François Dagognet (1924–)
A student of Georges Canguilhem’s, Dagognet has devoted a major work to his former teacher’s ideas and is arguably the primary inheritor of his project in contemporary France due to his longstanding philosophical engagement with the medical sciences. Born in Langres to a family of modest means, Dagognet passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1949 and later received his doctorate in medicine in 1958. He taught for many years at the University of Lyon before becoming Professor of Philosophy at Paris I (Sorbonne). The author of numerous works in the history and philosophy of science - ranging over various subjects, from chemistry to geology, in addition to his works on medicine - Dagognet is also notable for his writings on art. By the mid-1960s, Dagognet was already a well established figure in French academia, having published books on Bachelard, Pasteur, and ‘biological philosophy’, as well as his doctoral thesis, La Raison et les remèdes (1964). His contribution to volume nine of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse is an assessment of Lavoisier’s ‘preliminary discourse’ to his Elements of Chemistry.
Select bibliography
- Philosophie biologique. Paris: PUF, 1955.
- La Raison et les remèdes, essai sur l’imaginaire et le réel dans la thérapeutique contemporaine. Paris: PUF, 1964
- Gaston Bachelard: sa vie, son oeuvre, avec un exposé de sa philosophie. Paris: PUF, 1965.
- Tableaux et langages de la chimie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969.
- Pour une théorie générale des formes. Paris: Vrin, 1975.
- Philosophie de l’image. Paris: Vrin, 1986.
- Le Cerveau citadelle. Le Plessis-Robinson: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1992.
- Georges Canguilhem, philosophe de la vie. Le Plessis-Robinson: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1997.
- Le Nombre et le lieu. Paris: Vrin, 2000.
- Écriture et iconographie. Paris: Vrin, 2002.
- Faces, Surfaces, Interfaces. Paris: Vrin, 2003.
- L’Animal selon Condillac: une introduction au Traité des animaux de Condillac. Paris: Vrin, 2004.