Update May 2025: A revised and expanded version of this post is here, as part of the ‘Sunday Histories’ series.
There are many things I find interesting in the life and work of Alexandre Koyré, and I’ve already published on one of these – his unsuccessful attempt to get elected to a chair at the Collège de France (open access in History of European Ideas). I have also been writing a piece on Georges Canguilhem and Koyré for a workshop, and that paper opens up a wider discussion of his situation within a French tradition in the history of sciences, and beyond. I am also interested in his time in the United States during and after the war, and hope that when I am in the US next year I will be able to uncover a bit more of the story in archives there.
His teaching in Paris before and after the war is also important, and there are various archives which would add detail to what I already know. After the war he often taught in both the US and Paris each academic year, as well as spending regular time at the IAS in Princeton. There is more to be said about all this, I think.
But before he went to the US he also had visiting posts in Cairo, 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 dates as 1933-34, 1936-37, February to June 1940 and 1940-41. In 1941 he joined the Free French and from there went on to New York. His work there as the first general secretary of the École Libre des Hautes Études has been discussed in some histories of French intellectuals in New York, particularly by Emmanuelle Loyer.
But I think we know less about his work in Cairo. His Trois leçons sur Descartes, later republished as Entretiens sur Descartes, contains three lectures first given there. The first publication was French/Arabic 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 has been translated as Discovering Plato, I don’t think the Descartes material is in English. The copy of the Trois leçons I saw in Paris was the one Koyré gave to Alexandre Kojève, with a very brief dedication.
In Cairo Koyré lived in Zamalek, and I’ve seen some letters he sent from there, in particular to Henry Corbin – the Islamic scholar and, among other things, Heidegger translator. But other letters I’ve seen 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.
Koyré was following in the footsteps of 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, but it’s 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. 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 doesn’t have much information about this part of his career. She actually spends much of the section on this discussing the courses on Hegel in Paris for which Koyré had to find teaching cover for in his absence. That is certainly an interesting story since his replacement was Kojève, and those lectures are very famous. The historian and philosopher of chemistry, Hélène Metzger also covered some of his teaching, and on this and much else about Metzger, Cristina Chimisso’s book is an invaluable guide. But the period seems interesting not just for who took over from him in Paris, but what Koyré himself did in Cairo.
And beyond what I outline above, I’ve not found much.
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.
