This is a revised and expanded version of a post from September 2024

Alexandre Koyré’s teaching career was predominantly in Paris and the United States. Born in Russia, he studied in Paris and Germany, before beginning teaching at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in the inter-war years. His EPHE teaching was in a temporary post from 1921-22 and then as Directeur d’études from 1932-33. He spent much of the Second World War in the United States, teaching at the École Libre des Hautes Études along Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Gottman and others. His work there as its first general secretary, until he was replaced by Lévi-Strauss, has been discussed in some histories of French intellectuals in New York, particularly by Emmanuelle Loyer. He also taught courses at the New School for Social Research. I have indicated the titles of his courses at both these institutions here. After the war he returned to France, resuming his career at the EPHE. As I have discussed in History of European Ideas (open access), in 1951 he tried, unsuccessfully, to get elected to a chair at the Collège de France. He would continue teaching at the EPHE, but also combined this with various visiting posts in the USA, including at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University. From autumn 1962 his health meant that others often had to cover his teaching. He died in April 1964.

All of his teaching is, I think, interesting to explore. He taught on topics both within the history of science and in philosophy more generally. His earliest teaching was on religion and mysticism, and the relation between science and religion was a regular theme. His book on Plato was a development from war-time teaching. Perhaps his most famous book, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, developed from teaching at Johns Hopkins University. I had thought it was a course there, but though he taught courses there in two academic years, the book’s immediate genesis was a single lecture given the following year, on a return visit when he was teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before the war, it was his course on Hegel and religion which Alexandre Kojève took over when Koyré was absent, turning it into the famous courses on The Phenomenology of Spirit which had such a remarkable audience and which were so influential. (I say a bit more about those lectures and a planned co-translation of the Phenomenology by Kojève and Henri Lefebvre here.)

Koyré also had visiting posts in Cairo in the 1930s and early 1940s, at what was originally the Egyptian University, then the King Fuad University and is now the University of Cairo. Paola Zambelli’s biography of Koyré gives the Cairo dates as 1933-34, 1936-37, February to June 1940 and 1940-41. With the aid of EPHE teaching records, the first two dates can be specified as 1 December 1933-end May 1934 and 1 November 1936-1 June 1937. The EPHE also records a visit from 1 November 1937 to 1 June 1938. Around 1940 Charles de Gaulle and his colleagues in the France Libre government in exile persuaded Koyré that he could make a more significant contribution by running the École Libre than by joining the army. His return to Cairo after the Occupation of France was to facilitate his transfer to the United States in 1941, though he did this by travelling east rather than west across the Atlantic. 

Compared to Paris, where annual reports were published of his teaching, we know less about his work in Cairo. The main record of his teaching is his book Trois leçons sur Descartes, later republished as Entretiens sur Descartes. These three lectures were first given in Cairo. The first publication was a bilingual French-Arabic edition in 1937, the second in French alone in 1944. The first version maintains the spoken form more, which is edited out of the reprint. The lectures are later included in re-editions of his Introduction à Platon, but though the first part of the book was published as Discovering Plato, I don’t think the Descartes material is in English. (Discovering Plato was published slightly before the French version, even though the manuscript was written in French.) The copy of the Trois leçons at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in the Rare Books room, is the one Koyré gave to Kojève, with a very brief dedication.

In Cairo Koyré lived in Zamalek, and some of his letters to Henry Corbin from this time have been published. Corbin was a French scholar of Islam and, among other things, a Heidegger translator. Heidegger’s “What is Metaphysics?” appeared in Bifur in 1931, translated by Corbin and introduced by Koyré. But most of the other letters of Koyré’s which are published are from earlier or later periods of his life. The letters to Edmund Husserl are much earlier, while his surviving letters to Hannah Arendt, for example, are all later than this period (on their friendship, see here). There is limited correspondence in Koyré’s archive.

In teaching in Cairo Koyré was following in the footsteps of the philosopher of science André Lalande, and among their students was Abdul Rahman Badawi. Some online sources suggest Koyré supervised Badawi’s doctoral thesis, but a more reliable obituary says Lalande initially, and then Koyré, supervised Badawi’s master’s level thesis on the problem of death in existentialist philosophy, written in French. It was published only in 1964 in Cairo, and is not easy to find. Badawi went on to write a doctoral thesis, Le temps existentiel, in Arabic. Given the importance of Badawi’s work in Arabic philosophy, this is quite significant. Sevinç Yasargil has an interesting piece on Badawi in the Heidegger in the Islamicate World collection. Koyré was therefore an important figure in introducing both France to phenomenology and Egypt to existentialism.

I think Louis Massignon was also teaching in Cairo still too, which perhaps gives another connection. Massignon was Catholic but an important scholar of Islam, and did work to bring understandings of each faith closer to the other. Koyré’s work in Cairo is briefly discussed in Yoav Di-Capua’s work on Arab existentialism, but on this point doesn’t seem to add much beyond other sources.

Zambelli’s biography equally does not have much information about this part of his career. She actually spends much of the section on this discussing the courses on Hegel which Kojève took over. The historian and philosopher of chemistry, Hélène Metzger also covered some of his teaching in 1936-37, and on this and much else about Metzger, Cristina Chimisso’s book is an invaluable guide. Henry Corbin also covered some teaching in 1937-38, and post-war, several other people did when he was in the USA, or unwell. But the visits to Cairo seem interesting not just for who took over from him in Paris, but what Koyré himself did there.

Beyond what I outline above, I’ve not found much about this period of Koyré’s career. I say a bit more about his role in a European network of ideas here, with some reading suggestions. I also have said something some of the archival links to Georges Canguilhem and Jean Gottmann, and spoke about his connections to Canguilhem in Bristol in September 2024 (audio). As I mentioned above, I outline his New York teaching here, and I might follow up with more on his Paris teaching at the EPHE, and his other post-war courses in the United States.

References

Abdurrahman Badawi, Le Problème de la mort dans la philosophie existentielle: Introduction historique à une ontologie, Le Caire: Imprimerie de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1964.

François Chaubet and Emmanuelle Loyer, “L’École Libre des Hautes Études de New York: Exil et resistance intellectuelle (1942-1946)”, Revue Historique 302 (4), 2000, 939-72.

Cristina Chimisso, Hélène Metzger, Historian and Historiographer of the Sciences, London: Routledge, 2019.

Yoav Di-Capua, “Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the Intellectual History of Decolonization”, The American Historical Review 117, 2012, 1061-91. 

Yoav Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonialization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Stuart Elden, “Alexandre Koyré and the Collège de France”, History of European Ideas, Vol 51 No 2, 2025, 276-89 (open access)

Alexandre Koyré, Trois leçons sur Descartes (Professeur à la faculté des lettres de l’Université Égyptienne), Le Caire: Imprimerie Nationale, 1938.

Alexandre Koyré, Entretiens sur Descartes, New York/Paris: Brentanos, 1944.

Alexandre Koyré, Discovering Plato, trans. Leonora Cohen Rosenfield, New York: Columbia University Press, 1945.

Alexandre Koyré, Introduction à la lecture de Platon suivi de Entretiens sur Descartes, Paris: Gallimard, 1962.

Emmanuelle Loyer, Paris à New York, Intellectuels et artistes français en exil, 1940-1947, Paris: Grasset, 2005.

Peter M. Rutkoff & William B. Scott, “The French in New York: Resistance and Structure”, Social Research 50 (1), 1983, 185-214.

Paul Vignaux, “Alexandre Koyré (1892-1964)”, École pratique des hautes études, Section des sciences religieuses. Annuaire 1964-1965, 43-49, https://www.persee.fr/doc/ephe_0000-0002_1963_num_76_72_18144

Sevinç Yasargil, “Anxiety, Nothingness, and Time: Abdurrahman Badawi’s Existentialist Interpretation of Islamic Mysticism”, in Kate Moser, Urs Gösken and Josh Hayes (eds.), Heidegger in the Islamicate World, London/New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, 99-112.

Paola Zambelli, Alexande Koyré in Incognito, Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2016; trans. Irène Imbart, Alexandre Koyré, un juif errant? Firenze: Musée Galileo, 2021.

Aristide R. Zolberg with Agnès Callard, “The Ecole Libre at the New School 1941-1946”, Social Research 65 (4), 1998, 921-51.

Sources

Annuaires de l’École pratique des hautes études, https://www.persee.fr/collection/ephe

Teaching records of the École Libre des Hautes Études and the New School for Social Research, The New School Archives and Special Collections, New York

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This is the twentieth post of a weekly series, where I post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. 

The full list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here.