Who is Ernest Renan?
Ernest Renan (Joseph-Ernest Renan in full) was a French philosopher and a scholar and critic of religion. He was born in 1823 and passed away in 1893. In his obituary notes we can find that "He was educated for the priesthood, and proved to be a markable student, but the result of his studies was to make him a theist instead of a Christian priest". He is relevant to the context of Philosophy of Science, because when Gijsbers mentioned Hempel with the following quote
"Historical explanation, too, aims at showing that the event in question was not 'a matter of chance', but was to be expected in view of certain antecedent or simultaneous conditions. The expectation referred to is not prophecy or divination, but rational scientific anticipation which rests on the assumption of general laws."
We were able to make a connection to a certain theory Renan has about the creation of a nation. He described that a nation is a soul, one is in the past and the other in the present. So, it's a culmination of a long past of efforts, sacrifices and devotion. He theorised that the modern nation is a historical result brought about by a series of convergent facts. We will continue more in-depth about his theories on a separate page.
We will not deeply cover Renan's theological history, because that is out of scope for this work. He wrote L'Avenir de la science (The Future of Science), where he describes the importance of history of religious origins, and he also described the human science having equal value to the sciences of nature. Another popular work of his apart from "What is a Nation?", which will be covered on its own page, was the "Life of Jesus" (Vie de Jésus). He wrote it together with his sister, Henriette in Syria. Apart from it being one of his notable works, at the time it was also controversial. After he got elected to the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France, he quoted a French bishop and historian from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century calling Jesus "an incomparable man". However, the clericals weren't impressed, it also caused an uproar and as such got suspended. After he finished writing the book, it got denounced by the church. Despite its denouncement, presently it still gets read. It showed a Jesus that transcended his culture at the time and rejected all the social constraints while chasing the unique ideal of the kingdom of God. According to Renan, Jesus was the first true individualist in history.
References
Chisholm, Hugh. 1911. ‘A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information’. In The Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 23. At the University Press.
Leiden University - Faculty of Humanities. 2017. Chapter 3.1: Carl Hempel, Laws in History. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmpEqZQ60n8.
Pitt, Alan. 2000. ‘The Cultural Impact of Science in France: Ernest Renan and the Vie de Jésus’. The Historical Journal43 (1), 79–101. doi:10.1017/S0018246X99008948.
Renan, Ernest. 2018. ‘9. WHAT IS A NATION? (QU’EST-CE QU’UNE NATION?, 1882)’. In What Is a Nation? and Other Political Writings edited by M. F. N. Giglioli, 247–63. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.7312/rena17430-013.
Wardman, Harold. n.d. ‘Ernest Renan’. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernest-Renan.
Youmans, William Jay, ed. 1893. ‘Obituary Notes’. In The Popular Science Monthly, 42, 288. New York: New York, Popular Science Pub. Co., etc. http://archive.org/details/popularsciencemo421893newy.