A close reading of Georges Canguilhem’s early writings, recently published in a new edition, reveals that at the end of the 1930s, before he became the philosopher of life we know, Canguilhem carried out a spectacular reassessment of Bergson. One must therefore ask what inspired this new reading, since, against expectations to the contrary, the common problem he shared with Bergson does not seem to have been the problem of life. In this paper, I attempt to show how Canguilhem’s new attitude to Bergson allowed him to transfer Bergson’s theory of knowledge over to the field of the philosophy of values, whose object is the unity of experience.

There is still a question about what it means to say that Georges Canguilhem was a philosopher of error. This paper, unlike other work on the topic, investigates archival sources and early texts, up to and including the publication of the Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological in 1943, in order to reveal Canguilhem’s early thoughts on error and to formulate the basic philosophical problem therein, as he understood it. This work reveals a partial transformation of his thinking as he seeks to develop this question through the study of concrete human problems.

This article presents a comparative analysis between Georges Canguilhem’s Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological, published in 1943 and the English language debate that started in the 1970s between the naturalists and the normativists. Seemingly, this comparison illustrates the opposition between the French historical epistemology and the Anglo-American philosophy of sciences. However, I put into perspective what is generally considered an opposition between the two traditions by analyzing certain conceptual similarities.

Georges Canguilhem’s philosophy of life, according to which the living is a normative subject, grounds its epistemology in medicine. Medicine is a technique or an art that aims to restore the individual normativity of the patient. It can only be practiced based on the knowledge and understanding of the life norms, and on experience and values, in other words, on the subjectivity. This explains why the clinic and the therapeutics require a personal relationship between the physician and the patient.

One response to the Frankfurtian attack on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities is to advert to the observation that the agent’s actual action (or the particular event resulting from that action) is numerically distinct from the corresponding action (or the resultant event) he would have generated in the relevant counterfactual scenario. Since this response is based on taking actions and events to be fragile, I shall call it the fragilist account of alternative possibilities. This paper addresses an anti-fragilist argument delivered by John Martin Fischer. I contend that, on close examination, Fischer’s counterargument does not undermine the fragilist account.