AMPÈRE, ANDRÉ-MARIE. - French physicist, mathematician and philosopher, b. at Poleymieux near Lyon on 22 Jan. 1775, d. at Marseille on 11 June 1836. He is the greatest physicist of 19th-century France. His discovery of the laws of electricity and magnetism must be placed alongside the discoveries of Newton and Volta. He was also a great mathematician and a keen philosopher. Educated by his father, he read with enthusiasm the Encyclopédie of D'Alembert and Diderot and from it learned the love of science and the search for truth. He learned from his father not to care for titles and diplomas. Dissatisfied, anxious to know every new idea, he wrote to a friend: "... I find only truths; teach me the truth." He had a most unhappy life; his father, a Girondin, was guillotined at Lyon on 21 Nov. 1793, leaving his son a testament that demonstrates the loftiness and nobility of his spirit. His mother, deeply religious, transmitted to her son her pure and sincere faith. In A.'s work one must not separate science from religion, which simultaneously occupied his thought, revealed to us in his correspondence and in the memoirs of his contemporaries.

C. A. Valson published in 1910 an unpublished memoir of his, Sur les preuves historiques de la divinité du Christianisme. His philosophical ideas, and in particular a dichotomous classification of all human knowledge, are contained in the two volumes: Essai sur la philosophie des sciences, Paris 1834, 1838 and 1843, published by his son Jean Jacques.

Bibliography5 works

BIBL.: His writings on electricity are contained in Mémoires sur l'Electrodynamique, Paris 1885-87, published by the Société Française de Physique. His mathematical works, scattered in rare collections, also deserve to be republished. The Société des Amis d'A.-M. A. has published the: Correspondance du grand A., 2 vols., Paris 1936, and a complementary volume, 1943. The second volume contains a complete bibl. of his works and of his unpublished manuscripts. - B. Saint Hilaire, Philosophie des deux A., Paris 1866, 2nd ed., ibid. 1870. - Mme Chevreux, Journal et correspondance de A.-M. A., Paris 1872; by the same author, the two very rare volumes: A.-M. A. et Jean-Jacques A., correspondance et souvenirs (de 1865 à 1864), Paris 1875. - Among the biographies, note should be taken of those by E. Littré and by Ch.-A. Sainte-Beuve, prefaced to vol. II of the Essai sur la philosophie des sciences, cited above; C. A. Valson, La vie et les travaux d'A. M. A., 3rd ed., Lyon 1910; L. de Launay, Le grand A., d'après des documents inédits, Paris 1925; R. Sartori, A., Brescia 1946. - Cf. A. Eymieu, La part des croyants dans les progrès de la science, I, 3rd ed., Paris 1920, pp. 157-66.

Giovanni Vacca

@incollection{ec1_ampere_andre_marie, author = {Vacca, Giovanni}, title = {Ampère, andré-marie}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {I}, pages = {1112--1113}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1948}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/ampere-andre-marie} }

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Ampère, André-Marie

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