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  • Claude Bernard: Rationalité d’une méthode
  • Frederic L. Holmes
Pierre Gendron. Claude Bernard: Rationalité d’une méthode. Science—Histoire—Philosophie. Publications de l’Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Études Épistémologiques. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1992. viii + 148 pp. $27.75 (paperbound).

Scientific texts of the past provide, according to Pierre Gendron, “privileged material for philosophical reflection” (p. 1). It is to this end that he analyzes the work of the nineteenth-century physiologist Claude Bernard, whose writings have long served a similar purpose. More specifically, Gendron aims to extract from Bernard’s texts the “rational core,” to show in what way the physiologist’s procedures [End Page 323] were grounded in reason. Not concerned with the origins or development of Bernard’s views, he treats them mostly in the mature form in which Bernard described his investigations and general concepts in the published volumes of his course lectures.

Attentive to the concrete experimental achievements from which Bernard drew his general ideas, Gendron selects several of the investigations that he believes to be most revealing of Bernard’s general approach to the science of life. His studies of respiration and animal heat serve to connect Bernard with traditions traceable to Antoine Lavoisier and the chemical revolution. “Operation” is, Gendron asserts, the “key term” for understanding Bernard’s scientific procedure (p. 14), just as Lavoisier’s chemistry was based on chemical operations. Gendron puts great emphasis on Bernard’s claim that the aim of physiology is to “master” the phenomena of nature—a view that, he shows, Bernard traced to Descartes. He places Bernard among the followers of the “reductionist strategy,” originating with the theory of respiration of Lavoisier and Laplace (p. 20). The aim of the experimenter in this tradition is to describe physiological phenomena eventually by means of physical or chemical phenomena. As the prime example, in which Bernard was able to achieve this goal, Gendron describes his investigation of carbon monoxide poisoning.

In successive chapters, Gendron describes Bernard’s principle of determinism, which is fundamentally an operative principle; his use of toxic substances as instruments of chemical vivisection; his concepts of the “milieu interieur” and general physiology; the artificial production of disease; and the view that experimental medicine must be based on physiological experimentation. As might be expected for a subject about whom so much has already been written, this book covers much that is already well known to readers familiar with Bernard’s own works or earlier commentators. Less attention has been given to Bernard in the last two decades, however, than during the first century after his death, and Gendron brings the discussion of Bernard’s views up to date by relating them to some more recent philosophical writings.

Only in the last chapter does it become clear that the “notion of operation” that is central throughout the book has for Gendron a special meaning drawn from the philosophical work of Jean Ladrière. The meaning of an operator in mathematics, according to Ladrière, is a mode of action independent of the particular character of the objects to which it is applied. Transferring this to the work of experimentation, Gendron defines an operation as a “sequence of concrete manipulations that take place in a precise manner in time” (p. 92). It is unfortunate that he introduces this idea only after finishing his discussion of specific examples of Claude Bernard’s operational procedures. Although Bernard did employ characteristic procedures repeatedly, it is not evident from Gendron’s discussion of the cases, or from Bernard’s own writings, that he followed a precise sequence independent of the particular object of any given experimental problem. Here, therefore, there is a potentially significant, original insight about Bernard’s experimental practice, one that could also be extended to experimentation more generally—but the potential is not fully realized. [End Page 324]

Similarly, Gendron draws an interesting parallel between Bernard’s use of his experiments on carbon monoxide poisoning as a “remarkable example which shows us the limit to which one can pursue investigations in the life sciences” (p. 51), and the role of the “paradigm” example in Thomas Kuhn’s writings on scientific revolutions. The comparison does...

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