Concept and Form:
The Cahiers pour l’Analyse
and Contemporary French Thought

This project is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research grant and is supported by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) and Kingston University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Along with Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, Jean Cavaillès was a foundational figure for twentieth-century French epistemology and philosophy of science. Born in Saint-Maixent to a Protestant family descendent from the Huguenots, Cavaillès matriculated first in his class at the École Normale Supérieure in 1923. Léon Brunschvicg would be his primary mentor and responsible for Cavaillès’s engagements with mathematics and logic at a time when many of his classmates were looking for resources in German existentialism to move beyond Third Republic idealism. Cavaillès’s doctoral works on the historical advent of set theory method more generally laid the groundwork for his critical essay, Sur la logique et la théorie de la science (1946). This essay took the form of a progressive assessment of neo-Kantianism, logical positivism, and Husserlian phenomenology, ultimately finding all three inadequate to a modern theory of science as a result of their reliance either on a solipsistic account of consciousness (as in the first and third cases) or a tautological version of logic (as in the second) that lacked traction on scientific objects themselves. Cavaillès’s clarion call at the end of this essay - ‘It is not a philosophy of consciousness but a philosophy of the concept that can yield a doctrine of science’ - was a source of inspiration for the editors of the Cahiers. The inspirational character of Cavaillès’s theoretical intransigence was compounded by his political heroism. One of the founding members of the Resistance movement Libération-Sud, Cavaillès participated in various clandestine missions throughout France and helped to coordinate Resistance efforts from London in 1943. He escaped from prison twice, first after his initial capture following the German invasion in 1940, and again after being captured by Vichy authorities in 1942. It was during this second period of imprisonment that Sur la logique... was written. In September 1943, he was arrested in Paris for the last time and executed by a Wehrmacht firing squad on February 17, 1944.