He influenced many subsequent French philosophers, among them Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida, as well as the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour.

Empiricism and rationalism are not regarded as dualism or opposition but complementary, therefore studies of a priori and a posteriori, or in other words reason and dialectic, are part of scientific research.

To obtain his doctorate (doctorat ès lettres) in 1927, he wrote two theses: the main one, Essai sur la connaissance approchée, under the direction of Abel Rey, and the complementary one, Étude sur l'évolution d'un problème de physique: la propagation thermique dans les solides, supervised by Léon Brunschvicg.

[13] Discharged in March 1919 and unemployed, Bachelard searched and obtained a job in October as a professor of physics and chemistry at the college of Bar-sur-Aube.

[16][17] When he was appointed to the Sorbonne as a university professor and director of the Institute for the History of Science and Technology in 1940, he accompanied his daughter in her higher educations.

[20] Despite the gender role expectations at the time, Bachelard showed great concern in supporting his daughter's development into an academic career.

One task of epistemology is to make clear the mental patterns at use in science, in order to help scientists overcome the obstacles to knowledge.

Another goal is to “give back to human reason its function of agitation and aggressiveness” as Bachelard put it in ‘L'engagement rationaliste’ (1972).

To Bachelard, scientific developments such as Einstein's theory of relativity demonstrated the discontinuous nature of the history of sciences.

Thus models that framed scientific development as continuous, such as that of Comte and Émile Meyerson, seemed simplistic and erroneous to Bachelard.

In non-Cartesian epistemology, there is no "simple substance" as in Cartesianism, but only complex objects built by theories and experiments and continuously improved (VI, 4).

In addition to epistemology, Bachelard's work deals with many other topics, including poetry, dreams, psychoanalysis, and the imagination.

Bachelard influenced many subsequent French philosophers, among them Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida, as well as the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour.