The labyrinth or the logic of time without direction in Alexandre Koyré

Abstract

French contemporaries of the inter-wars period often characterized it as one of profound crisis. For the historians living through that period there was a ‘crisis of history’ and it was associated with the collapse of notions of determinism and
historical direction. The future, and with it, historical temporality, became uncertain and unforeseeable. A. Koyré’s position in the context of that problematization is interesting insofar as he endeavored to inscribe that indeterminate
and directionless historical temporality in a new historiography of science and to extract its new philosophy. On the one hand he associated historical time to the image of a labyrinth, an important symbol that circulated intensely in
various domains at that time, transiting between artistic and epistemological vanguards. On the other, he sought to define the nature of that new historical temporality in the terms of a philosophy of history, hence his interest in the philosophy of history, in existentialism and in authors like Hegel and Heidegger. It was necessary to attempt to
understand the logic of a time that was open and devoid of direction.