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Key Contemporary Thinkers series includes:

Lee Braver, Heidegger

John Burgess, Kripke

Michael Caesar, Umberto Eco

Filipe Carreira da Silva, G. H. Mead

Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell, Agamben

Jean-Pierre Couture, Sloterdijk

Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi

Oliver Davis, Jacques Rancière

Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell

Gerard de Vries, Bruno Latour

Reidar Andreas Due, Deleuze

Neil Gascoigne, Richard Rorty

Nigel Gibson, Fanon

Graeme Gilloch, Siegfried Kracauer

Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson

Rachel Jones, Irigaray

S. K. Keltner, Kristeva

Matthew H. Kramer, H. L. A. Hart

Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler

Ronald Loeffler, Brandom

James McGilvray, Chomsky, 2nd Edition

Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl

Marie-Eve Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy

Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak

Timothy Murphy, Antonio Negri

James O'Shea, Wilfrid Sellars

William Outhwaite, Habermas, 2nd Edition

Herman Paul, Hayden White

Ed Pluth, Badiou

William Scheuerman, Morgenthau

Severin Schroeder, Wittgenstein

Anthony Paul Smith, Laruelle

James Smith, Terry Eagleton

Felix Stalder, Manuel Castells

Christopher Zurn, Axel Honneth

Canguilhem

Stuart Elden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

polity


Acknowledgements

This book was written in parallel to my ongoing research on Foucault for Polity Press, especially for the forthcoming The Early Foucault. For this project, I am grateful to friends and colleagues for assistance, encouragement and suggestions: Giuseppe Blanco, Stefanos Geroulanos, G. M. Goshgarian, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Mark Kelly, Daniele Lorenzini, Gerald Moore, Nicolae Morar, Ingrid Muller, Clare O'Farrell, Simon Reid-Henry, Alison Ross, and Couze Venn. I also thank Pascal Porcheron, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, John Thompson and their colleagues at Polity for their enthusiasm for this project, and the anonymous readers of the proposal and manuscript. Leigh Mueller copyedited the manuscript, and Lisa Scholey compiled the index.

Much of the initial research for this book was conducted while I was a visiting scholar at ACCESS Europe at the University of Amsterdam in 2017. I thank Luisa Bialasiewicz for arranging the visit, and Guy Geltner for the use of his office. I have consulted materials at the following libraries: University of Amsterdam, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, British Library Rare Books Room and Newsroom, Columbia University, London School of Economics, Senate House Library, University College London, University of Warwick and the Wellcome Library. I am especially grateful to Nathalie Queyroux and David Denéchaud at the Centre d’Archives en Philosophie, Histoire et Édition des Sciences (CAPHÉS) at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris for access to the Georges Canguilhem archive of his papers and library.

Thanks, as ever, to Susan for her love and support.


Abbreviations for Works by Georges Canguilhem

In-text references are provided for major works. For books, the French page number is given first, followed by the English after a slash. A dash means the relevant text does not have a corresponding passage. I have sometimes modified existing translations, especially earlier ones, for clarity and consistency.

Throughout, English titles are used for works available in translation; French for untranslated texts or unpublished manuscripts, though an English translation of the title is provided the first time they are used. Greek characters are transliterated.

BT 

‘Le cerveau et la pensée’, in Georges Canguilhem: Philosophe, historien des sciencesActes du colloque (6-7-8 décembre 1990), Paris: Albin Michel, 1993, 11–33; ‘The Brain and Thought’, trans. Steven Corcoran and Peter Hallward, Radical Philosophy 148, 2008, 7–18

DE 

Du développement à l'évolution au XIXe siècle, with Georges Lapassade, Jacques Piquemal and Jacques Ulmann, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003 [1962]

EGC 

‘Entretien avec Georges Canguilhem’, in François Bing, Jean-François Braunstein, and Elisabeth Roudinesco (eds.), Actualité de Georges Canguilhem: Le normal et le pathologique, Paris: Synthélabo, 1998, 121–35

EHPS 

Études d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences, Paris: Vrin, 5th edn, 1983 [1968]. Includes an additional study, while the pagination for the rest replicates the first edition

FCR 

La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2nd edn, 1977 [1955]

IR 

Idéologie et rationalité dans l'histoire des sciences de la vie: Nouvelles études d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences, Paris: Vrin, 1977; trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Subsequent French editions have the 1977 pagination in the margins

KL 

La connaissance de la vie, Paris: Vrin, 2nd revised edn, 1965 [1952]; trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, Knowledge of Life, New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Subsequent French editions have the 1965 pagination in the margins

NP 

Le normal et le pathologique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 12th edn, 2015 [1943/1966]; trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen as The Normal and the Pathological, New York: Zone, 1991 [1978]

OC I 

Oeuvres complètes tome I: Écrits philosophiques et politiques (19261939), ed. Jean-François Braunstein and Yves Schwarz, Paris: Vrin, 2011

OC IV 

Oeuvres complètes tome IV: Résistance, philosophie biologique et histoire des sciences 19401965, edited by Camille Limoges, Paris: Vrin, 2015

RAM 

‘The Role of Analogies and Models in Biological Discovery’, in A. C. Crombie (ed.), Scientific Change, London: Heinemann, 1963, 507–20; French version in EHPS 305–18

VM 

Vie et mort de Jean Cavaillès, Paris: Allia, 1996

VR 

A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings, edited by François Delaporte, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, New York: Zone, 1994

WM 

Écrits sur la médecine, Paris: Seuil, 2002; trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, Writings on Medicine, Fordham University Press, 2011

WP 

‘What is Psychology?’, trans. Howard Davies, Ideology and Consciousness 7, 1980, 37–50; French version in EHPS 365–81

Archival Material

CAPHÉS 

Archives de Georges Canguilhem, Centre d’Archives en Philosophie, Histoire et Édition des Sciences (CAPHÉS), École Normale Supérieure.