A tribunal for science: Reading Georges Canguilhem through his archives

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The current coronavirus pandemic demonstrates that science and politics are intrinsically intertwined.While political strategies often seek legitimation in scientific claims, science is increasingly accepted ordenied based on political views. A philosophical inquiry seeking to understand this relation must answersome fundamental questions: Is science an autonomous activity? What is the value of scientific truths?Can science be ethically and politically judged for its impact on human lives?My research will address these questions through a reappraisal of Georges Canguilhem's history ofscience, whose purpose is to reveal the role of socio-political values in the formation of scientificconcepts and retrace the process through which they acquired their autonomy. Furthermore, byconceiving science as an activity that constantly questions its own results, Canguilhem shows thehistorical nature of the validity of scientific truths, which he calls 'the most recent errors'. Therefore,rather than the progressive accumulation of discoveries, science is the temporary result of a constantrectification of scientific knowledge. Lastly, through a vitalist definition of life as the living being'sunconscious creation of ways to relate to its environment, Canguilhem grounds an ethical critique of allprocesses of normalisation (including scientific ones) which impose on humans a unique norm that limitsthem in the expression of their creative potentialities.Since many of Canguilhem's writings were published in obscure outlets, the development of his ideas hasbecome clearer only recently, thanks to the still ongoing publication of his complete works. However,scholars have continued to overlook the ethical critique at the heart of his history of science. Through theanalysis of some of these neglected texts, and of further unpublished archival material, I will explore therole of Canguilhem's critical vitalism in his history of science, thereby elaborating a philosophical-historical method to address and ethically evaluate contemporary relations of science and politics.