Most of my recent trip to Paris was for the Indo-European project, but I also did a little work on Alexandre Koyré, which is becoming something of a side project (see the posts Koyré in Cairo, Koyré and a Network of Ideas, and the article “Alexandre Koyré and the College de France“).

In Paris I followed up on some connections between Koyré and two people I’d worked on before – Georges Canguilhem and Jean Gottmann. The Canguilhem-Koyré link is well known, since both are seen as key figures in a French tradition in epistemology and the history of the sciences. Their connections are the topic of my contribution to the Bristol workshop next week organised by Federico Testa and Pierre-Olivier Méthot. My main source of material was CAPHÉS at the ENS, but I also found something useful at the Archives Nationales. The main Koyré archive is at the Humathèque-Condorcet, but I know that’s a much larger collection which would take a lot of time. I have been avoiding opening up that as a line of research as I know it will take me away from the Indo-European project too much. But the CAPHÉS material was just a morning’s worth of work, at least for now, and it was helpful for the Bristol paper, which I hope will be published in some form.

I also found, while looking for something else in the BnF catalogue, that there are some letters between Koyré and Gottmann, another Russian-born French naturalised citizen who, being Jewish, also spent the war years in the United States. Gottmann was a generation younger, but taught at the École Libre des Hautes Études, which Koyré led for a couple of years. As well as many writings on urban questions, Gottmann was the author of The Significance of Territory, which I found very useful for my own work on that topic and which I wrote about here. I had half-wondered if the correspondence between Koyré and Gottmann might be in Russian, but fortunately for me it’s in French. And it was quite interesting.

It was most revealing for Koyré’s role as secretary general of the ELHE, since most of the letters are from him. (There is little correspondence in the Koyré archive, apparently.) But there is one interesting draft from Gottmann at the BnF, about one of the courses he taught. This file is probably most useful if I do more on Koyré, but nonetheless interesting to see. It’s held in the Salle Cartes et Plans, in a different part of the Richelieu site which I hadn’t used before. It’s a remarkable space, part of the newly renovated site. I know António de Ferrez Oliveira has used the Fonds Gottmann in his work (see, for example this essay), as has Luca Muscarà for his book on Gottmann, but I hadn’t had a reason to visit before this.