Emile Meyerson (1859-1933)
Résumé
Emile Meyerson was born on February 12, 1859 in Lyublin, Russia (now Lublin, Poland). He died in Paris, on December 4, 1933. He was educated in Germany from the ages of twelve to twenty-three. He studied chemistry in Gottingen, Heidelberg and Berlin, and he met Hermann Kopp, the great historian of chemistry who had a deep influence on him. He arrived in Paris in 1882. He first worked at the College de France in Paul Schutzenberger's laboratory. He then had a brief career as an industrial chemist. His command of many languages finally enabled him to become a foreign-news editor, first for the Havas Agency, and later for the Jewish Colonization Association, Edmond de Rotschild's philanthropic organization that helped Jewish settlements in Palestine. Although he never became a member of the French academic commnunity, he regularly met the philosophers Leon Brunschvicg, Andre Lalande or Dominique Parodi, and the scientists Paul Langevin, Louis de Broglie and Albert Einstein. In spite of the efforts of his dcisciples, General Andre Metz and Alexandre Koyre, to defend him after his death he was the object of vehement criticism from Gaston Bachelard. Nevertheless, later in the century, he was still read by many American authors, including Thomas Kuhn and Willard V. O. Quine. He himself was very interested in Anglo-Saxon philosophy, as is evident from his comments on Francis Herbert Bradley, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead.