The problem of forms of thinking “other” than ours in Alexandre Koyré and Lucien Febvre

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to reconstitute the terms of a short controversy that took place in the late 1940s between Alexandre Koyré and Lucien Febvre regarding the constitution of modern science and the birth of technology in seventeenth-century Europe. By analyzing this controversy, it is possible not only to recognize how two singular ways of understanding the history of science have emerged in France, but also, and above all, to show how they were mobilized by a common issue. Since the early twentieth century, ways of thinking that are different from “our own” could no longer be understood based on an evolutionary conception of reason. It became henceforth clear that ways of thinking “other” than ours could no longer be regarded as proscribed, banished or outdated forms of thought. By different routes, Febvre’s history of mentalities and Koyré’s history of scientific thought sought to solve this very same problem.