This article argues that historical epistemology offers the history of philosophy and science more than a mere tool to write the history of concepts. It does this, first of all, by rereading historical epistemology through Michel Foucault's “techniques of the self.” Second, it turns to the work of Léon Brunschvicg and Gaston Bachelard. In their work we see a proposal for what the subjectivity of scientists and philosophers should be. The article thus argues that their work is driven by a (...) normative psychology: a set of prescriptions for which mental constitution a scholarly self has to have. In the Conclusion, it returns to existing analyses of “open‐mindedness” as a virtue and explores in what way these cases challenge these analyses, as well as to what extent Foucault's “techniques of the self” can be applied to other cases in the history of French philosophy. (shrink)

Why did nineteenth‐century German historians and physicists habitually warn against vices that they believed philosophers in particular embodied: speculation, absence of common sense, and excessive systematizing? Drawing on a rich array of sources, this article interprets this vice‐charging as a rhetorical practice aimed at delineating empirical research from Naturphilosophie and Geschichtsphilosophie as practiced in the heyday of German Idealism. The strawman of “the philosopher” as invoked by historians and physicists served as a negative model for strongly empiricist scholars committed to (...) virtues like precision, thoroughness, and conscientiousness. In their historical narratives, historians and physicists consistently depicted philosophy either as a relic from the past or as a phase that they had virtuously left behind. This boundary work was central to the self‐positioning of both history and physics, which makes clear that the persona of the philosopher mattered not only to philosophers but also to scholars in adjacent disciplines. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper elaborates a conception of the unity of science that emerges in the context of Dilthey’s well-known treatment of the distinction between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften. Dilthey’s account of the epistemological foundations of the Geisteswissenschaften presupposes, this paper argues, their continuity with the natural sciences. The unity of the two domains has both a psychological and a biological basis. Whereas the psychological functions at work in scientific thinking, the articulation of which is the task of Dilthey’s proposed science (...) of ‘descriptive and analytic psychology’, are common to both kinds of sciences, their ontological ground consists in the embodied and environmentally situated context of human beings, and is expressed in Dilthey’s central concept of ‘life’. Accordingly, this paper develops the shared biopsychological foundations of the epistemology of the natural and human sciences from Dilthey’s writings in the 1880s and 1890s. Dilthey’s conception of unity, furthermore, has implications for philosophy’s orientation towards the special sciences. Thus, in conclusion, this paper applies the biopsychological account to sketch an outline of Dilthey’s historicist method in the philosophy of science, and considers its similarities and differences with a contemporary approach in ‘historical epistemology’. (shrink)

The analytical notion of ‘scientific style of reasoning’, introduced by Ian Hacking in the middle of the 1980s, has become widespread in the literature of the history and philosophy of science. However, scholars have rarely made explicit the philosophical assumptions and the research objectives underlying the notion of style: what are its philosophical roots? How does the notion of style fit into the area of research of historical epistemology? What does a comparison between Hacking’s project on styles of thinking and (...) other similar projects suggest? My aim in this paper is to answer these questions. Hacking has denied that his project of styles of thinking falls into the field of historical epistemology. I shall challenge his remark by tracing out the connections of the notion of style with historical epistemology and, more in general, with a tradition of thought born in France in the beginning of twentieth-century. (shrink)

In this article I assess Georges Canguilhem's historical epistemology with both theoretical and historical questions in mind. From a theoretical point of view, I am concerned with the relation between history and philosophy, and in particular with the philosophical assumptions and external norms that are involved in history writing. Moreover, I am concerned with the role that history can play in the understanding and evaluation of philosophical concepts. From a historical point of view, I regard historical epistemology, as developed by (...) Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, as a conception and practice which came out of the project, elaborated in France from the 1920s to the 1940s, of combining history of science and philosophy. I analyse in particular Canguilhem's epistemology in his theory and practice of history of science. What he called 'normative history' is the focus of my analysis. I evaluate the question of the nature and provenience of the norm employed in normative history, and I compare it with the norm as discussed by Canguilhem in Le normal et le pathologique. While I am critical of Canguilhem's treatment of history, I conclude that his philosophical suggestion to analyse the formation of scientific concepts 'from below' represents a useful model for history and philosophy of science, and that it can be very profitably extended to philosophical concepts. (shrink)

In 1675, Burchard de Volder became the first university physics professor to introduce the demonstration of experiments into his lectures and to create a special university classroom, The Leiden Physics Theatre, for this specific purpose. This is surprising for two reasons: first, early pre-Newtonian experiment is commonly associated with Italy and England, and second, de Volder is committed to Cartesian philosophy, including the view that knowledge gathered through the senses is subject to doubt, while that deducted from first principles is (...) certain. On the surface, it is curious that such a man would bring experiments to university physics. After all, in demonstrating experiments to his students, he was teaching them through their senses, not reason. However, if we consider the institutional context of de Volder’s teaching, we come to see de Volder’s Cartesian experimentalism as representative of a certain form of pre-Newtonian Dutch Cartesian science, as well as part of a larger tradition of teaching through observation at the University of Leiden. Considering de Volder’s institutional context will help us see that de Volder’s experimentalism was not in spite of his Cartesianism, but motivated by it. This paper will describe de Volder’s physics curriculum, the Theatre in which it was taught and how his work predates similar efforts in other European Universities. The second part will consider three aspects of the culture at the University of Leiden: a tradition of teaching through observation, a particular reception of Cartesianism, and an eclectic approach to the New Philosophy. The concluding portion shows how de Volder would have understood his enterprise in Cartesian terms. (shrink)

We provide an overview of three ways in which the expression “Historical epistemology” (HE) is often understood: (1) HE as a study of the history of higher-order epistemic concepts such as objectivity, observation, experimentation, or probability; (2) HE as a study of the historical trajectories of the objects of research, such as the electron, DNA, or phlogiston; (3) HE as the long-term study of scientific developments. After laying out various ways in which these agendas touch on current debates within both (...) epistemology and philosophy of science (e.g., skepticism, realism, rationality of scientific change), we conclude by highlighting three topics as especially worthy of further philosophical investigation. The first concerns the methods, aims and systematic ambitions of the history of epistemology. The second concerns the ways in versions of HE can be connected to versions of naturalized and social epistemologies. The third concerns the philosophy of history, and in particular the level of analysis at which a historical analysis should aim. (shrink)

The paper begins with a detailed reconstruction of the development of Ian Hacking’s theory of scientific ‘styles of reasoning’, paying particular attention to Alistair Crombie’s influence, and suggesting that Hacking’s theory deserves to come under the title ‘historical epistemology’. Subsequently, the paper seeks to establish three critical theses. First, Hacking’s reliance on Crombie leads him to adopt an outdated historiographical position; second, Hacking is unsuccessful in his attempt to distance historical epistemology from epistemic relativism; and third, Hacking has not offered (...) convincing criteria for individuating styles of reasoning. Keywords: Styles of reasoning; Historical epistemology; Ian Hacking; Alistair Crombie; Relativism; Sociology of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This article investigates the emergence of the archive as the primary venue for the production of historical knowledge in the 19th century. The turn to archival research, the article argues, may be considered as a response to the discussions about the problems of testimony that dominated 18th- and early 19th-century German writings on the methodology and epistemology of historical research. These discussions, especially regarding the epistemic virtues of witnesses, also helped create the particular culture of knowledge-making within German historical scholarship (...) that enabled the archival turn. The article illustrates these developments through the examples of Johann Peter von Ludewig, who was one of the most prominent historians of the early German Enlightenment, and Leopold von Ranke, who is normally considered the founder of the modern historical discipline and the most important advocate of the 19th-century archival turn. (shrink)

In Objectivity, Daston and Galison argue that scientific objectivity has a history. Objectivity emerged as a distinct nineteenth-century “epistemic virtue,” flanked in time by other epistemic virtues. The authors trace the origins of scientific objectivity by identifying changes in images from scientific atlases from different periods, but they emphasize that the same history could be narrated using different sorts of scientific objects. One could, for example, focus on the changing uses of “type specimens” in biological taxonomy. Daston :153–182, 2004) indeed (...) provides a detailed account of the history of the type specimen which purports to show this. I argue that this attempt hinges on a conceptual confusion and therefore fails. I show that the actual history of the type specimen does not reinforce the account of epistemic virtues from Objectivity, but rather threatens to subvert it. (shrink)

This highly multidisciplinary collection discusses an increasingly important topic among scholars in science and technology studies: objectivity in science. It features eleven essays on scientific objectivity from a variety of perspectives, including philosophy of science, history of science, and feminist philosophy. Topics addressed in the book include the nature and value of scientific objectivity, the history of objectivity, and objectivity in scientific journals and communities. Taken individually, the essays supply new methodological tools for theorizing what is valuable in the pursuit (...) of objective knowledge and for investigating its history. The essays offer many starting points, while suggesting new avenues of research. Taken collectively, the essays exemplify the very virtues of objectivity that they theorize—in reading them together, the reader can sense various anxieties about the dangerously subjective in our age and locate commonalities of concern as well as differences of approach. As a result, the volume offers an expansive vision of a research community seeking a communal understanding of its own methods and its own epistemic anxieties, struggling to enunciate the key problems of knowledge of our time and offer insight into how to overcome them. -/- (Contributors: Alex Csiszar, Scott Edgar, Peter Galison, Ian Hacking, Sandra Harding, Moira Howes, Paolo Savoia, Judy Segal, Joan Steigerwald, and Alison Wylie). (shrink)

This paper considers the legacy of Kuhn and his Structure with regard to the current history and philosophy of science. Kuhn can be seen as a myth breaker, whose contribution is the way he connected historical and philosophical studies of science, questioning the cumulativist image and demanding historical responsibility of the views of science. I build on Kuhn’s legacy and outline a suggestion for theoretical and philosophical study of history (of science), which can be subdivided into three categories. The first (...) is the philosophical analysis of historical interpretation and its relation to the historical record. The second is ‘theoretical history’ in which one tries to infer philosophically relevant interpretations on the nature of science on the basis of historical evidence. The third is the conceptual reflection of the assumptions and implications of the contemporary historiography of science. At the end I suggest that theoretical and philosophical study of history offers a fresh way to make history and philosophy relevant to each other. (shrink)

The importance given by historian and philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem to the role of practice, techniques, and experimentation in concept-formation was largely overlooked by commentators. After placing Canguilhem’s contributions within the larger history of historical epistemology in France, and clarifying his views regarding this expression, I re-evaluate the relation between concepts and experimental practices in Canguilhem’s philosophy of science. Drawing on his early writings on the relations between science and technology in the 1930s, on the Essai sur quelques problèmes (...) concernant le normal et le pathologique , and on La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles , I argue that the formation and rectification of concepts in Canguilhem’s sense are intrinsically bound with the experimental, material, technical, and cultural contexts in which concepts are operationalized. (shrink)

Whether we live in a world of autonomous things, or a world of interconnected processes in constant flux, is an ancient philosophical debate. Modern biology provides decisive reasons for embracing the latter view. How does one understand the practices and outputs of science in such a dynamic, ever-changing world - and particularly in an emergency situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic, where scientific knowledge has been regarded as bedrock for decisive social interventions? We argue that key to answering this question (...) is to consider the role of the activity of reification within the research process. Reification consists in the identification of more or less stable features of the flux, and treating these as constituting stable things. As we illustrate with reference to biological and biomedical research on COVID-19, reification is a necessary component of any process of inquiry and comes in at least two forms: means reification, when researchers create objects meant to capture features of the world, or phenomena, in order to be able to study them; and target reification, when researchers infer an understanding of phenomena from an investigation of the epistemic objects created to study them. We note that both objects and phenomena are dynamic processes and argue that have no reason to assume that changes in objects and phenomena track one another. We conclude that failure to acknowledge these forms of reification and their epistemic role in scientific inquiry can have dire consequences for how the resulting knowledge is interpreted and used. (shrink)

The article shows the strategic analogies, but also the differences between Bachelard and Canguilhem on the use of the history of science for epistemology. It emphasizes the importance of the ideology for Canguilhem, and the conceptual essence he recognizes in the history of science, which is read in its internal specific differences and in its complex articulations with life and reality. No concept, in fact, comes from nothing. The link between history and epistemology is not however of subjection, but of (...) mutual influence. Canguilhem radicalizes the thought of Bachelard, and recognizes the historicity of every aspect of scientific knowledge, even of its less valued features and above all of errors. All aspects of Science are historical. The object of the history of science is not the object of the sciences, because it is always a discourse. This is why the history of science is inevitably linked to other forms of history. This opens up a pluralist conception of History and of Time, thinking of the sciences in their real body and no longer ideal or legal. Thus Canguilhem opens the way to the researches of Foucault and Serres. (shrink)

This paper tries to motivate three desiderata for historical epistemologies: (a) that they should be reflective about the pedigree of their conceptual apparatus; (b) that they must face up to the potentially relativistic consequences of their historicism; and (c) that they must not forget the hard-won lessons of microhistory (i.e. historical events must be explained causally; historical events must not be artificially divided into internal/intellectual and external/social “factors” or “levels”; and constructed series of homogenous events must not be treated as (...) quasi-organisms). Ian Hacking’s work on styles of reasoning and Lorraine Daston’s and Peter Galison’s investigation into epistemic virtues are used to identify the costs of neglecting these desiderata. (shrink)

It is often claimed that epistemological thought divides around the issue of the place of experience in knowledge: While empiricists argue that experience is the only legitimate source of knowledge, rationalists find other such sources. The trouble with such accounts is not that they are wrong, but that they are incomplete. On occasion, epistemological differences run deeper, raising the very notion of experience as an issue for epistemology. This paper looks at two epistemological debates which concerned not simply the place (...) of experience in knowledge but also the appropriate account of experience itself. The first episode is the rise of Marburg Neo-Kantianism in the 1870s – in particular the seminal work of Hermann Cohen in his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (1871). Cohen's principal point was that Kant's significance as an epistemologist was in providing a new theory of experience, one that tied experience to exact science and led to a new stress on the formal conditions of exact knowledge. The second episode is Carnap's rejection of epistemology in the 1930s in favour of a program of the logic of science. My focus in each case will be the interplay between an epistemology focused on exact science as the locus of knowledge and a concomitant call for logical methods in epistemology. (shrink)

Intellectual history in the United States has long borne a peculiarly close kinship to social history. The twin fields rose together a century ago in a filial revolt against the cloistered, conservative study of political institutions. Sharing a progressive interest in social thought and social reform, they joined in the self-styled “social and intellectual history” of the interwar decades. After mid-century, however, they moved in divergent directions. Many social historians adopted the quantitative methods of the social sciences, documenting the diverse (...) experiences of workers, women, immigrants, slaves, native peoples, and others often marginalized in the textual record as well as the property regimes, modes of production, patterns of inheritance and mobility, and large-scale demographic and environmental forces that governed their lives. Intellectual historians tended to favor the qualitative evidence gleaned from the more cohesive letters and libraries of traditional elites, specializing in close readings of the intricate discursive, aesthetic, and spiritual templates of social experience found in religion, science, philosophy, political theory, and art and literature. Both subdisciplines had come into parallel crises by the 1980s, chastened by postmodern attacks on “master narratives” of any kind, whether idealist or materialist. In the decades since, social historians have sought a more nuanced consideration of thought and culture, while intellectual historians have at once broadened the range of their subjects and sources and limited more carefully the claims they make for them. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDieser Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit den öffentlichen Debatten über die Genealogie der polnischen Sozialwissenschaften nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Es wird gezeigt, wie sich in der Periode zwischen dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges (1945) und der Stalinisierung der polnischen Wissenschaft im Rahmen des „Ersten Kongresses der polnischen Wissenschaft“ (1951) die Grenzen des Erlaubten in öffentlichen Diskussionen über die wissenschaftliche Identität der Soziologie verschoben haben. Der Artikel, der vor allem auf der Analyse der öffentlichen Haltung des Organisators der soziologischen Gruppe Józef Chałasiński (...) basiert ist, beschreibt die Entwicklungsetappen des öffentlichen Diskurses über die akademische Tradition der Sozialwissenschaften, die den zunehmenden Einfluss der politischen Agenda auf die wissenschaftliche Praxis widerspiegeln. Obwohl unmittelbar nach dem Krieg die Kontinuität mit der Zwischenkriegstradition und der „limitierte Charakter“ des marxistischen Ansatzes betont wurden, hat die beginnende Stalinisierung des öffentlichen Raums 1948 dazu geführt, dass die politische Rolle der Soziologie, die zusammen mit dem Marxismus dem progressiven Lager angehörte, zum zentralen Punkt ihrer eigenen Genealogie wurde. Die Schließung der soziologischen Abteilungen und Zeitschriften zwischen 1950 und 1951 markierten dabei die neue Etappe im Rahmen der Vorbereitungssitzungen zum ersten wissenschaftlichen Kongress. Eine der Hauptaufgaben für die Sozialwissenschaften im Rahmen dieses Kongresses bestand darin, gemeinsam mit den Philosophen eine progressive wissenschaftliche Tradition Polens zu konstruieren. Der Kongress wurde für die polnischen Wissenschaftler zur Aufgabe mit bekanntem Ergebnis und mehreren obligatorischen Elementen wie einer „fortschrittlichen nationalen Tradition“, dem „Marxismus-Leninismus“ und einem „Sechsjahresplan“ zu verfassen. Trotz des starken Drucks von Seiten der Politik konnten die Teilnehmer der Diskussionen keinen Kompromiss im Hinblick auf die progressive Tradition der polnischen Sozialwissenschaften finden und so die notwendige „Einheit“ erreichen. (shrink)

Historical epistemology is a form of intellectual history focused on “the history of categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation”. Under this umbrella, historians have been studying the changing meanings of “objectivity,” “impartiality,” “curiosity,” and other virtues believed to be conducive to good scholarship. While endorsing this historicization of virtues and their corresponding vices, the present article argues that the meaning and relative importance of these virtues and vices can only be (...) determined if their mutual dependencies are taken into account. Drawing on a detailed case study—a controversy that erupted among nineteenth-century orientalists over the publication of R. P. A. Dozy'sDe Israëlieten te Mekka —the paper shows that nineteenth-century orientalists were careful to examine the degree to which Dozy practiced the virtues they considered most important, the extent to which these virtues were kept in balance by other ones, the extent to which these virtues were balanced by other scholars’ virtues, and the extent to which they were expected to be balanced by future scholars’ work. Consequently, this article argues that historical epistemology might want to abandon its single-virtue focus in order to allow balances, hierarchies, and other dependency relations between virtues and vices to move to the center of attention. (shrink)

This article deals with the public debates on the genealogy of Polish social sciences after the Second World War. The author shows how the changes in political conditions in the period between the end of the war (1945) and the ‘Stalinisation’ of Polish science at the First Congress of Polish Science (1951) influenced the ‘limits of the permissible’ in public discussions about the scientific identity of sociology. The article describes the stages in the development of public discourse on the genealogy (...) of the social sciences and thematises the increasing influence of the political agenda on the public practices of academics. When, immediately after the war, continuity with inter-war tradition, and the limited character of the Marxist approach, were particularly emphasised in the public discourse on the genealogy of social sciences, the beginning of the ‘Stalinisation’ of public space in 1948 forced the scholars to put emphasis on the political role of sociology, which, according to them, belonged to the ‘progressive camp’ together with Marxism. The closing of the sociological departments, and a journal, between 1950 and 1951 started a new stage of the debates within the preparatory meetings for the scientific congress. At this congress, the task of the social scientists was to construct, together with philosophers, a ‘progressive scientific tradition’ in Poland. For the Polish social scientists, the congress was a task to write a ‘mathematical equation’ with a known result and several mandatory elements such as ‘the progressive national tradition,’ ‘Marxism-Leninism,’ and ‘six-year plan.’ However, even under strong political pressure, the participants in the discussions did not come to a compromise concerning the progressive tradition of the Polish social sciences, and did not achieve the necessary ‘unity.’. (shrink)