Antoine-Augustin Cournot

Antoine Augustin Cournot (Gray, August 28th, 1801 - Paris, March 30th, 1877) was a mathematician French which was interested in particular in formalization of the economic theories. It is thus one of the first to have formulated a model of supply and.

Biography

He was professor with Lyon, then with Grenoble and became vice-chancellor of the academy of Dijon of 1854 to 1862.

The economist

In Microéconomie, he worked on balances between two producers (" balances of Cournot" generalized later under the term of balances of Nash or balances of Nash-Cournot"). It introduced the concept of elasticity in economy and marginal Coût. It has also a contribution on strutures of market by studying the duopoly.

Its work in the field of the economy influenced the reflections of Leon Walras, one of the craftsmen of the marginal revolution.

Its book headlight on the subject remains its Recherches on the mathematical principles of the theory of the richnesses , delivers whose theoretical importance will be recognized only much later.

The epistemologist and the philosopher

It is also a philosopher, who wanted to think the articulation and the difference of the physical determinism, life, freedom and chance.

It contributed to an original interpretation of the Hasard. The chance is not that the expression of our ignorance of the causes, as believed it the deterministic physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace. Cournot defines the chance, in a proposal become famous, as the “meeting of two independent causal series”. The events in themselves are completely given as for their cause and for their purpose; it is of their unforeseeable meeting, of the intrusion of a new causality independent in unfolding of a process which is born the chance.

Thanks to current research on the deterministic chaos, one manages to bore the bases of the nature of the chance such as had stated Cournot. The events which affect a complex system, like the solar system, are partially unforeseeable, contrary to the assertion of Laplace.

This research led Cournot to a renewal of the philosophy of the Histoire (he knew the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt and its brother). The history is neither a science, for lack of laws, nor the product pure Aléa S, which would make the account historical impossible, or chaotic. Admittedly, the choices of the individuals play a part there, but account should be also held effects of Structure. Historical knowledge is thus at the confluence of these two logics. That does not want to say that the role of the large characters is negligible. But if the Church is to some extent the girl of Bossuet, Bossuet is well more still the son of the Church.

As well this design of the chance as that of the history are to be brought closer to the text of Humboldt on the laws of the development of the man power (1791). Let us note however, that if Cournot appreciated the work of the Humboldt brothers, it could not have read this draft, because it was not published of alive sound.

Finally Cournot, following the German philosophers, thinks the articulation of sciences in connection with their objects. One passes thus gradually from the materialism to the sphere of the vital activity, then " vitalisme" with that of the abstract reason. The social sciences have as an aim an intermediate reality, where join the organicity of the language, the company, of the religions, and the activity of the abstract reason.

Works

Mathematical and economic works

Research on the mathematical principles of the theory of the richnesses (1838)
Treated elementary of the theory of the functions and the infinitesimal calculus (1841)
Re-examined summary of the economic doctrines (1877)

Philosophical works

Test on the bases of our knowledge and the characters of philosophical criticism (1851)
Treated sequence of the fundamental ideas in sciences and the history (1861)
Considerations on the walk of the ideas and the events in modern times (1872)
Materialism, vitalism, rationalism (1875)

Reference

Random links: