Background
Vuillemin, Jules was born in 1920.
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Jules Vuillemin
Edit ProfileHistorian of philosophy: epistemologist
Education
University of Strasbourg. Inns: Martial Gueroult, Marx, Soren Kierkegaard, Kant, Hermann Cohen, Bertrand Russell. Rudolf Carnap and Nelson Goodman.
Career
Taught philosophy at the Faculté des Lettres de Clermond-Ferrand. Since 1962, Professor of Philosophie de la Connaissance, Collège de France.
Views
A disciple of Martial Gueroult. Vuillemin is one of the foremost French historians of philosophy and epistemologists. A prolific writer, his studies cover a wide range of topics. His early writings were inspired by Marxism and existentialism. But his philosophy soon took a different turn, finding a fresh point of departure in the tradition of critical Kantianism. This led him to take up the critical project of Kant anew, for the present day, integrating it with the lessons of the analytical movement in philosophy. Thus the guiding aim of Vuillemin’s interrogation of the history of philosophy, evident in his L’Héritage kantien (1954) and in all his subsequent writings, is to show how the philosophy and the science of a particular period are engaged on a cooperative task, that there is symbiosis of the two: the scientist is assured by the philosopher that the world really is what he assumes it to be; the philosopher is assured by the scientist that his a priori theories are vindicated by every appeal to the facts. In pursuing this ambitious objective, Vuillemin has produced works that are widely praised for their great precision and rigour.
