The Boutroux Circle and Poincare's Conventionalism

Bibliographic Data

ID4456908
AuthorsMary Jo Nye (corresponding author)
Year1979
Volume40
Issue1
Pages107
Publication date1979-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the History of Ideas (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-5037 • E-ISSN: 1086-3222
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2709262
OpenAlexW2328778640
LanguageEN
Citations received15

In France at the turn of the twentieth century, contemporary observers wrote of a renaissance in French philosophy which by the time of Henri Poincare's death in 1912 was irrevocably linked with his name and the philosophy of conventionalism.1 This conventionalist philosophy asserted that fundamental scientific principles are not reflections of the real nature of the universe but are convenient ways of describing the natural world insofar as they are not contradicted by observation or experiment. In addition to developments in philosophy, the 1890s and early 1900s were years of new achievement for French laboratories and science lecture halls, after decades in which the French sciences, like philosophy, had languished in the shadow of German accomplishments. Indeed, at the turn of the century, a renaissance in French philosophy was paralleled by a renaissance in French science associated with the names of Becquerel, the Curies, Perrin, Langevin, and, again, Poincare.2 Inevitably a suspicion comes to mind in studying these two parallel renaissances in French intellectual history that there are links between the two renaissances in this period; one such link surely is in the figure of Henri Poincare (1854-1912), whose reputation as a mathematical physicist at the turn of the century is exceeded perhaps only by that of Einstein. Poincare's conventionalist philosophy has been one of fruitful debate since its inception. Yet, one may ask, how did this con

Conventionalism · Epistemology · Poincaré conjecture · History of Science and Natural History · Mathematical Physics · Mathematics · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Philosophy, Science, and History

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