KOYRE,ALEXANDRE VERSUS LEVYBRUHL,LUCIEN - FROM COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATIONS TO PARADIGMS OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT

Alexandre Koyre is one of the most important historians of philosophic and scientific thought since the thirties. Research on the Scientific Revolution, on Galileo, Descartes, Newton, as well as on Paracelsus a nd Boehme has deeply changed under his influential method: it has been a model for Kuhn's methodology of paradigms and revolutions in the hi story of science. Whereas Koyre used to be considered opposed in his i deology and method to sociological approaches, he has recently been ch aracterized by Yehuda Elkana as a sociologist of knowledge. In fact, u ntil now one of the main sources of his method had not been identified : it is only by acknowledging the influence of Lucien Levy-Bruhl on Ko yre: that it is possible to explain how the latter wrote his thesis on Boehme's mystical thought just before his Etudes galileennes. Lucien Levy-Bruhl was teaching history of philosophy at the Sorbonne, and Koy re was strongly influenced by his idea of ''prelogical thinking'' as a universal phenomenon and in a general way by the sociological school of Durkheim. Conceptual analysis deriving from Husserl, collective rep resentations and attitude mentale (the latter invented not by Lucien F ebvre but by Levy-Bruhl), came together in Alexandre Koyre's method.