Hosted by the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science with the support ofthe School of Modern Languages of the University of Bristol and the British Academy

If joining online via Zoom

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (2004) once described Georges Canguilhem as a “totemic emblem”, embodying a “heretical” model of intellectual rigour and seriousness for all those who, from the 1960s, sought to break with dominant existentialist trends in French philosophy and produce new ways of thinking. Indeed, philosophers such as Louis Althusser and Alain Badiou saw in Canguilhem a key figure in the French philosophical field, who opened different theoretical possibilities.  Michel Foucault (1985) emphatically stated that if one ignores Canguilhem’s importance “in the whole debate of ideas that preceded and followed the movement of 1968”, one would “no longer understand very much about a whole series of discussions that took place among French Marxists”, “sociologists” and “psychoanalysts”.

Nonetheless, and despite the wide range of themes Canguilhem considered in his published works and unpublished manuscripts, he remains mostly know in Anglophone academia as one of the founders, together with Alexandre Koyré and Gaston Bachelard, of a particular approach in the history (and philosophy) of science widely known as ‘historical epistemology’. In view of complexifying this narrative, this workshop focuses on two paths along which Canguilhem engaged with what he called in The Normal and the Pathological “concrete human problems”: the reflection on medicine and the experience of disease, on the one hand, and the discourses and theories of the human sciences, on the other.

The papers will explore the creative and inspiring ways in which Canguilhem reflected on medicine, psychology, sociology, geography, history, and anthropology, bringing philosophy to bear on issues that engage human life, and which are themselves reflected in medical knowledge, the experience of disease as well as in the concepts, methods, and empirical efforts of the human sciences. Lastly, we will also draw on Canguilhem’s work to explore the notions of normal and pathological from contemporary philosophical perspective of embodiment.