Jules Vuillemin

Jules Vuillemin died on January 16, 2001.

Jules Vuillemin was 80 years old at the time of death.

Jules Vuillemin (/ˌvuːiˈmæn/; French: [vɥijmɛ̃]; 15 February 1920 – 16 January 2001) was a French philosopher, professor of philosophy of knowledge at the Collège de France, in Paris, from 1962 to 1990, succeeding Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and professor emeritus from 1991 to 2001. He was an Invited Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey (1968).

At the Collège de France, Vuillemin introduced analytical philosophy to France. Vuillemin's thought had a major influence on Jacques Bouveresse's works. Vuillemin himself vindicated the legacy of Martial Gueroult.

A friend of Michel Foucault, he supported his election at the Collège de France, and was also close to Michel Serres.

Biography

After studying at the École Normale Supérieure, he completed his agrégation in 1943, being received premier ex aequo alongside Tran Duc Thao. A student of French historical epistemologists Gaston Bachelard and Jean Cavaillès, he was however at first influenced by phenomenology and existentialism, before shifting towards study of logics and science.

He had two children from his first marriage to Suzanne Vuillemin (née Pagnier): Françoise Létoublon and Jean Vuillemin.

In 1962, he published a book titled The Philosophy of Algebra, dedicated to mathematician Pierre Samuel (a member of the Bourbaki group), René Thom, physicist Raymond Siestrunck, and linguist Georges Vallet. Vuillemin thought that renewals of methods in mathematics have influenced philosophy, thus relating the discovery of irrational numbers to Platonism, algebraic geometry to Cartesianism, infinitesimal calculus to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Furthermore, he observed that philosophy had not yet taken into account the changes brought to mathematics by Joseph Louis Lagrange and Évariste Galois.

In 1968, he co-founded with Gilles-Gaston Granger the journal L'Âge de la Science. He was one of the main French commentators on the philosophy and works of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap and Willard Van Orman Quine.

Vuillemin also took an interest in aesthetics, besides writing several books on Kant, Anselm and on Diodorus's master argument (see problem of future contingents).