Author of an abundant work, mainly centered on the relations between philosophy and scientific or medical thought, it was also a figure in publishing and cultural institutions. He died on May 1, at the age of 78.
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Born February 5, 1944 in Paris, the philosopher Dominique Lecourt died, the 1 er May, at the Lariboisière hospital, in Paris. With him disappears the author of an abundant work, with around forty volumes, mainly focused on relations between philosophy and scientific thinking or medical thought, but also a figure in publishing and cultural institutions that has marked his imprint in recent decades.
It is with three main philosophers that the normalien of rue d’Ulm was formed. Louis Althusser was his master at the École Normale Supérieure, which first led him to engage for a time in the fight of the Maoists in the years 1960-1970, and later to become the legal representative of Louis Althusser, that ‘He helped get out of prison after the murder of his wife in 1980. Georges Canguilhem, doctor and philosopher, directed his memory on the historical epistemology of Gaston Bachelard and presented this first book, published by Vrin in 1969. Finally, François Dagognet, a doctor and philosopher too, directed his thesis, the Order and the Games, published by Grasset in 1981.
The main concern of Dominique Lecourt, who will be expressed in different forms over his works, was to analyze the relationships between knowledge and current society, trying to rectify them. In the wake of Bachelard and Canguilhem, he was indeed attentive to thwart misunderstandings, ideological traps, political or religious farms of knowledge, whose world is today, more than ever, theater. In this spirit, he studied in particular the quarrel of creationism (America between the Bible and Darwin, PUF, 1992) and protested against the misdeeds of catastrophism and technophobic apocalypses, in 1990 with against fear (PUF), and Again in 2009 with the age of fear (Bayard).
influence the course of ideas
Another facet of this desire for action led him to develop educational tools, especially several than know-out? And several encyclopedias and dictionaries, many times reissued in pocket format, such as the encyclopedia of science (pocket book, 1998), the Dictionary of History and Philosophy of Sciences (PUF, 1999) or the Dictionary of Medical Thought ( PUF, 2004). The pamphlet was not to displease him either, as his attack on “media philosophers” showed, who were, according to him, compared to their elders, only poor thinkers (Flammarion, 1999).
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