Examining tensions between the past and present uses of scientific concepts can help clarify their contributions as tools in experimental practices. This point can be illustrated by considering the concepts of mental imagery and hallucinations: despite debates over their respective referential reliabilities remaining unresolved within their interdependent histories, both are used as independently stable concepts in neuroimaging experiments. Building on an account of how these concepts function as tools structured for pursuit of diverging goals in experiments, this paper explores this (...) tension by re-examining the continued reliance of each concept on inverse characterisations inherited from the nominally-discarded ‘mediator-view’ of sensory-like mental phenomena (SLMP). In doing so, I seek to demonstrate how examining unresolved tensions can help highlight that entrenched associations can remain both integral to, and obscured by, the uses of concepts as goal-directed tools within experimental practices. (shrink)

Our goal in this paper is to reassess the relationship between norms and life by drawing on the philosophy of Georges Canguilhem, particularly some of his unpublished lectures about teratology and sexual determination. First, we discuss the difficulties Canguilhem identified in the introduction of life and sexuality as objects of philosophical reflection. Second, we reassess Canguilhem’s understanding of normativity as rooted in life and the axiological activity of the living. Third, we analyze how Canguilhem drew from past and contemporary teratology (...) to conceive of the notions of anomaly and abnormality. Finally, we reconstruct Canguilhem’s analysis of a case of hermaphroditism, highlighting how he presented it as evidence that sexual determination is the result of a normative choice. One of the key contributions of the paper to scholarly literature on Canguilhem is a better understanding of his notion of choice, which was considered not the conscious and intentional act of a subject but rather an axiological activity of the living. We conclude by positioning Canguilhem’s concept of normativity and his belief that norms are produced by the living in relation to the naturalist/normativist divide in medicine. (shrink)

In the 1950s, George Canguilhem became known in France as a vocal exponent of the philosophy of the concept, an approach to epistemology that treated science as the highest expression of human rationality and scientific concepts as the necessary preconditions for the manifestation of scientific truth. Philosophers of the concept, Canguilhem included, viewed concepts as the key to the study of science; and science, in turn, as the key to a substantive theory of reason. This article explains what concepts are (...) for Canguilhem, how they are extracted from the history of the sciences, and why they continue to matter for contemporary debates in the History and Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the relation between problems and the formation and development of concepts in Bergson’s work, as well as in Bachelard, Canguilhem and Deleuze. Building on work by Elie During, I argue that it is not only Bergson but also Deleuze who shares with the French epistemological tradition an “anti-positivist” conception of concept formation, founded upon the posing and solving of novel problems as opposed to the acquisition and verification of empirical facts. Contrary to During, however, I argue (...) that it is not Bergson but Deleuze who furnishes us with an “anti-positivist” conception of problems that is adequate to this anti-positivist conception of concept formation. Deleuze’s anti-positivist view of problems holds, firstly, that genuine problems require the creation of novel terms in which to state and solve them. He shares this view with Bergson, Bachelard and Canguilhem. Secondly, however, Deleuze holds that a problem’s “truth” is not to be evaluated with reference to its eventual solutions, nor with reference to some privileged and contentful experience of reality, but is rather a matter of its purely intrinsic productivity. (shrink)