Background

Suzanne Bachelard was born on October 18, 1919, in Voigny, France. She is the daughter of the philosopher Gaston Bachelard and Jeanne Rossi.

Education

Suzanne Bachelard studied at the University of Paris.

Career

Suzanne Bachelard started her career as a professor of philosophy at the Charles de Gaulle University – Lille III. Later she worked at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles and soon took up a post of a professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris. Bachelard published her first book La Conscience de rationalité: Etude phénom-énologique sur la physique mathématique in 1958. Later she wrote such books as A Study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic and Hommage à Jean Hypolite. She also translated works of Edmund Husserl.

Achievements

• Suzanne Bachelard was a French educator, philosopher, and writer who was the first translator to French of Edmund Husserl Formal and Transcendental Logic. Bachelard was awarded the Officer of the National Order of the Legion of Honour.

Works

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  • A Study of Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic 1968

Views

Suzanne Bachelard’s main preoccupation was with the clarification of the phenomenological dimensions of all branches of knowledge. A dominant theme in her work is the claim that epistemology has two orientations: the subjective and the objective.

Her translation of and commentary on Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic are exemplars of scholarship in which she examines Husserl’s theory of science and clarifies the nature of his anti-psychologism. She emphasizes that although anti-psychologism is an important strand in Husserl’s thought, his phenomenology should never be reduced simply to that strand. Rather, her aim is ‘to exclude beforehand the hypothesis of a psychologist's interpretation, the danger of which seems to us to be ever renascent’. She maintains that when Husserl returned, in 1929, to the study of logic, his earlier work enabled him not only to find a radical grounding for logic but also, and by means of this radical grounding, to present new aspects of the phenomenological method in an impressively systematic manner.

Bachelard holds that the human cogito is never exhausted by descriptions of its cogita, that any actual intention has a scope or horizon of potentialities. The transcendental analysis of consciousness, she writes, ‘can be a concrete investigation of this entire totality of actualities and potentialities without losing, as a result, its specifically transcendental character’.

Connections

Father:

Gaston Bachelard

Mother:

Jeanne Rossi

References

• Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers This Biographical Dictionary provides detailed accounts of the lives, works, influence and reception of thinkers from all the major philosophical schools and traditions of the twentieth-century. This unique volume covers the lives and careers of thinkers from all areas of philosophy – from analytic philosophy to Zen and from formal logic to aesthetics.
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