Alexandre Koyré (/kwɑːˈreɪ/; French: [kwaʁe]; born Alexandr Vladimirovich (or Volfovich) Koyra (Russian: Александр Владимирович (Вольфович) Койра); 29 August 1892 – 28 April 1964), also anglicized as Alexander Koyre, was a French philosopher of Russian origin who wrote on the history and philosophy of science.
[3][4] The same year he started teaching in Paris at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), and became a colleague of Alexandre Kojève, who eventually replaced him as lecturer on Hegel.
During World War II, Koyré lived in New York City, and taught at the New School for Social Research, including a course on Plato's Theaetetus, together with Leo Strauss and Kurt Riezler, in the fall of 1944.
Much of his originality for the period rests on his ability to ground his studies of modern science on the history of religion and metaphysics.
According to Koyré, it was not the experimental or empirical nature of Galileo's and Newton's discoveries that carried the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, but a shift in perspective, a change in theoretical outlook toward the world.
Koyré strongly criticised what he called the "positivist" notion that science should only discover given phenomena, the relations between them and certain laws that would help to describe or predict them.
To Koyré science was, at its heart, theory: an aspiration to know the truth of the world, of uncovering the essential structures from which phenomena, and the basic laws that relate them, spring.
Koyré consistently sought to show how scientific truth is always discovered in correlation with specific historical, even purely personal, circumstances.
Koyré influenced major European and American philosophers of science, most significantly I. Bernard Cohen, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Michel Foucault and Paul Feyerabend.