Gaston Bachelard

(1884 - 1962)

After working as a postmaster in Bar-sur-Aube, Gaston Bachelard studied physics before switching his focus to philosophy. He occupied the chair of philosophy of science and history at the Sorbonne from 1940 to 1955. “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box,” he writes in The Poetics of Space. “Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.”