Abstract

At first, Georges Canguilhem’s philosophy is a philosophy of medicine recognizing the main contribution of biological knowledge to medicine. However, this philosophy also questions the nature of life. Life involves biological processes, but life is also normativity. In this paper, we question the normativity and the epistemological history in Canguilhem’s works to understand their relevance for current scientific questions. According to Canguilhem, the epistemological history of the life sciences concerns an activity of constitution of (biological) scientific disciplines. The relevance of Canguilhem is the fact that a historian of science has not only to restore a history of the scientific theories or a history of the development of the sciences in context, but he also has to explore the relationship and the limits between life science and its context in the process of genesis and scientific elaboration. Scientific work is a vital activity of the human being, the history of science is the history of this axiological activity, and this implies a philosophical approach. In this paper, we propose that the history of ecology may give a valuable example of a scientific elaboration from various elements and from diverse skills: ideologies that announce or extend a scientific construction also affect this discipline.