Gaston Berger

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Gaston Berger (French: [be]; 1 October 1896 13 November 1960) was a French
futurist but also an industrialist, a philosopher and a state manager. He is mainly known
for his remarkably lucid analysis of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and for his
studies on the character structure.
Berger was born in Saint-Louis, Senegal. He received his primary and part of his
secondary education in Perpignan, France, and had to take up a position in an industrial
firm . After having performed his military duties in world war I, he became an associate
of the owner of the firm. Berger decided to continue his studies. He worked with Rene
Le Senne and passed his baccalaureat. He then enrolled in the university of Aix-enProvence where he studied philosophy under Maurice Blondel. Having passed his
licence, he obtained a diploma dEtudes Superieures with a thesis on the Relations
between the conditions of intelligibility on the one hand and the problem of contingency
on the other hand. In 1926 Berger founded with some friends the Societe de
Philosophie du Sud-est and its periodical Les Etudes Philosophiques. In 1938 he
organized the first Congress of French Language Societies of Philosophy. In 1941 he
submitted his two theses de doctorat dEtat, the first entitled Investigations on the
conditions of Knowledge. Essay of Pure Knowledge, the second The Cogito in
Husserls philosophy. Berger then left his industrial firm and became first a 'Charg de
Cours', then a 'Maitre de Conferences' for philosophy at the University of Aix-en
Provence. In 1944 he became full professor. In 1949 he became secretary general of the
Fulbright Commission, in charge of the cultural relations between France and the
United States.
After managing a fertilizer plant during the 1930s, he created in Paris the Centre
Universitaire International et des Centres de Prospective and directed the philosophical
studies (tudes philosophiques). The term prospective, invented by Gaston Berger, is
the study of the possible futures.
From 1953 to 1960 he was in charge of the tertiary education at the Minister of National
Education and modernised the French universities system. He was elected at the
Acadmie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1955.
In 1957 he founded the journal Prospective and the homonym centre with Andr Gros.
This same year he created the Institut national des sciences appliques (INSA) of Lyon
with the rector Capelle.
He was the father of the French choreographer Maurice Bjart (19272007). The
university of Saint-Louis, Senegal, where he was born is named after him.

Main works

Recherches sur les conditions de la connaissance, Paris, PUF, 1941

Le Cogito dans la philosophie de Husserl, Paris, Aubier, 1941

Trait pratique danalyse du caractre, Paris, PUF, 1950

Questionnaire caractrologique, PUF, Paris, 1950

Caractre et personnalit, Paris, PUF, 1954