Édouard Le Roy, the French philosopher of science, ethics, and religion, was born in Paris and studied science at the École Normale Supérieure. He passed the agrégation examination in mathematics in 1895 and took a doctorate in science in 1898. Le Roy became a lycée teacher of mathematics in Paris but was soon drawn to philosophical problems through an interest in the philosophy of Henri Bergson. He succeeded Bergson, to whose thought his own was deeply indebted, as professor of philosophy at the Collège de France in 1921 and was elected to the French Academy in 1945.

In a series of articles titled "Science et philosophie" (Revue de métaphysique et de morale 7 [1899]: 375–425, 503–562, 706–731, and 8 [1900]: 37–72), Le Roy took a pragmatic view of the nature of scientific truth, a view more or less shared by his contemporaries Bergson, Jules Henri...