Gaston Milhaud was a French mathematician, philosopher, and historian of science. He was a professor of mathematics and philosophy at Montpellier University.
Background
Gaston Milhaud was born on August 10, 1858, in Nîmes, Languedoc-Roussillon, France to the family of David Haim Ulysse Milhaud and Rousse Montel. Milhaud, a village near Nîmes, once belonged to the bishop of Nîmes and thus was able to shelter a Marrano community. Gaston Milhaud’s ancestors came from this locality.
Education
Gaston Milhaud completed his secondary school at the Lycée de Nîmes. In 1878 Milhaud qualified for both the École Normale Supérieure and the École Polytechnique; he chose the former. He studied mathematics with Gaston Darboux at the École Normale Supérieure. He graduated in 1881. In 1894, at Paris, he defended a Doctor of Philosophy.
Gaston Milhaud taught mathematics at Le Havre for ten years. His meeting with Pierre Janet and the fruitful collaboration that followed during this period induced a shift in his interests. He translated du Bois-Reymond’s Théorie générate des functions; wrote a number of articles for such journals as Revue scientifique, Revue des études grecques, and Revue philosophique de la France et de l’éctranger; and was henceforth concerned with the philosophy of mathematics.
Appointed a professor of mathematics at Montpellier in 1891, Milhaud gave a series of lectures on the origins of Greek science (published in 1893). In 1894, at Paris, he defended a Doctor of Philosophy dissertation on the conditions and limits of logical certainty. This remarkable work was decisive for his career. He was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the Faculty of Letters of Montpellier in 1895 and rapidly became, through his lectures and publications, a respected authority in a field that was then quite new. He also arranged meetings between investigators in various disciplines. In 1909 a chair was created for Milhaud at the Sorbonne in the history of philosophy in relation to science. Despite the decline in his health, which had always been delicate, he continued to be active and held this chair with distinction until his death.
It has been observed that the end of the nineteenth century witnessed two complementary movements in response to the crisis in the foundations of science: that of philosophers becoming scientists and that of scientists becoming philosophers. Milhaud is one of the best representatives of the latter trend. He modestly presented himself as a teacher who wished to do useful work in the history of science, which he conceived of as inseparable from a critical examination of fundamental notions and inseparable from philosophical views that, underneath the precise data that are constantly accumulating, attempt to appear and to evaluate the progressive and continuous work being accomplished.
Acutely aware of the effort required to amass and criticize data, Milhaud declared that he was not learned in this respect. Nevertheless, his many works on Greek science show that he accepted the burdens of scholarship; and his study of the arguments of Zeno of Elea is important and still worth consulting. He was also responsible for renewing knowledge of Descartes as a scientist, and his writings on this subject remain a reliable source. It was Milhaud’s second son, Gérard, who with Charles Adam produced an improved edition of Descartes’s correspondence.
Milhaud oriented the study of the history of science more toward philosophy. Certain of his views, although representative of his time, are now outmoded, notably those of continuous progress and the analysis of the conditions, role, and scope of demonstration in mathematics and physics. But his writings on logical contradiction, the limits of the affirmations that it appears to permit, and the critique of scientifically inspired deterministic metaphysical systems are still of interest and justify the considerable influence he has exerted. Milhaud also illustrated his contention that “science progresses in proportion to the disinterestedness with which it is pursued.”
Quotations:
"I see today that even in the extreme example of absolute rigor dreamed of by the mathematician, the living and dynamic identity of thinking always takes precedence over the static immobility of the principle of identity."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
“By the soundness and originality of his findings in both the theoretical and the historical domains regarding a question of paramount importance, that of the relation between certainty and truth, this conscientious, modest, and penetrating investigator has performed a lasting service to science and to philosophy.” - Émile Boutroux in proposing Milhaud’s election to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1918
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Émile Boutroux, Paul Tannery, Jules Lachelier
Connections
Gaston Milhaud married Claire Rachel Clary Monteaux on 12 November 1884, in Marseille. They had six sons Pierre Ulysse, André Ulysse, Pierre David, Jean Raoul, Gabriel Léon Julien, and Gérard and a daughter Simone Roussette.