Alexandre Koyré
Alexandre Koyré (/kwɑːˈreɪ/, French: [kwaʁe]; born Alexandr Vladimirovich (or Volfovich) Koyra (Russian: Александр Владимирович (Вольфович) Койра); 29 August 1892 – 28 April 1964), also anglicized as Alexander Koyre, was a French philosopher of Russian origin who wrote on the history and philosophy of science.
Alexandre Koyré
28 April 1964 (aged 71)
University of Göttingen (1908–1911)
Collège de France (1912–1913)
University of Paris (1911–1914)
École pratique des hautes études (1931–1962)
Johns Hopkins University (1946–?)
The New School (1941)
Criticism of positivist philosophy of science
Life[edit]
Koyré was born in the city of Taganrog, Russia on 29 August 1892 into a Jewish family. His original name was Alexandr Vladimirovich (or Volfovich) Koyra (Russian: Александр Владимирович (Вольфович) Койра). In Imperial Russia he studied in Tiflis, Rostov-on-Don and Odessa, before pursuing his studies abroad.
At Göttingen, Germany (1908–1911) he studied under Edmund Husserl and David Hilbert. Husserl did not approve of Koyré's dissertation, whereupon Koyré left for Paris, to study at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne during the period 1912–1913 under Bergson, Brunschvicg, Lalande, Delbos and Picavet. Following Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, a series of lectures given in Paris in February 1929 (and one of the more important of Husserl's later works),[2] Koyré met again with Husserl repeatedly.
In 1914 he joined the French Foreign Legion as soon as the war broke out. In 1916 he volunteered for a Russian regiment fighting on the Russian front, following a cooperation agreement between the French and Russian governments.
In 1922 Koyré completed his two State doctorate (then called Doctorat ès lettres) theses.[3][4] The same year he started teaching in Paris at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), and became a colleague of Alexandre Kojève, who eventually replaced him as lecturer on Hegel. In 1931, he helped found the philosophical journal Recherches philosophiques. In 1932 the EPHE created a Department of History of Religious Thought in Modern Europe for him to chair. He retained this position until his death.
During the years 1932–34, 1936–38, and 1940–41, Koyré taught in Fuad University (later Cairo University) where, along with André Lalande and others, he introduced the study of modern philosophy to Egyptian academia. His most important student in Cairo was Abdel Rahman Badawi (1917–2002) who is considered the first systematic modern Arab philosopher. Koyré later joined the Egyptian National Committee of the Free French.
During World War II, Koyré lived in New York City, and taught at the New School for Social Research, including a course on Plato's Theaetetus, together with Leo Strauss and Kurt Riezler, in the fall of 1944. After World War II, he was a frequent visitor to the United States, spending half a year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton each year from 1955 to 1962 and also teaching as a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, and Johns Hopkins. His lectures at Johns Hopkins would form the nucleus of one of his best known publications, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957).
He died in Paris on 28 April 1964.