As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, François Jacob, Louis
Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem has
exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and French
philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans
twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of
epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes,
ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that
defined the rise of modern biology.
How do transformations in biology and modern medicine shape conceptions
of life? How do philosophical concepts feed into biological ideas and
experimental practices, and how are they themselves transformed? How
does knowledge undo the experience of life so as to help man remake what
life has made without him, in him or outside of him? Knowledge of Life
is Canguilhem's effort to explain how the movements of knowledge and
life come to rest upon each other.
Published at the dawn of the genetic revolution and still pertinent
today, the book tackles the history of cell theory, the conceptual moves
toward and away from mechanical understandings of the organism, the
persistence of vitalism, and the nature of normality in science and its
objects.