of science. One cannot explain in observational terms
(thus for Canguilhem Priestly did not have a concept of oxygen whereas Lavoisiier did
Gutting 1989).
But Canguilhem also insists upon the separation of concepts from any theories which
may use those concepts. Concepts are not imbedded in theories, and they do not derive
their meaning from associated theories. Instead concepts permit one to identify data in a
scientically meaningful and useful manner: theories explain the data and/or phenomena
identied prior to explanation by concepts. Concepts permit scientic questions to be
formulated and theory(ies) provide(s) scientic answers to those questions. Concepts are
also claimed to be theoretically polyvalent (Canguilhem, 1988: 6). By this is meant
that one and the same concept can occur in different theories. Thus Canguilhem was able
to write the history of the reex arc, a concept which occurs in several quite different
theories. This is not to deny that a concept may become reformulated and transformed
between theories, but if the concept retains an underlying fundamental scientic content,
it is still the same concept.
Canguilhem believes that there is a close relationship between concepts and phenomena.
If he is rejecting the distinction sometimes claimed between (neutral) facts and theories,
he is not doing so in any simplistic fashion which claims that there are no observed facts
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apart from their theoretical interpretations. His position is more complex as he makes
distinctions between terms, concepts and theories. Concepts which are theoretically poly-
valent identify phenomena, not necessarily or merely theories. Instead theories explain
those phenomena identied prior to explanation by concepts.
Clearly Canguilhem does not view the history of science as itself possessing scientic sta-
tus. Such a view of the history of science would see it in positivistic manner as presenting
already constituted objects from the past of science to be scrutinised by the historian of
science, just like any other data in a laboratory. What is wrong with this approach is
Canguilhems insistence that history of science is normative. Here he would seem to be
following Bachelard in believing that the historians judgements of the past are informed
by the present. This involves a form of epistemological analysis which furnishes to the
historian the principles for informed judgement of the past. Clearly there are normative
notions associated with the evaluation of sciences achievements and progress.
On the Normal and the Pathological is the work for which Canguilhem is best known.
Not only was it important in the area of medicine but it was important for other areas
of the human sciences. As Foucault said in the Introduction to the English version this
work was important for those very people who were separated from, or challenged, the
establishment. It was the work of Cavaill` es, Bachelard, and Canguilhem on a philos-
ophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept which was important in the crises of
the Universities and the status and role of knowledge in the 1960s, rather than a philos-
ophy of experience, of sense, and of subject, ie, of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, according
to Foucault (Canguilhem, 1978: ix-x.). If that is the case however, for Canguilhem, the
events of 1968 were not easy or comfortable, as he had given his life to the academy and
may have been seen as a mandarin (Bourdieu, 1998: 191).
This work was essentially his medical doctoral thesis. He attacked the notion that the
concepts of the normal and the pathological, so essential to the thought and activity of
medicine, could be interpreted in a straightforward positivistic and statistical manner. He
attacked the fundamental notion that normal was a statistical mean, because that amounted
to conceiving and treating a living system as if it were structured and therefore governed
in a law like manner. If that were the case it would have been in some pre-established
harmony with the environment. Instead, Canguilhem argues, the human organism is a
living vital organism which is by no means in any pre-established harmony with its envi-
ronment, for The laws of Galilean or Cartesian mechanics cannot by themselves explain
the origin of coordinated organ systems, and such coordinated systems are precisely what
one means by life. In other words, mechanism is a theory that tells us how machines
(living or not) work once they are built, but it tells us nothing about how to build them
(Canguilhem in Delaporte, 1994: 78).
Thus for Canguilhem the normal begins instead with the living organism and an order of
specic properties, arguing that medical practice must be based upon the diversity of life
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which in turn provides the paths for its own conceptualisation and for the restoration of its
normal state. To say that no doctor proposes to produce a new kind of man, with a new
arrangement of eyes or limbs, is to recognise that an organisms norm of life is furnished
by the organism itself, contained in its existence (Canguilhem, 1978: 159). Therefore
we must proceed from life to understanding and not from understanding to life, and thus
dene life as a meaning inscribed in matter. Lecourt (1975: 184) translates this position
into the form of an equation: < life = code = information = concept of life = concept >.
Essentially for Canguihem then normality means the ability to adapt to changing circum-
stances, to environments which are both various and variant. It thus involves activity
and exibility so that the living being lives in shifting relationships with a continuously
changing environment. Medical dictionaries dene the normal as that which conforms
to the rule, regular. Canguilhem extends this brief denition as follows: (1) normal is
that which is such that it ought to be; (2) normal, in the most usual sense of the word, is
that which is met in the majority of cases of a determined kind, or that which constitutes
either the average or standard of a measurable characteristic (Canguilhem, 1978: 69).
For Canguilhem and his views on life and concept, there can be no such sense of a patho-
logical normal for living organisms and hence there can be no purely objective pathology
(Rabinow, in Delaporte, 1994: 16).
Canguilhems thesis on life is known as vitalism. Gordon (1998: 185) states the thesis
thus:
life is an irreducible concept and one which is necessary to science;
its content is given through experience as living beings as well as our observation
of living beings;
our conceptual activity in general is a continuation and extension of our existence
as living beings.
Also, for Canguilhem (1952: 143), machines are seen as an extension of living organisms:
Un outil, une machine ce sont des organs, et des organs sont des outils ou des machines.
His point is not that tools and machines are organisms but that they are extensions of the
body (Hacking, 1998: 207). His work here, directed as much against Cartesian dualism,
has obvious implications for the philosophy of technology.
In education there are at least three broad parameters along which a Canguilhem inspired
research programme might proceed. First there is the importance for the human sciences,
including education, of Canguihems approach to epistemology, especially his emphasis
that this must be an historical epistemology. If this is being traced in the general area of
the social sciences in Anglo-American thought (see eg, Economy and Society, 27 [2&3],
1998) it is almost non-existent in education (though see Marshall, 1996: 47-53). What
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would be of concern here is the specic nature of rationality in education, especially
those aspects of educational theory and research which laid claim to scientic status, and
the role which critical historical thought might play in relation to the vital form of life
displayed in a living organism. Second there is a need for a deeper exploration of the
notion of normal in educational thought and theory. Canguilhems notion of the norm
as not being statistical but, instead, to be associated with normativity, that is the ability of
a living organism to adapt with activity and exibility to changing circumstances would
be more than helpful here. Finally his views on vitalism, normativity and the notion that
tools and machines are extensions of living organisms have interesting possibilities for
problematising the educational thrust towards technology.
For extensions of the ideas of Canguihem to the human sciences see entries for Michel
Foucault, particularly Foucault on Science. See also entries for Bachelard, Canguilhem
and Foucault on Science, and Norms in Education.
References
Balibar,

Etienne et al. (1993) Georges Canguilhem: philosophe, historien des sciences,
Paris: Albin Michel.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1998) Georges Canguilhem: an obituary notice, Economy and Soci-
ety, 27(2&3), 190-192.
Canguilhem, Georges (1952) Machine et Organisme, Connaisance de la Vie, Paris: Ha-
chette.
Canguilhem, Georges (1976) Vie et Mort de Jean Cavaill` es, Ambialet: Pierre Laleure.
Canguihem, Georges (1978) On the Normal and the Pathological, Dordrecht: Reidal,
1978. Originally published as Le Normal et le Pathologique, Paris: Presse Universitaires
de France, 1966.
Canguilhem, Georges (1988) Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences,
Cambridge, Ma.: MIT
1
Press.
Delaporte, Francois (1994) A Vital Rationalist: selected writings from Georges Canguil-
hem, New York: Zone Books. Introduction by Paul Rabinow, pp.11-22.
Gordon, Colin (1998) Canguilhem: life, health and death, Economy and Society, 27(2&3),
182-189.
1
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Gutting, Gary (1989) Michel Foucaults Archaeology of Scientic Reason, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hacking, Ian (1998) Canguilhem amid the Cyborgs, Economy and Society, 27(2&3),
202-216.
Lecourt, Dominique (1975) Marxist Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault,
London: New Left Books. Part I published as The Historical Epistemology of Gaston
Bachelard, Paris: Vrin, 1969, and Part II as For a Critique of Epistemology, Paris: Li-
brairie Francois Maspero, 1972.
Limoges, Camille (1994), Critical Bibliography, in (ed.) Francois Delaporte (1994), A
Vital Rationalist: selected writings from Georges Canguilhem, New York: Zone Books,
pp.385-454.
Macey, David (1998) The Honour of Georges Canguilhem, Economy and Society, 27(2&3),
171-181.
Marshall, James D. (1996) Michel Foucault: personal autonomy and education, Dor-
drecht: Kluwer.
Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Education
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