Here the phenomenologist has nothing in common with the literary critic who, as has frequently been noted, judges a work that he could not create and, if we are to believe certain facile condemnations, would not want to create. A literary critic is a reader who is necessarily severe. By turning inside out like a glove an overworked complex that has become debased to the point of being part of the vocabulary of statesmen, we might say that the literary critic and the professor of rhetoric, who know-all and judge-all, readily go in for a simplex of superiority. As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader's pride mixed in with much enthusiasm.

(Le nouvel esprit scientifique)
Dialectic of Duration. He compared "scientific knowledge" to ordinary knowledge in the way we deal with it and saw error as only illusion: "Scientifically we think the truth as the historical rectification of a long error and we think experience as the rectification of the common and original illusion (illusion première). The role of epistemology in science
Bachelard was a rationalist in the Cartesian sense although he recommended his "non-Cartesian epistemology" as a replacement for the more standard Cartesian epistemology.

He rose to some of the most prestigious positions in the Académie française and influenced many subsequent French philosophers among them Michel Foucault Louis Althusser Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break (obstacle épistémologique et rupture épistémologique).