Émile Meyerson (; 12 February 1859 – 2 December 1933) was a Polish-born French epistemologist, chemist, philosopher of science and Zionist activist.
Biography Meyerson was born Ezryel-Szoel-Froim MeyersonBernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Eva Telkes-Klein, Les identités multiples d’Émile Meyerson, Honoré Champion, 2016, p. 17. to a Jewish family. He was educated at the University of Heidelberg and studied chemistry under Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. In 1882 Meyerson settled in Paris. He served as foreign editor of the Havas news agency, and later as the director of the Jewish Colonization Association for Europe and Asia Minor. He became a naturalized French citizen after World War I.
Thomas Kuhn cites Meyerson's work as influential while developing the ideas for his main work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition, University of Chicago Press, 2012, p. xl.
In La Déduction relativiste, Meyerson expressed the view that Einstein's general theory of relativity was a new version of the identification of matter with space, which he considered "the postulate upon which the whole (Cartesian) system rests."Quoted in Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Revolt against Dualism: An Inquiry Concerning the Existence of Ideas (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), p. 5; Lovejoy's translation [orig. publ. 1930].
Works Identité et réalité (1908) De l'explication dans les sciences, 2 vols. (1921) La déduction relativiste (1925) Du cheminement de la pensée, 3 vols. (1931) Réel et déterminisme dans la physique quantique (1933) Essais (1936)
See also Franciszka Arnsztajnowa (his sister)
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References
Further reading
External links Miguel Espinoza, "Meyerson, Physics and the Intelligibility of Nature"