Abstract
The aim of the study is to present the epistemological part of Gaston Bachelard's philosophy. As a starting point, it uses a summary of the translated works, yet including also some other works, most notably the Formation of the Scientific Mind, and from there proceeds to describe the most important points of Bachelard's epistemology, as well as their mutual connections.
Bachelard's conception of the new scientific spirit and the related notion of an open-ended, non-cartesian rationalism are thus discussed, along with their relation to Bachelard's discontinuistic conception of the progress of science and the famous notion of epistemological obstacle. The subject of applied (and regionalized) rationalism is further connected to some more technical topics, which are nonetheless of key importance to Bachelard, such as precision and purity and the overall importance of the experiment as the locus of dialectical confrontation between theory and matter.
The study is closed by some remarks about the possible relations of Bachelard's epistemology to his poetological works.