Teilhard de Chardin and the new geological paradigms in the xxth Century. In the centennial of Eduard Suess

Abstract

The centenary of Eduard Suess’s geologist death, on the 26th of April, 1914, is the occasion to inquire into the knowledge Teilhard had of the innovative ideas in the Earth Sciences and the acceptance on his part of those paradigms that contributed to his work as geologist in China during twenty years. In the year 1921, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin publishes in Études, the review of the French Jesuits, an article which he titles as «The face of the Earth». The author is seeking to inform the readers of the most outstanding ideas of one of the great geologists of the late Nineteen Century and the beginning of the Twentieth: Eduard Suess. This research offers the possibility of philosophically reflecting on the epistemology hidden in Teilhard de Chardin and which contributes, in a decisive way, to the construction of his great synthesis. A century ago, between 1912 and 1914, a young Pierre Teilhard de Chardin devoted his time to study of the prehistory in Paris directed by Marcellin Boule in the Human Palaeontological Institute, attached to Natural History Museum. Teilhard discovered that the humanity rooths knowledge can be posible by means the prehistory, a new emergent discipline. Excited by that discovery, he publishsed a paper in 1913 in Études, a review edited by the french jesuits, where he justified the prehistory scientific character and their potentiallity for reached the human origins knowledge.