Background
Rougier, Louis was born on April 10, 1889 in Lyons, France.
Rougier, Louis was born on April 10, 1889 in Lyons, France.
Professor at Besançon, Cairo, Caen.
Louis Rougier was not quite the only French adherent of the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, but he was certainly the most productive and interesting. Brought up in the intellectual atmosphere of Poincare's conventionalism, he was convinced that logical systems are matters of choice, not reports of the general structure of the world. This was the centre of a general assault on rationalism, understood as the idea that there is just one single universally valid set of notions and principles, common to all minds. In his early years he wrote some lucid expositions of the new physics of relativity and quanta and of its philosophical implications. He also produced a massive critique of Thomist scolasticism, taking its central error to be the principle that there is a real distinction between essence and existence: the instrument with which Aquinas attempted to carry out the impossible feat of reconciling Aristotle and Christianity. In his later, much shorter book on metaphysics and language, this diagnosis is generalized and the errors of Greek, scholastic and German idealist philosophy are persuasively traced to idiosyncrasies of the Greek, Latin and German languages. In his magnum opus. Traité de la connaissance (1955), dedicated to Moritz Schlick, Rougier applies his logical conventionalism to a broad range of issues in epistemology and the philosophy of science. He has written scholarly works on the early anti-Christian philosopher Celsus and more popular, political and economic works of a right-wing liberal character, in defence of liberty against egalitarian and democratic excesses. In the Second World War he played an obscure and somewhat questionable part as an emissary from Pétain to Churchill. Rougier does not seem to have had any perceptible influence on the very limited and localized emergence of analytic philosophy in France, which has come about, to the extent that it has, as a result of direct study of that philosophy’s Anglo-Saxon exponents.