The Books
Henri Poincaré wrote three books popularizing science and presenting his philosophy of science: La Science et l’hypothèse, La Valeur de la science and Science et méthode. These were followed by a posthumous book: Dernières Pensées.
These books were bestsellers in Poincaré’s lifetime. You can see that the cover of my copy of La Valeur de la science indicates that this printing from 1914 of the first edition is in the 21 thousands. La Science et l’hypothèse had two subsequent editions that were revised by Poincaré and all four books went through new editions and numerous printings in French over the following century. All of them are available in print in French including editions published in the last few years with new front matter.
Translations into English
These books were all translated into English within a few years of their original publication in French. Together the first three books were first published in English in a single volume in 1913 called The Foundations of Science. All English-language versions of these books appear to go back to the original translations from over 100 years ago. In some cases they are nothing more than images of the original pages and in some cases text has been produced by OCR without review, which results in something worse than page images.
Specifically, Science and Hypothesis was translated by W. J. Greenstreet, an English Head-Master, The Value of Science was translated by G. B. Halstead, a US mathematician, Science and Method was translated by Francis Maitland, and Mathematics and Science: Last Essays (French title: Dernières Pensées) was translated by John W. Bolduc. None appear to have been experienced translators.
It is reasonable to approach these translations with some caution. Jeremy Gray¹ in his Preface, page xii notes: “it seems desirable also to refer to the English translations, but they are of imperfect quality…” and adds on the following page, “I have used the English translations of [these books], but I have checked all the translations and used mine where necessary.” As a specific example, consider Gray¹ who writes (in footnote 17 on page 60 with reference to a translation of La Science et l’hypothèse) “The English translation has the journey from experiment to law running backwards, which makes no sense.”
This situation seems especially unfortunate since Poincaré was known as a good writer; this recognition was confirmed by his induction into the Académie Française. A quality translation into contemporary English would seem to be warranted.
¹ Gray, J. (2013). Henri Poincaré: a scientific biography. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.