Handbook for the Historiography of Science (Historiographies of Science) [1st ed. 2023] 3031275098, 9783031275098

Table of contents :
Series Preface
Volume Preface
Contents
About the Series Editor
About the Volume Editors
Contributors
Part I: Key Authors for the Historiography of Science
1 Pierre Duhem: Between the Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History
Introduction
Shared Prejudice up Until Les origines de la statique
The Historiographic Turn: From Les origines de la statique Until Mid-1908
The Persistence Toward Medieval Dynamics: The Attribution of Importance to John Buridan and Nicole Oresme and Its Consequences
The Philosophy of History
The Idea of Providence as the Ruler of History
The Positive Role of Errors
The Historical Conditionings and the Search for Precursors
A Legalistic History
Duhemian (Dis) continuism in Question
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
2 The Origins of Alexandre Koyré´s History of Scientific Thought
Introduction: An ``Almost Inevitable Passage´´
Copernicus
Galileo
Descartes
The Topography of a Concept
Uncertainty, Disarray, and the Way Out of the Crisis
The Problem of Philosophy
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
3 Gaston Bachelard and Historical Epistemology: A New Perspective for the History of Science in the Twentieth Century
Introduction
A Perspective for the History of Science: The Bachelardian Epistemology
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
4 The Case of Life in the Historiography of Modern Science: Canguilhem´s ``Biophilosophy´´
Introduction
Canguilhem´s Historical Epistemology and His Time
The Historical Epistemology of Life
Scientific Facts as Vital Facts
Epistemologist or Philosopher of Life? One or Many Canguilhems
The Obstacles to Scientific Knowledge of Life
History of Science, Historical Epistemology, and Historical Epistemology of the Life Sciences
Biological Philosophy and Vitalist Themes
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
5 Ludwik Fleck: Thought Style and Thought Collective in the Historiography of Science
Introduction
The Thought Collective and Its Thought Style
A Biological Model for the Historiography of Science
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
6 John Desmond Bernal and ``Bernalism´´
Introduction
Cambridge ``High Science´´ in the 1920s
The London 1931 Congress and the Development of History of Science
The Social Function of Science
War Research and History of Science
Science in History
History of Science at Cambridge
``Bernalism´´ and the New Britain
The Decline of ``Bernalism´´ and the Birth of STS
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
7 Thomas Kuhn´s Legacy for the Historiography of Science
Introduction
Paradigms, Scientific Revolutions, and Incommensurability
History Versus Philosophy: The Debate Between Kuhn and Popper
History Versus Sociology: Kuhn and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
The Kuhnian Legacy: Historical and Social Aspects, Evolution and Language in the Construction of Science
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
8 Bourdieu and the Social History of Scientific Reason
Introduction
Biographical Sketches
The Foundational Role of Historical Epistemology
History and Social Temporalities
Sociology and Social History of Science
Beyond Logicism and Relativism: Historicist Rationalism
Reflexivity and the Social History of Social Sciences
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
9 History of Science as History of Our Best Errors: Joseph Agassi’s Critical Historiography of Science
Introduction - The Historian´s Tasks: Explanation, Reconstruction, Assessment
The Inductivist Approach
The Conventionalist Approach
The Critical Approach
A Popperian Path
A (Keplerian) Footnote to Agassi
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
10 Embodied Boundaries of Historical Studies of Science: A Vision of Steven Shapin´s Historiography
Introduction
A Sociological Wittgenstein for the History of Science
The Mundaneness of the History of Science
Science Incarnated
The Boundaries of Scientific Practice
From the Receiver of the Air-Pump to the Stomach of the Spokesman for Reality
The Public-Private Tension in Knowledge-Making Spaces
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
11 Ian Hacking´s Contributions to Historical Reflection on Science
Introduction
Words in Their Sites
Historical Ontology and Historical Meta-Epistemology
Styles of Scientific Reasoning
The History and Philosophy of Science in Hacking´s Project
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
12 Lorraine Daston´s Historical Epistemology: Style, Program, and School
Introduction
The Development of a Style: ``Historical Epistemology´´ as ``History´´
The Imagination of Possible
History of Science Without Structure
From Epistemology to the Ethos and Back Again
The Scientific Self in Motion
Conclusion: Historical Epistemology, Medicine, or Poison?
Cross-References
References
Part II: Concepts and Conceptions in the Historiography of Science
13 The Historiography of Scientific Revolutions: A Philosophical Reflection
Introduction
A Brief History of the Concept of Scientific Revolution
An Overview of the Main Philosophical Analyses of Scientific Revolutions
The Unit of Analysis Reconsidered
Scientific Development Reconsidered
Single-Line Versus Multiline Models of Scientific Development
The Web of Scientific Development
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
14 Historical Epistemology: A German Connection
Introduction
The Return of the Philosophy of Nature
Science and History
History and Philosophy
The Structural Continuity of Scientific Concepts
Conclusions
Cross-References
References
15 The French Style in the Philosophy of the Sciences
Introduction
The ``French Network´´
For a History of the History of the Sciences: Auguste Comte and the French Style in the Philosophy of the Sciences
School, Tradition, or Style?
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
16 The Beginning of the Epistemological History of Science: Gaston Bachelard´s Responsibility
Introduction
The Origin of the Expression ``Historical Epistemology´´
Towards a Dialectic Between ``Follow´´ and ``Guide´´
What History Teaches Epistemology
Towards the Unconscious of Scientific Practices and Theories
Between History and Epistemology
The ``Phenomeno-Technology´´
``All History Must Be Judged´´
Canguilhem´s Task
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
Part III: Historiography of Science from Modern Science to Contemporary Scientific World
17 Early Historiography of Science
Introduction
The Status of Mathematics
Scientific Biography
The Heroization of the Scientist
Galileo and His Followers
The Biographical Style Spreads North: France
English Biography of Scientists
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
18 On the Interpretations of the Cultural and Techno-Scientific Significance of Portuguese Navigations: A Historiographic Appr...
Introduction
António Sérgio, Jaime e Armando Cortesão: Experimentalism and the Geographical Revolution
Joaquim Barradas De Carvalho: A Prehistory of Modern Thought
Reijer Hooykaas: Sophisticated Empiricism and Science in Manueline Style
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
19 ``The Herodotus of Geometry´´: Montucla and the Birth of a General Historiography of Science in the French Enlightenment
Introduction
Montucla Before the Histoire des mathématiques: Between Newtonianism and Erudition
D´Alembert and Montucla: Shaping Enlightenment Historiography of Science
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
20 Leonhard Euler´s Works on the Motion of the Moon: A Historiographical Shift
Introduction
Euler Moon Theory Studies: the Construction of a Research Field in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century
A Lost Historiographical Debate: Euler´s Heritage After the Construction of the Hill-Brown Theory and the 1933 Discussion
Euler´s Heritage After World War II
Euler´s Moon Theory in the Historiography of Science at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
Sources
Bibliography
21 The Emergence of a Sophisticated Historiography of Science in Continental Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century
Introduction
German Historicism and French Positivism
German Histories of Science
French Histories of Science
Concluding Remarks
Cross-References
References
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
22 Feynman´s Frameworks on Nanotechnology in Historiographical Debate
An Outline
The First Steps of a New Science
The Structure of This Chapter
Introduction
There´s Plenty of Room at the Bottom
Defining Nanotechnology in the Years
Plenty of Room, Crossing the History
Nanotechnology as a Hidden Scientific Revolution
Is a Founding Document Necessary?
Should We Consider Feynman a Necessary Pioneer?
Addendum to the Historiographical POR Debate
Reading POR in the Timeline Literature
Historiographical Approaches
Is POR an Evident Cornerstone?
Historiography of a Scientific Debate
Concluding Remarks
References
23 Cosmopolitical Propositions: A Historiographic Analysis of Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives on Sciences
Introduction
The Ontological Turn in Anthropology
Cosmopolitics
How Historical Narratives Are Written in the Field of Cosmopolitics
Bruno Latour´s Symmetrical Narratives
Isabelle Stengers´ Cosmopolitical Narratives
Dipesh Chakrabarty´s ``Climate Changing´´ Narrative
Final Remarks
Cross-References
References
Part IV: Historiography of Science and Related Fields
24 Science, Religion, and the Creation of Historiographical Categories
Introduction
The History of the Origins of Science and the Origins of the History of Science
Colonizing and Decolonizing Science and Religion
Science, Religion, and Nationalism
Science, Religion, and the Modern Nation
Science as Nation
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
25 Postcolonial and Decolonial Historiography of Science
Introduction
The ``Wrong Questions´´ and the Diffusionist Answer
Reactions to the Diffusionist Model and Innovative Replies
Theoretical Propositions to Escape from the Diffusionist Model
Challenges for Further Developments
Conclusions
Cross-References
References
26 Historiography of Science and Gender
Introduction
From Women´s History to Gender Studies: Looking Back to the Future
Gender Equality and Historiography of Science
Women as Researches and Subject of Research: Lessons from History
Challenges and Perspectives in the Digital Age
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
27 Historiography of Science and the Relationship Between History and the History of Science
Introduction
Reflections on the Possibilities for a Historical Historiography of Science
Historiography of Science in the Light of Historiography
Historiography as a Concept of History: Toward a ``Historiographical Operation´´ of Science
From Theoretical Reflection to Methodology
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
28 Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History: Toward a Rapprochement Between Disciplines That Never Ruptured
Introduction
Plan for the Chapter
Part 1: Historiography
Part 2: Historiography of Science
Part 3: Philosophy of History
Part 3.1: Hempel´s Contribution to the Philosophy of History - and Reactions to Hempel
Part 4: Further Observations, Hesse (Again), and Prospects for an Interdisciplinary Confraternity
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
Index

Citation preview

Historiographies of Science

Mauro L. Condé · Marlon Salomon Editors

Handbook for the Historiography of Science

Historiographies of Science Series Editor Michael R. Dietrich, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

The goal of this series is to provide definitive assessments of the historiography and the future of major fields and approaches within the history of science. Each volume will address the major trends in historical thought within a particular field, the major debates among historians of that field, and promising new directions that may shape future scholarship. Each volume is framed in terms of what a scholar should know about the history of work in that area, if they wanted to make a meaningful and original contribution to that field. Each volume will be written by experts in that field for graduate students and other scholars new to the history of that field. While other areas of history have extensive historiographic literatures, history of science has fewer resources from which to draw. The paucity of historiographical reflections by leading scholars in the history of science makes it more difficult for new scholars to join the field, as they try to assess the traditions of research on their own. These volumes will offer an informed introduction to major issues that will foster new, original research in the history of science. Editors will be asked to select topic areas/ fields that they think have had a substantial and diverse body of scholarship. Each volume will be informed by different methods, theories, and perspectives that can be compared and contrasted in each volume.

Mauro L. Conde´ • Marlon Salomon Editors

Handbook for the Historiography of Science With 12 Figures and 6 Tables

Editors Mauro L. Condé Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Marlon Salomon Universidade Federal de Goiás Goiânia, Brazil

ISSN 2523-7748 ISSN 2523-7756 (electronic) Historiographies of Science ISBN 978-3-031-27509-8 ISBN 978-3-031-27510-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Series Preface

While some areas of history have extensive historiographic literatures, the history of science has fewer resources from which to draw than most. This scarcity of historiographical reflections by leading scholars makes it more challenging for newcomers who must try to assess traditions of historical research as they frame their own contribution to the history of science. As informed introductions to major themes in the writing of the history of science, we hope that this series will both help foster original research in the history of science and further discussion regarding historiographic trends. The goal of this series is to provide an assessment of the historiography and future of major approaches within the history of science. Each volume addresses the major trends in historical thought within a particular field, the major debates among historians of that field, and promising new directions that may shape future scholarship. Written for graduate students or scholars new to the history of science, each volume is framed in terms of what a scholar should know about the history of work in that area, if they wanted to make a meaningful and original contribution to that field. The volumes in the historiography of science series are not intended to provide comprehensive reviews of every topic discussed in the history of science. Editors of individual volumes select topic areas and fields that they think have had a substantial and diverse body of scholarship that have been informed by different methods, theories, and perspectives. Because we would like to foster more conversation about historiography, we see the idiosyncrasies of individual chapters not as flawed and partial perspectives but as opportunities to articulate diverse perspectives through an ongoing conversation. These volumes are open for revision through Springer’s Meteor publishing platform. Please engage with the authors and editors and help push this historiographic dialogue further. Michael R. Dietrich

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Volume Preface

The Handbook for the Historiography of Science aims to perform a critical and broad assessment of the historiography of science produced from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. The volume examines the prominent thinkers that have significantly impacted the historiography of science, as well as the concepts, interpretive approaches, and schools of thought associated with the historiography of science. It also analyzes the historical circumstances of the rise of the history of science as an intellectual discipline in the modern period and the various connections between the historiography of science and related areas of thought. This book examines the historiography of science in terms of the epistemological criteria and choices that guided the writing of the history of science in its different contexts. Instead of simply providing an account of the various possibilities of historiographical approaches to science, the following chapters assess the bases, possibilities, and scope of the different historiographical conceptions, authors, and traditions that have established the writing of the history of science. This volume seeks to understand the extent to which some of the most influential historiographical approaches, followed by hundreds of historians of science, have generated new interpretive insights into the task of thinking historically and philosophically about scientific activity. Throughout the twentieth century, philosophers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and scientists themselves have produced histories of science with varied forms of analysis. So, the historiography of the sciences is an essentially transdisciplinary field. It is somewhat like a delta in which the waters of science, history, sociology, and philosophy flow together. Thus, a reconstruction of the history of the historiography of science entails, from the outset, recognizing the plurality and diversity of its critical trajectories. During the twentieth century, these varied historiographic analyses contributed to the idea that science has a “historicity.” At the beginning of that century, a positivist vision prevailed, which sought to conceive a history of science that described the “objectivity” of scientific knowledge in a mere chronological succession. However, throughout the same century, scholars also argued that science is a social product made by women and men in well-defined contexts. These contexts contribute to the final result of what is produced by science. Today, a history of science understood vii

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Volume Preface

primarily as description or mere representation is considered anachronistic and banished from the horizon of the science of history. We overcame a “positivist epistemology” to construct different historiographic perspectives on the writing of the history of science. The volume analyzes these historiographies in their crossreferences and transversals, their divergences, their points of support, their continuities and discontinuities, their innovations and impasses, their promoters, their institutions and their social inscriptions, their successes, but also their failures. The Handbook for the Historiography of Science is intended to foster a conversation about the historiographic traditions that have constructed the history of science. It can be conceived as a reference work not only for professional historians and philosophers but also for academics from different backgrounds who are new to the study of the history and philosophy of science, be they scientists from different fields or young researchers from various backgrounds who want to begin learning about the history and philosophy of science. This volume, we hope, serves as a reliable resource to inspire and promote that conversation. Belo Horizonte, Brazil Goiânia, Brazil June 2023

Mauro L. Condé Marlon Salomon

Contents

Part I 1

2

3

4

5

Key Authors for the Historiography of Science . . . . . . . . . . .

1

Pierre Duhem: Between the Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fábio Rodrigo Leite

3

The Origins of Alexandre Koyré’s History of Scientific Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marlon Salomon

29

Gaston Bachelard and Historical Epistemology: A New Perspective for the History of Science in the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . Fábio Ferreira de Almeida

49

The Case of Life in the Historiography of Modern Science: Canguilhem’s “Biophilosophy” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Charles Wolfe and Giulia Gandolfi

63

Ludwik Fleck: Thought Style and Thought Collective in the Historiography of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mauro L. Condé and Paweł Jarnicki

83

6

John Desmond Bernal and “Bernalism” Daniele Cozzoli

....................

101

7

Thomas Kuhn’s Legacy for the Historiography of Science . . . . . . Mauro L. Condé

121

8

Bourdieu and the Social History of Scientific Reason Gerardo Ienna

..........

145

9

History of Science as History of Our Best Errors: Joseph Agassi’s Critical Historiography of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . Stefano Gattei

173

Embodied Boundaries of Historical Studies of Science: A Vision of Steven Shapin’s Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . María de los Ángeles Martini

189

10

ix

x

11

12

Contents

Ian Hacking’s Contributions to Historical Reflection on Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . María Laura Martínez

209

Lorraine Daston’s Historical Epistemology: Style, Program, and School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gabriel da Costa Ávila and Tiago Santos Almeida

229

Part II Concepts and Conceptions in the Historiography of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

The Historiography of Scientific Revolutions: A Philosophical Reflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yafeng Shan

255

257

14

Historical Epistemology: A German Connection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Juan A. Queijo Olano and Antonio A. P. Videira

275

15

The French Style in the Philosophy of the Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . Jean-François Braunstein

293

16

The Beginning of the Epistemological History of Science: Gaston Bachelard’s Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Enrico Castelli Gattinara

Part III Historiography of Science from Modern Science to Contemporary Scientific World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Early Historiography of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael Segre

18

On the Interpretations of the Cultural and Techno-Scientific Significance of Portuguese Navigations: A Historiographic Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . João Príncipe

19

20

21

“The Herodotus of Geometry”: Montucla and the Birth of a General Historiography of Science in the French Enlightenment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Giorgio Matteoli

315

337 339

355

377

Leonhard Euler’s Works on the Motion of the Moon: A Historiographical Shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dmitri Starostin

397

The Emergence of a Sophisticated Historiography of Science in Continental Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . Stefano Bordoni

419

Contents

22

23

Feynman’s Frameworks on Nanotechnology in Historiographical Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Raffaele Pisano and Andrea Durlo

441

Cosmopolitical Propositions: A Historiographic Analysis of Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives on Sciences . . . . . . . Nathan Willig Lima

479

Part IV 24

xi

Historiography of Science and Related Fields . . . . . . . . . .

Science, Religion, and the Creation of Historiographical Categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jaume Navarro and Kostas Tampakis

501

503

25

Postcolonial and Decolonial Historiography of Science . . . . . . . . . Silvia F. de M. Figueirôa

523

26

Historiography of Science and Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrea Reichenberger

543

27

Historiography of Science and the Relationship Between History and the History of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrea Mara R. S. Vieira

28

Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History: Toward a Rapprochement Between Disciplines That Never Ruptured . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matt Waldschlagel

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

565

589 617

About the Series Editor

Michael R. Dietrich is Professor and Chair of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He studied Philosophy and Biology at Virginia Tech before earning a doctorate in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. As a historian and philosopher of twentieth-century biology, his primary interests are in the nature of scientific controversy. In numerous scholarly articles and chapters, he has explored controversies in evolutionary genetics and molecular evolution, as well as controversial figures, such as the émigré geneticist Richard Goldschmidt. He has coedited several books including Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology with Oren Harman (2007), The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences with Nancy Anderson (2012), Biology Outside the Box: Boundary Crossers and Innovation in the Life Sciences with Oren Harman (2013), and Dreamers, Visionaries and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences with Oren Harman (2018). He is currently writing a book on genetic drift with Roberta Millstein and Robert Skipper entitled Survival of the Luckiest: Perspectives on the History and Philosophy of Random Drift in Evolutionary Biology, as well as a biography of Richard Goldschmidt.

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About the Volume Editors

Mauro L. Condé is a Professor of History of Science (Historiography of Science) at the Federal University of Minas Gerais – UFMG (Brazil) since 1998. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy (2001). From 2009 to 2010, he was a visiting scholar at Boston University (USA). He also was a visiting scholar at the University of Vienna in 2016 and the University of São Paulo in 2017. His primary academic interests and research topics focus on the relationship between the historiography of science and epistemology. Author of several articles, book chapters, and books on the historiography of science, he wrote especially on Kuhn and Fleck and the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. He is working on the role of language in the rise of modern science in his current project. He was editor of several books and is currently Editor-in-Chief of Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science. Marlon Salomon is a Professor of Modern History at the Federal University of Goiás – UFG (Brazil) since 2003. He received his Ph.D. in History (2002). In 2006 and 2009, he was a visiting professor on the history of science team at the University of Picardy Jules Verne (France). His main research interest focuses on the relationships between the historiography of science and other academic disciplines, such as philosophy and history. In recent years, he has been dedicating himself to the study of conceptions of temporality in the history of the historiography of science. He is the author of numerous studies on Alexandre Koyré and the development of the historiography of science in France. In addition, he was editor of several books and is currently Editor-inChief of Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science. xv

Contributors

Fábio Ferreira de Almeida Faculty of Philosophy, Federal University of Goiás, Goiânia, Brazil Tiago Santos Almeida History Department, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil Gabriel da Costa Ávila Center of Arts, Humanities and Languages, Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, Cachoeira, Brazil Stefano Bordoni Bologna, Italy Jean-François Braunstein Université de Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France Enrico Castelli Gattinara Ex Università La Sapienza and EHESS, Rome, Italy Mauro L. Condé Department of History, Federal University of Minas Gerais – UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil Daniele Cozzoli Department of Humanities, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain Andrea Durlo IEMN, Lille University-CNRS, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France Silvia F. de M. Figueirôa School of Education, University of Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil Giulia Gandolfi Universita Ca’Foscari Venice, Venice, Italy Université Paris 1 Sorbonne, Paris, France Stefano Gattei Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Italy Gerardo Ienna Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship (MISHA, Horizon 2020; GA: 101026146), University of Verona and University of Maryland, Verona, Italy Paweł Jarnicki Warsaw University of Technology, Warszawa, Poland

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Contributors

Fábio Rodrigo Leite Federal University of São João del-Rei, Ouro Branco, Minas Gerais, Brazil Nathan Willig Lima Physics Department, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil María Laura Martínez Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Institute of Philosophy, School of Humanities and Education Sciences, University of Republic, Montevideo, Uruguay María de los Ángeles Martini Universidad de Buenos Aires/Universidad Nacional de Moreno, Buenos Aires, Argentina Giorgio Matteoli University of Turin, Turin, Italy Jaume Navarro University of the Basque Country and Ikerbasque, San Sebastian, Spain Raffaele Pisano IEMN, Lille University-CNRS, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France João Príncipe Departamento de Física da Universidade de Évora, Centro de Estudos de História e Filosofia da Ciência, Instituto de História Contemporânea, IN2PAST, Évora, Portugal Juan A. Queijo Olano Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay Andrea Reichenberger Fakultät IV/Department Mathematik, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany Marlon Salomon Faculty of History, Federal University of Goiás, Goiânia, Brazil Michael Segre Gabriele D’Annunzio University, Chieti, Italy Yafeng Shan Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China Dmitri Starostin St Petersburg State University, St Petersburg, Russia Kostas Tampakis Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens, Greece Antonio A. P. Videira Universidade do Estado de Rio de Janeiro, CNPq, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Andrea Mara R. S. Vieira Federal University of Minas Gerais – UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil Matt Waldschlagel Anna Maria College, Paxton, MA, USA Charles Wolfe Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse, France

Part I Key Authors for the Historiography of Science

1

Pierre Duhem: Between the Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History Fa´bio Rodrigo Leite

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shared Prejudice up Until Les origines de la statique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Historiographic Turn: From Les origines de la statique Until Mid-1908 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Persistence Toward Medieval Dynamics: The Attribution of Importance to John Buridan and Nicole Oresme and Its Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Philosophy of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Idea of Providence as the Ruler of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Positive Role of Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Historical Conditionings and the Search for Precursors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Legalistic History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Duhemian (Dis) continuism in Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter initially analyzes Pierre Duhem’s incursions in the direction of medieval science, delineating both (a) the genesis of historiographic research brought about by his discoveries regarding medieval statics, which occurred at the end of 1903, and (b) his persistence in that direction resulting from a new set of discoveries, this time associated to medieval dynamics and the names of John Buridan and Nicole Oresme, which occurred in mid-1908. In a second moment, the chapter argues that the Duhemian thinking supports itself on a philosophic vision of historical development present ever since the beginning, in 1892, of his epistemological publications. It underscores that his philosophy of history, essential for sustaining an understanding of the methodology itself, is (a) optimistic insofar as it reveals that the historical events are ruled by a providence that makes F. R. Leite (*) Federal University of São João del-Rei, Ouro Branco, Minas Gerais, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_1

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even the sincere errors of the theoreticians fruitful and that (b) the author embraces a teleological, almost determinist conception of historical evolution as being governed by laws that make predictions of the future of theories possible. Lastly, based on the preceding considerations, the intention is to draft a synthetic and coherent position regarding the supposed (dis)continuism attributed to our historian. Keywords

Continuism · Determinism · Historical laws · Medieval science · Methodology · Philosophy of history · Physical theory · Pierre Duhem · Providence · Scientific revolution

Introduction As a qualified physicist, Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (1861–1916) found that his scientific activities naturally inspired him to produce a philosophy of science. In turn, he was always pensative about having recourse to history as the means of illustrating or materializing his main philosophical theses. Indeed, prior to the initial publication of Les origines de la statique in the second half of 1903, that was basically the role which the historical narrative performed in his publications. Everything took place as if the history of science could legitimize his philosophy and, a ulteriori, his scientific conception. However, during and after his writing of Les origines, Duhem’s history acquired a certain degree of autonomy in relation to his scientific project, no longer being a mere epistemological “test laboratory,” but becoming largely independent and endowed with an agenda of its own. (More precisely, in practically all Duhemian historiographic works, his theses on the development of science, especially their conclusions and prefaces, end up being used in the defense of positions transcendent to the history itself, be it apologetic (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 438–448), nationalist (Duhem 1906–1913/1984, v. 3: xiii–xiv), or methodological (Duhem 1913–1959, v. 2: 50–179), etc. That observation reinforces the unity of Duhemian thought.) New concerns arose such as with dating and certifying the authenticity of various medieval manuscripts, studies on inheritance and the dissemination of specific editions among European universities, as well as the affiliation of ideas that would make it possible to establish research priorities and traditions. Examples of early publications that sought to reveal innovative medieval contributions are Études sur Léonard de Vinci and the later works Le mouvement absolu et le mouvement relatif and Le système du monde, along the same lines. What we might call his “historiographic turn” took place in a very specific way: it was the (re)discovery of medieval manuscripts, forgotten by tradition, but in which the historiographer discerned contributions heralding the advent of modern statics that made him start the production of a revisionist reading worthy of the attention of genuine historians. Thus, the relative autonomy of history actually came about as result of the discovery of a medieval science in the form of statics. It is impossible for us to describe the former without referring to the latter.

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However, we should not suppose that Duhem’s discoveries were limited to those first moments insofar as between April and June of 1908 a new set of discoveries, this time related to dynamics, took our historian by surprise. While he was writing Le mouvement, Sauver les apparences, and the second volume of Études, Duhem came across John Buridan’s version of the impetus theory, in which Duhem descried a rudimentary anticipation of the Law of Inertia and the unification of terrestrial and celestial mechanics, announcing a rupture with the peripatetic cosmos. Parallel to those events, he devoted unprecedented attention to the thinking of Nicole Oresme. Duhem lost no time in relating the emergence of Buridan and Oresme’s theoretical essays with the recently discovered impact of the condemnations of March 7, 1277, promulgated by Bishop Stephen Tempier in Paris, against pagan necessitarism, considering it a milepost in the occidental thinking’s liberation from the yoke of Aristotelianism and expanding the scope of his astronomical analyses to theological and cosmological contexts. That being said, we can sum up his ways of dealing with medieval science as follows: in an initial period, it was practically absent, mainly consisting of marginal and negative comments; in a second, he addressed it in depth and exalted its fecundity. This second moment can be divided into two: a first moment of genesis in which Duhem exhibits the medieval anticipations in regard to statics and a second moment of persistence in which he attributes seminal importance to the dynamics and the astronomy of the Parisian masters. We will now pass on to brief portrayal of the first of those three stages.

Shared Prejudice up Until Les origines de la statique On various occasions in his early articles, Duhem unabashedly propagated the predominant prejudice of his day in regard to medieval science. In his work Les théories de l’optique, he starts his historical narrative with Descartes and insists that with the exception of astronomy, hydrostatics, and the great principles of statics, nothing was obtained in the Middle Ages and in Antiquity “other than incoherent and poorly observed facts” (Duhem 1894: 94). To him, the end of the Renaissance marks the adolescence of the modern world, the moment in which ideas spring up on every side to form the modern tradition. Again, in Les théories de la chaleur, the exposition only goes back a mere “three centuries” into the past. In it, the scholastics are negatively described as obstinate defenders of peripatetic qualitativism in regard to heat, thereby making its quantification and transformation into the modern theoretical concept of temperature all the more difficult (Duhem 1895/2002: 126–127). A more explicit example can be found in L’évolution des théories physiques, in which the opening paragraph proffers these words: “The theories of modern physics are born of a reaction against scholastic philosophy” (Duhem 1896/ 2002: 193). Modern physics, Duhem declares, is born against scholastic philosophy, not due to it. On various occasions, he describes scholastic thinking as being like an ancient incoherent building, his commentaries as being strange and narrow, his explanations puerile, and his set of themes, riddled with all sorts of personal affinities

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and antipathies, as bizarre (Duhem 1896/2002: 196). Only with Galileo, the true founder of modern physics was man to learn how to study nature, to conduct an experiment adequately interpreting its results, and to use the apparat of mathematics in a precise and scientific manner (Duhem 1896/2002: 197). Even in the main works that preceded Les origines de la statique, albeit he did not summarily ignore them altogether, he described the Middle Ages as being scientifically unfruitful. In L’évolution de la mécanique, he resumed his criticism of the Scholastics: “The renaissance of the sciences at the beginning of the 17th century was a violent reaction against such explanations” based on occult qualities (Duhem 1903: 13). The period distinction seems to be quite clear: up until the end of the sixteenth century, the influence of the decadent scholasticism was still decisively felt, whereas modern science, born in opposition to it, began in the seventeenth century. In regard to that change, the historian Duhem went so far as to elaborate a study project that consisted of tracing the moon’s antics in the light of the struggle between the old scholasticism and the new physics, the Newtonian physics (Duhem 1903: 32). The medieval development of statics continued to be missing up to that point.

The Historiographic Turn: From Les origines de la statique Until Mid-1908 Many authors have analyzed the chronology of the example that represents the liberation of Duhemian thinking from the ideology of the positivist/enlightenment tradition. Jaki (1984: 384–388), Martin (1991: 147–162), Brenner (1990: 144–146), Patapievici (2015: 203–206), and Leite (2015) have all discoursed on the case from similar points of view. Thus, a succinct account of that subject should be sufficient for us to calibrate the extent to which the French author’s perspective changed. The first article of the series that would eventually compose the first four chapters of Les origines de la statique was published in October 1903 in the Revue des questions scientifiques. Very few mentions of medieval statics can be found in it, and that was justified by the declaration that the scholastic comments on statics “added nothing essential to the ideas of the Stagirite” and that “to see these ideas develop new branches and bear new fruits, one must wait for the beginning of the 16th century” (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 16). The next number of the Revue came out in January 1904, but, significantly, without the expected article by Duhem. The series was only resumed in the April number and in its fifth chapter took a chronological step back from the sixteenth century to address The Alexandrian sources of Medieval statics. In it, the enigmatic figure of Jordanus de Nemore and of his Elementa Jordani Super Demonstrationem Ponderis emerged. After historically introducing that treatise, the sixth chapter entitled Statics During the Middle Ages – Jordanus de Nemore makes an unhurried analysis of Jordanus’s originality, and he is portrayed as the inheritor of one tradition and the initiator of another (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 75). Creator of a veritable school, Jordanus’s ideas, according to Duhem, gave rise to an intense intellectual movement in the Middle Ages (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 92). In the preface to the first volume of Les origins, Duhem (1905–1906/1991: 7)

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registers the “unforeseen observations” of his research and adds “little did we know that our research would lead to a complete rethinking of the entire history of statics.” With the modifications brought about by “totally unforeseen conclusions,” Duhem felt the need to justify the work’s disorderly structure. It was necessary, he felt, to get back to the Middle Ages to demonstrate how the thirteenth century had been a century of intellectual activity at the heart of which an autonomous statics developed that was independent of any ancient acquisitions (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 8). In the wake of that discovery of the figure of Jordanus de Nemore, Duhem devoted unpremeditated attention to a new character, Albert of Saxony, and to him, Duhem dedicated an initially unplanned second volume of Les origines. Ever since the beginning of Les origins, Duhem (1905–1906/1991: 12) had been anxious to publish a work on the history of dynamics in which he intended to delineate the main stages of the “gigantic” intellectual efforts that had led to the rejection of the peripatetic dynamics and the consequent adherence to the Galilean dynamics, paying special attention to the thinking of Leonardo da Vinci and Cardano (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 34). Initially, that intention gave rise to an article, De l’accélération produite par une force constante: Notes pour servir a l’histoire de la dynamique, and later to the Études sur Léonard de Vinci. However, it should be noted that even after he had exhibited the originality of medieval statics in his work Les origines, Duhem (1905–1906/1991: 91) felt comfortable in stating that the peripatetic axiom that established the proportionality between force and velocity would only come to be surpassed with the “revolution which took place in dynamics in the 16th century.” Thus, while in 1904 Duhem’s conceptions regarding the history of statics had already altered, his views on the history of dynamics remained practically unshaken: Ancient dynamics was condensed in this law: the velocity of a moving body is proportional to the force that propels it. Modern dynamics states that the force is proportional to the acceleration. More than any other cause, the works of Galileo contributed to the revolution that replaced the ancient dynamics with modern dynamics. (Duhem 1904: 901)

Two factors stand out in the above paragraph. The first, more general one, is the use of the concept “revolution.” Duhem never denied the possibility of the existence of revolutions in the history of science. His continuism was not so exclusive that it led him to completely abandon the category of revolution in areas such as optics, chemistry, dynamics, and astronomy, among others (Leite 2012: 337–348; Stoffel 2017). Generally speaking, there is a real epistemological rupture between peripatetic physics and modern physics, a revolution of grandiose proportions. What the historian did was to attribute importance to the thinking of Buridan and Oresme and push back the birth of modern science, the beginning of the scientific revolution, to the fourteenth century. That also proved to be a way of valorizing his findings. The second, more specific factor, is that the historian still preserved the idea of the existence of a revolution in the sixteenth century. It is his earlier unawareness of Buridan and Oresme’s contributions that explains Duhem’s conservatism. His discovery of Nemore was not sufficient to make Duhem abandon his idea of a

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revolution in Galileo’s century. Nemore achieved advances in statics but not in dynamics. There was nothing in his first discovery that implied the second, given that it would have been considered incapable of generating an ample “research Program” that included the latter. At the time, Duhem was merely sketching out the history of dynamics, and there is nothing that would lead us to believe that he expected any further impacting novelties.

The Persistence Toward Medieval Dynamics: The Attribution of Importance to John Buridan and Nicole Oresme and Its Consequences It seems to have been through the intermediation of George Lokert (1485–1547) that Duhem (1905–1906/1991: 290) obtained his first information regarding Buridan’s influence. However, unlike the contributions of Albert of Saxony, those of the philosopher of Béthune did not receive the slightest attention in Les origines de la statique. The attention paid to Oresme, albeit greater than that devoted to Buridan, was nevertheless scanty. In the final pages of that work, there are two explanatory notes, but only the second one briefly mentions the thinking of the Norman philosopher insofar as he is respected as he “to whom we owe our first notions on coordinates” and as being the author of the work Treatise on the sphere, which was supposed to have contributed to the diffusion of the ideas of the German (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 486–487). In effect, the Bordeaux professor’s focus was still on Albert. We know that in the impetus theory’s explanatory and unifying potential, Duhem (1913–1959, v. 8: 340) would later discern one of the greatest if not the greatest revolutions that ever shook the science of physics. Thus, it behooves us to seek out the earliest references to the said theory in his texts. In De l’accélération produite par une force constante, which traces the historical evolution in the period from antiquity to the seventeenth century, that led to the abandonment of the peripatetic relation of proportionality between the force applied to a body and its velocity, Duhem occupied himself with some of the medieval versions of impetus, but Buridan’s name does not appear associated to any of them. In the first volume of Études sur Léonard de Vinci, he (1906–1913/1984, v. 1: 111) leaves no room for doubt that Albert of Saxony was the first to formulate and clarify the theory and completely ignores the figures of Buridan and Oresme. An examination of the methodological works of the same period reveals that the Picardian philosopher is not even the object of analysis in La théorie physique albeit, in that work, Duhem elaborates a long historical reconstruction of the formation of the universal gravitation theory asserting that it emerged from a “millenary evolution” (Duhem 1991: 222). We are also aware that one of the main methodological theses in Le système du monde consists of a defense of the idea that seeds of modern science planted in the fourteenth century developed under the guardianship of what Duhem (1913–1959, v. 6: 728–729) designated as “Christian positivism.” Only his lack of knowledge of the thinking of the Parisian masters could explain why he, always so anxious to

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historically justify his representationalist method, could have failed to draw on such a large body of support in his major philosophical work. Let us move forward a couple of years. As had been the case with Les origines de la statique, the composition of Le mouvement absolu et le mouvement relatif was not uniform. However, unlike what he had done before, Duhem chose to preserve the chronological order of the chapters, only presenting the results of his more recent research at the end in the form of a long appendix (Duhem 1909a: 208–272). The appendix consists of eight sections and a note, all published between February and March of 1909, that is, after the publication of the conclusion, printed in December 1908. It is worth noting that the order in which the various authors appear in the appendix is not the chronological order of their respective discoveries but instead, as Duhem himself explains, the order in which they should have appeared in the work if they had been written at the appropriate moment (Duhem 1909a: 208). As each of those appendix sections follows a pattern that gives a precise indication of the place they should have occupied in the body of the work, we can determine that the section on Buridan should have been the 12th one. We know that the section in question was actually published on April 1, 1908 (Duhem 1906–1913/1984, v. 3: 247, note 1), and so we can conclude that Duhem did not attribute any importance to Buridan and Oresme until mid-March of that same year. In Sect. XIII (May 1), dedicated to Albert of Saxony, we come across a single, but revealing, paragraph on Oresme which means that at that time, he was already leafing through a manuscript in which the bishop of Lisieux discoursed on the geometric measurement and representation of all quantities and qualities (Duhem 1909a: 111). In Sect. XIV (June 1), dedicated to the Paris School, there is the marginal appearance of the name of the philosopher Béthune, but once again, there is a note explaining that the historian had “consulted” a manuscript Buridan’s in Latin (Duhem 1909a: 128). Those are some of the indications that, for the first time, Duhem was frequenting the thinking of that pair of Parisian theologians. However, given that there had been no mention of the Buridan impetus theory up until that moment, we should not be surprised that it does occur in the following month in another work, Sauver les apparences, published in parallel with the earlier one. In regard to Sauver les apparences, we should be able to find an analysis of the positions of that duo of Parisian masters in the third section on Medieval Christian Scholasticism, but in fact we only find it in the last four paragraphs of the following chapter dedicated to The Renaissance Before Copernicus. Not only is the insertion of the Parisians misplaced but the very manner in which it was produced announces the circumstances in which it emerged. After addressing the influence of the University of Paris in Vienna and in Padua, Duhem ends the said section with the following words: To account for Luiz Coronel’s point of view we do not have to appeal to the influence of Nicholas of Cusa. It would be sufficient to invoke the traditions of the University of Paris; Coronel was merely formulating a rule of procedure constantly observed at that university from the middle of the fourteenth century on, as can be seen from the works of John Buridan, Albert of Saxony, and Nicholas of Oresme, which supply many examples. (Duhem 1969: 60)

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The rule in question conditions the principles of physics to being understood as fictions or abstractions that, albeit incessantly perfectible, were not aimed at achieving the true essence of things. A quick consultation enables us to confirm that the highlighted paragraph interrupts the expositive sequence. Three others follow it, all equally elucidative, in which (i) Buridan’s impetus theory appears linked to the representationalist use that Buridan confers on it; (ii) the tradition of the University of Paris is exalted as having been, for centuries, the depository of the most profound methodological analyses; (iii) Duhem defends the thesis that the Parisian Scholastics adopted the principle that the physics of the sub-lunar and celestial world were of the same nature and therefore should be addressed using the same method, that which seeks exclusively to save the phenomena treated. The introduction of Buridan is extraordinary for various reasons: (a) it is outside of the natural thematic section; (b) even in the section where it occurs, it is in chronological misalignment; (c) the preceding section implied the nonexistence of any other University of Paris professor other than those it mentioned for in the section Duhem established the following generalization: The end of the Middle Ages slips by without that university’s [of Paris] providing us, through its teaching, with any new documents concerning the value of astronomical hypotheses. Astronomy was going through one of those periods of quiet possession when no need is felt to discuss the principles that underlie theory, when all are directing their effort to working out the applications of theory. In the fourteenth century, at Paris, the system of Ptolemy was accepted without argument. (Duhem 1969: 44)

Assuming that what Duhem means by “the end of the Middle Ages” is the period after the writings of John of Jandun (†1328), then it can be concluded that up until that moment, Buridan and Oresme, whom in the following year Duhem referred to as the precursors of Copernicus insofar as they defended the idea of the Earth’s daily rotation, did not represent even the slightest deviation from the general tendency. The strange section that introduces the thinking of Buridan and Oresme was published in the July 1908 edition of Annales de philosophie chrétienne. That July article contained sections 4 and 5 of Sauver les apparences, and in them, there is evidence of the author’s acknowledgment of the value of the Buridanian ideas. As the articles were published monthly, it can be concluded that up until the finalization of the June article, the second in the series, Duhem did not set much value on Buridan’s theories. Intercalating the chronology of the two publications, Le mouvement and Sauver les apparences, we arrive at the conclusion that the historian began to attribute scientific importance to the thinking of the two medieval philosophers in the period between the beginning of April and the end of June 1908. There can be no doubt that Duhem dedicated part of the second half of 1908 to exploring the consequences of his recent discoveries. The long notes added on to the end of the second volume of Études stem from that period during which the fourteenth-century philosopher was the object of some study. In at least three opportunities, two in the notes and one in the preface, there are allusions to the recent nature of those examinations (Duhem 1906–1913/1984, v. 2: 380, 420, iii, respectively).

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Thus, the transition from the first two volumes of Études to the third was not without surprises and resulted in the abandonment of theses and the rearranging of projects in progress. Indeed, it was through the intermediation of that second set of discoveries, this time related to dynamics and astronomy, that Duhem made his name as a historian of medieval science (most of his historiographic works were in fact written from 1909 onward). The new discoveries illuminated important occurrences among which we can name the following: (1) the beginning of publications specifically on Buridan and Oresme. It should be noted that the 1909 article Un précurseur français de Copernic: Nicole Oresme (1377) displayed for the first time Oresme’s precociousness regarding the Earth’s daily movement of rotation; (2) the introduction of the paragraphs upsetting the internal order and coherency of Sauver les apparences; (3) the insertion of the long appendix to Le mouvement absolu et le mouvement relatif whose articles appeared simultaneously with the preceding work; (4) the alterations to the subtitle and arrangement of the third tome of Études sur Léonard de Vinci from Ceux qu’il a lus et ceux qui l’ont lu to Les précurseurs parisiens de Galilée, with the aim of announcing Buridan and Oresme’s medieval anticipations; (5) the course that Duhem began to give, already in 1909, on the “History of the theories of physics and in particular the formation of the Copernican system”; (6) his reassessment of his initial Le système du monde project resulting in the reorientation of his thematic scope from astronomy to cosmology (Duhem had had Le système in mind ever since 1906 (Stoffel 2002: 241). In his initial project, the work was to have been dedicated to the history of the theories of physics up until Copernicus, and it was to be in eight volumes altogether (Duhem 1913–1959, v. 6: v). If, as Jaki (1984: 195) stated, the History course Duhem intended to give in Bourdeaux served to prepare for his work Le système, then we must conclude that there was a change of direction because the subtitle of the published work refers to “The History of the Cosmological Doctrines from Plato to Copernicus.” That redirection sprang from the need to insert into what were merely astronomical questions a cosmological substrate that had sustained them from ancient times through to the Middle Ages. It would not have been possible to describe the astronomic or purely theoretical discussions without their due metaphysicaltheological contextualization, and among those was the theory of impetus. The incorporation of cosmological questions to the initial project led Duhem to increase the number of volumes which he then stipulated as 12 of which ten were actually written.); (7) the alteration of his judgment of Albert of Saxony who went from being described as an original thinker in the second volume of Études to being considered as “more of a disciple than a master” insofar as “his thinking very rarely offers any proof of originality” (Duhem 1913–1959, v. 4: 152; Lemonnier 1917: 31); (8) his argument, common from them on, that the revolution that propitiated the birth of modern science took place in the mid-fourteenth century with the unification of mechanics as tentatively delineated by Buridan and concretized by Newton (Duhem 1913–1959, v. 2: 453; v. 8: 340; 1917: 165; 1906–1913/1984, v. 3: ix; 1913: 537; 1916b: 670); and (9) the predominance, starting in 1909, of Duhemian publications of a historical nature and the decline (at least up until when they were taken up again

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in 1914) of those with a philosophical orientation, in addition to lesser dedication to scientific issues. Thus, Duhem’s great historiographic work, dedicated to extracting the consequences of the two sets of discoveries mentioned above, was no longer to be characterized by that summarized history, directed at physicists, that defended a specific methodological vision to the detriment of opposing visions. Albeit continuing to underscore the links of continuity among the ideas involved and the conditions in which the main concepts that would come to form modern science emerged, his writings would actually come to compose a complex historiography, leaving aside expositive linearity. Reconstructing those conditions was to involve acknowledging seminal discontinuities: the “theological revolution” provoked by the 1277 condemnations (Duhem 1913–1959, v. 2: 453; v. 4: 316), the emphasis on the rupture with peripatetic cosmology that imprisoned human intellect in the spherical and divided universe of the ancient thinkers, and all the metaphysical framework that served as the backdrop for the emergence of modern science were themes to be addressed in depth. In one stroke, the Duhemian historiography operates an examination that illuminates the science of the past but, even so, examines topics which, at first sight, would be dispensable in a history of victorious theories. While it is true that the screening of the themes was to some extent retroactive, the requirement of understanding the ancient texts defined the method to be followed: it was necessary to avoid precipitation, and to make tabula rasa of the studies of past theories (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 12), and to seek out the knowledge, methods, and instruments that were available to those authors, the errors they were liable to and which were almost inevitable for them (Duhem 1913–1959, v. 2: 54). Furthermore, it would be important to know the doctrines among which a given idea springs up in order to be able to properly determine its worth. Hence, Duhem’s criticism of anachronic readings (Duhem 1905–1906/ 1991: 506, note 42) and his precaution when indicating medieval anticipations of modern concepts (Duhem 1913–1959, v. 8: 336). In a way, Duhem criticizes the type of narrative that he had composed himself up until 1903.

The Philosophy of History Insofar as medieval science was a relative latecomer in Duhem’s work, a veritable philosophy of history accompanies it from the primordial moments through to the last of his publications. We will see how that philosophy has some notable features from which we can derive a strictly continuist vision of physics theories, namely, the unificationism of its development, given that science would pass from diversity toward an ever-increasing unity; continuity through the complexity, in the sense that the science of physics progresses, despite all the mishaps and regressions, in the direction of that unity; and philosophical optimism, whereby the historical evolution would supposedly be regulated by a superior, providential plane. Let us turn to this last point at once.

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The Idea of Providence as the Ruler of History We know that the Duhemian concept of physics theory, at least in a statics analysis, is close to the positivist vision insofar as both of them set out to drain the theories of their ontological content. On that point, the main difference between them is that instead of the elimination of metaphysics or its relegation to the ambit of pure irrational faith, Duhem was concerned, above all, to guarantee the autonomy of physics’ hypotheses in the face of the cosmological systems. From then on, redirected to outside of the theoretical justification context, metaphysics would find an appropriate place for its development in history. Duhem’s rupture with positivism intensified as much at the level of the history of sciences, by underscoring the fecundity of medieval science and refusing to see the progress as essentially revolutionary, as at the level of the philosophy of history, by introducing the notion of divine Providence as the ruler of the historical process. Let us examine this aspect further. In short, the description Duhem offered of the evolution of physics from the seventeenth century on was that after the mechanism revolution that Descartes and his followers conducted, there was a gradual restauration of the qualities they had sought to banish from physics. Atomism salvaged the primitive notion of mass from its Cartesian exclusion as one of matter’s primary qualities. The advent of Newtonianism restored the notions of force and in the nineteenth century came thermodynamics. This last conceded ample space to qualities that had been framed as being irreducible to exclusively mechanical qualities. In generalized versions, like the one Duhem envisaged, thermodynamics came to serve as the base for mechanics itself, inverting the former relationship of subordination. The French historian insisted, however, that it does not follow from the above that the devotees of mechanism worked in vain: generalized thermodynamics would be equally indebted to Cartesian mathematics, inheritor of the Newtonian synthesis and of the experimental method of Galileo and Pascal. To Duhem, all that was best in the earlier approaches had flowed into it so that in all that immense effort: there is not a traveler whose work has been lost, even if this work has not always been used as the author intended; it often plays a different role in today’s science than the role he attributed to it. It has taken up the place assigned in advance by He who leads all this activity. (Duhem 1896/2002: 213)

Duhem’s philosophy of history enables us to see how, behind all the agitations that make demands on human intellect, there is a progressive order in their development. Thanks to a “guiding idea,” the diversions, the mistakes, in relation to that order, end up being corrected, compensated for, even though it may not be by what their authors had imagined: “The creator of a mechanical doctrine is also unconsciously the precursor of those doctrines that will replace it” (Duhem 1903: 345–346). In the general framework of the evolution of physics theories, men work unconsciously, as if they were serving a “strange” purpose unknown to them: “It seems as if a mysterious force is watching over the progress of statics

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and is able to render beneficial both truth and error alike” (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 445). In spite of all the individual, disperse, and heterogeneous nature of the efforts, the harmonious convergence to increasingly perfect and unified theories observed in the theoretical evolution is fortified by a set of maneuvers that its actors are not conscious of: Even more than the growth of a living being, the evolution of statics is the manifestation of the influence of a guiding idea. Within the complex data of this evolution, we can see the continuous action of a Wisdom which foresees the ideal form towards which science must tend and we can sense the presence of a Power which causes the efforts of all thinkers to converge towards this goal. In a word, we recognize here the work of Providence. (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 447–448)

Duhem presents his argument using an analogy between the developments of a living being and that of physical theory insofar as, despite the contrasts of their superficialities, the complexity and continuity of the theoretical evolution are wonderfully well ordered. They lead us to suspect the existence of a conducting thread, a specific end toward which all the isolated works tend. Well, he argues, if there is indeed a finality that guides (tutors) the exact fitting together of apparently disconnected contributions, it cannot possibly reside in the minds of the physicists themselves, unaware as they always are of the place of their work will occupy in the yet to be theoretical scheme. Given that the future is unknown to them, it follows that the executors of the planning that historically materializes are not the planners themselves. Some are the bricklayers, but the architect will be another. Therefore, total knowledge of the plan is held exclusively by its formulator whose place is above that of ignorant common men. Being wise, that architect knows the plan to be carried out; being powerful, he conducts and causes to converge the individual efforts; being kind, he rewards even those who err, ensuring, for their work, provided it is elaborated with a “sincere” desire to achieve the truth, a worthy place in the science of the future. That author is Providence. Just as the naturalist cannot desist from searching for a “je ne sais quoi” that directs cells’ unconscious efforts toward the composition of the mature living being, in the development of theories, the attentive historian discerns an emerging order that leads to a constantly updated finality. For that reason, Duhem did not hesitate to state that one small demonstration of Jordanus de Nemore’s contained “potentially” the doctrines of Lagrange, Gibbs, and Helmholtz (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 446). The difference between the two states is astonishing; nothing in the latter suggests anything of the former and the complexity of the latter is glaringly apparent, but a highly attentive history reveals the existence of an affiliation between them. Skilled in the use of metaphors, it was among them that our author found the means to exhibit his philosophy of history, and all of them tend to reinforce the idea of continuity. In the final paragraph of Les origines, Duhem offers (theist) Christian Apologetics a variant of the Design argument, similar in form and different in material, drawn

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from the history of science (Leite 2016). In that history, nothing is lost and even the mistakes contribute toward progress. On another occasion, without having recourse to the existence of a superior intelligence, we find him stating that The history of science offers us a good number of discoveries suggested by erroneous doctrines [. . .]; when the engendering theory has exhausted its illegitimate fecundity it still obliges those that seek to overthrow it to gather a new harvest of discoveries. What a subject of profound and consolidating meditations the spectacle of scientific progress and the contemplation of the ways in which the truth frees itself little by little is! It draws to itself the fruits laboriously acquired by thousands of researchers, whose sincerity was lost in the ways of error; it inserts each discovery in its due place in the chain of ideas and not in the one its author had designated for it; to the incessant efforts of the human spirit, it decrees: per falsa, ad verum. (Duhem 1900: 4)

Optimistic, the Duhemian philosophy of science unveils the existence of a purpose that assumes the role of filtering out the errors and the truth and aggregating the initially isolated truths, causing them to flow toward a common plane on which each one will find what one could call its “natural place.”

The Positive Role of Errors Given that, as Duhem always took pains to make clear, all hypotheses have both a relative and an approximative domain (Duhem 1914/1991: 168–174), it is easy to see that the representative extension and the improvement of the empirical adaptation of the theories take place along a path that starts from error. Thus, error, in its aspect as a condition of theoretical work, is also the way to correctness. Indeed, in Duhem’s enormous historiographic production, he does not fail to consider the importance of the errors, hesitations, obstacles, and declines suffered in the perfecting of knowledge. Descartes shows us that error may be genial: in regard to the thesis that light travels with instantaneous velocity, he imagined cases in which his hypothesis would be invalidated, thereby contributing to enabling him to acknowledge his error more readily and thus being able to rectify it (Duhem 1894: 98). Insofar as it is not a linear progression, the description of historical development must include all achievements including outdated theories. On showing the ways in which the theories of place evolved in his work Le mouvement absolu et le mouvement relatif, the deviations receive special attention, not for having been condemned but, in some cases, to be exalted as auxiliaries of progress. While on the one hand, medieval Averroism with its persistence in maintaining peripatetic dynamics and astronomy represented a brusque interruption of the evolution of the theories of place and a return to wrong ideas (Duhem 1909a: 109–110), on the other hand, our historian declares that by defending the homocentric spheres theory, the Averroists reminded everyone that the Ptolemaic system was not the only one available so that although they were “ruled by tendencies diametrically opposed to

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the true scientific spirit [. . .] they paved the way for the Copernican revolution” (Duhem 1911/1996: 181). In his valorization of errors, Duhem echoed his colleague Paul Tannery (Brenner 2004: 43–45). When considering the pre-Socratic philosophers as being primarily “physiologists,” Tannery, author of Pour l’histoire de la science hellène, states that It does not matter that his science had been nothing more than a tangle of errors or a series of inconsistent hypotheses; error is ignorance’s pathway to the truth; the hypothesis, insofar as it can be verified, is the means to acquiring certainty. The history of the origins of science must, above all, concentrate on those errors, scrutinize the hypotheses of the earliest times; it must perceive in what aspects some served progress and others blocked it. (Tannery 1887b/ 1930: 11–12; Duhem 1905a: 219)

Thus, the mathematician justifies his position stating that error is to truth as hypothesis is to certainty. A history that does not have the objective of summarily listing the set of successes that led to the extant science of today to justify it must, according to Tannery, take into account the errors and aborted successes. An integrated history of the errors and the successes enables a better calculation of what we can expect in the future. Satisfying a vain curiosity is far from being history’s only objective. History can be the means to foreseeing the future: “History does not have as its only objective the satisfaction of a vain curiosity; it is the future that must eventually clarify the studies of the past” and, farther on, “[. . .] the real problem that actually imposes itself in that history is defining the circumstances and determining the cause of the past decadence with a view to knowing what precautions to take to avoid a future decadence” (Tannery 1887a: 8, 9; Duhem 1905a: 221, 222). Duhem was to find his colleague’s historical research useful in two ways. The historical description of the legacies of the past and the theoretical influences received were important for Duhem the historian, but the history itself, in the way that Tannery framed it, also aroused the interest of Duhem the philosopher, anxious to know what services error had rendered to the truth (Duhem 1905a: 223). Thus, the study of the past of science has a current value for the scientist as well serving as a guide to avoid his incurring analogous methodological errors. In Duhem’s case, that conception is founded on a double presupposition: (a) the naturalization of the history of science, that is to say, the idea that the evolution of “our conception of the external world” takes place just as it does in inanimate nature, subject to laws that can be discerned (Duhem 1898/2002: 235), and (b) the notion that it is possible to elaborate a scientific history of the past, so history is a science (albeit a hypothetical one) capable of elaborating reliable descriptions, forecasts, and retrodictions (Duhem 1915/1991: 41–56). It is knowledge of those laws that, in turn, can orientate the physicist as to his theoretical options. For history to be capable of teaching us something about the present, it must be captured in its own dynamics according to its regularities. In Duhemian history, what remains beyond the individual is more important than the individual as such so that it is actually a history of the evolution of ideas, problems, and (possibly unsuccessful) attempted solutions.

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The Historical Conditionings and the Search for Precursors Even in his earliest epistemological essays, Duhem always took pains to distinguish between the English and French spirits and in that way explain the idiosyncrasies of the theories engendered in the respective nations. He was to further elaborate that distinction in his work La théorie physique extending it to the historical narratives. When he took up that theme once more, the new examples addressed the differences in the ways the English and the French treat social and political history. In his view, due to his enormous factual memory, the English historian will readily describe the historical events with no logical connections among them, whereas the narrowness and profundity that characterize the French spirit demand that the discourse on history should adopt a clear and simple approach that unfolds with order and method “just as corollaries are deduced from a theorem” (Duhem 1914/1991: 68). Instead of singling out compartmentalized events, when reconstructing history, the Frenchman seeks for a rationale, a vision of the whole. Actually, especially in the historical reconstructions he wrote up until 1903 but even afterward in smaller essays, Duhem dedicated himself to examining the genesis and affiliation of scientific ideas as if they took place in a geometrical demonstration. Echoing once again Paul Tannery when discoursing on the theories of optics, he would say He who loves ancient things because they are old can satisfy his curiosity researching what the Egyptians or the Greeks thought of Mercury or of magnets; the man of science, however, will not find, in the march of their doctrines, continuous evolution or logical catenation. Actually, it is that very evolution and catenation that interests us in the history of physics; effectively, they reveal the laws according to which our knowledge of the external world develops; they establish the genesis of the commonly acknowledged theories and thus allow us to weigh the exact value of theories that currently enjoy our confidence, to assess their chances of lasting. (Duhem 1894: 94)

History provides the material from which calculations can be made to measure the value of current theories. Only with the admission of a history marked by an evolutive continuum, the true interest of the man of science (and not exactly of the historian), does it become possible to evaluate the probability of the success of individual theories. The narrative style of this admirer of Fustel de Coulanges (Duhem 1915/ 1991: 71), characterized by the chronological causal exhibition that almost always starts from the origins to seek out the historical regularities, is invariably guided by a general idea: the understanding of the facilitating elements and the obstacles that led to the trusted theories of today. The basic belief subjacent to that procedure is the idea that the present is as if it were the natural fruit of the past and its emergence is conditioned by preceding factors that prepare and explain its emergence: The development of mechanics is, correctly speaking, an evolution; each stage of that evolution is the natural corollary of the stages that preceded it; it is pregnant with the stages that are to follow. The consideration of that law must be the consolation for the theoretician. (Duhem 1903: 346)

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The generational succession of the theories is also their logical succession, thus, the author of La théorie physique declares that “To give the history of a physical principle is, at the same time, to make a logical analysis of it” (Duhem 1914/1991: 269). When dimensioning the conditionings involved in scientific practice, Duhem’s language comes close to historical determinism, revealing that “the physicist does not choose the hypothesis on which he will base a theory” and that “the physicist is limited to opening his thought through attention and reflection to the idea which is to take seed in him, without him” (Duhem 1914/1991: 256). The theoretician’s freedom of choice is no greater than the freedom of a flower to choose the grain of pollen that will fertilize it. In his aspect as a creator, the physicist is first of all a simple passive receiver of autonomous ideas that hover in the air (Martin 1991: 123–126). Determinism only does not have the last word because Duhem eventually makes a distinction between (passively) receiving the hypotheses and (actively) promoting them. It all takes place as if the physicist’s freedom is exercised in regard to the possibility of the ideas that germinate in him not taking hold, that is to say, in the decision not to develop them. There is no room, in the heart of a conception that hyper-valorizes the intellectual environment, for the isolated genius, for super-human creative and a-historical capacity. The traditional concept of genius is reduced to a mere fiction, produced by a superficial narrative that ignores the intermediate stages of theoretical elaboration. It is therefore necessary to acknowledge that the inventor’s initiative is always “guided or conditioned, in a manner more or less conscious to him, by an infinity of external and internal circumstances” (Duhem 1914/1991: 254). The Duhemian approach converts what is strange into something intelligible and the unusual into the natural, into something almost forcible (Duhem 1902a: 110). With the support of reflections of his colleague François Mentré, Duhem used precisely that conception to explain how impressive scientific discoveries made simultaneously by different authors with no communication between them could come about (Duhem 1914/ 1991: 255; 1906: 774; Mentré 1904). In the final analysis, even the greatest scientists are only the depositories of a tradition: Science knows no spontaneous generation. The most unexpected discoveries were never created in toto by the mind which gave birth to them, but they always issued from a seed first planted in the mind of a genius. The role of the genius was limited to making the small seed within him germinate and grow until the tree in full foliage might offer its flowers and fruits. (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 114)

Given the nonexistence in science of an intellect capable of producing “a completely new doctrine at one stroke” (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 439), most discoveries will be the result of an enormity of small efforts and the competition of innumerable hidden tendencies. In the work of Raffaello Caverni, Duhem identified certain ideas regarding the object of the historian that were analogous to his own. For the author of Storia del metodo sperimentale in Italia, “the task of the historian is to reveal the hidden causes that produce the supposed prodigies, and having done so, reduce them to the natural order” (Caverni apud Duhem 1906–1913/

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1984, v. 2: 363). Duhem applied that maxim in his Études sur Léonard de Vinci. In the preface to the first volume, he declares that the ideas that sprang up in the Da Vincian spirit are always produced by some external cause: an experience, a report, or a reading (Duhem 1906–1913/1984, v. 1: vi). Leonardo, humanized in that way, would also be an inheritor of the Parisian tradition (Duhem 1906–1913/1984, v. 3: xiii). The initial admiration, in view of the height to which the most colossal genius rose, becomes more pondered. It can then be seen that the nature of his intelligence is not so different from our own and that he too, on the road to his discoveries, took obscure directions, hesitated, and got lost. Such setbacks are almost always obliterated by the inventor himself, who is more inclined to reveal to us the iter regium (royal journey) of the trajectory (Duhem 1906–1913/1984, v. 1: iv). In other words, fide digno knowledge of scientific activity requires going beyond the context of justification. The vision of science in its aspect as a collective activity is reinforced in Duhem’s preface to Albert Maire’s book L’oeuvre scientifique de Blaise Pascal (1912). In it, Duhem states: “No scientific discovery is a creation ex nihilo; it is essentially a composition, a combination of preexisting elements that organize themselves according to a new plan” (Duhem 1912: iii). Thus, the notion of novelty, as an exclusively subjective creation, melts away insofar as all creation will gradually sprout from rearrangements or combinations of previous materials. That makes it difficult to attribute an invention to a specific author because, unlike the case of artistic creation, which is always personal, “scientific creation is never a spontaneous emission gestated by an isolated and autonomous genius”; “it is collective and, as it were, social” (Duhem 1912: viii). Thus, the intelligent reading of a simple treatise will require burrowing in libraries in search of the precursors that prepared it, of their contemporaries, irrespective of whether the latter were collaborators or contradicters, and also of their successors responsible for demonstrating its latent fecundity and extracting its often unsuspected potentialities. Consequently, the study of the precursors must be accompanied by the study of the successors as the subtitle of Études sur Léonard de Vinci – “Ceux qu’il a lus et ceux qui l’ont lu” [Those he has read and those who have read him] makes clear. Understanding what, of Da Vinci, posterity stored away and what it developed is also a means to understanding it (Duhem 1906–1913/1984, v. 1: vii). In this kind of history in which innumerable “spirits” converge toward the same discovery and numerous others diverge in the extraction of their results, every eponym must be simply viewed as a “convenient label” (Duhem 1912: i). Duhem’s incessant quest for precursors has received the attention of the critical literature: it is sometimes considered to be an “emergent technique” that artificially makes connections of continuity appear (Agassi 1967/2008: 154), sometimes, as the “clearest possible symptom of unsuitability for epistemological critique” (Canguilhem 1968: 21), and even as being dangerous, insofar as it makes it difficult to know the work of a given author by deeming it to be the precursor of another (Koyré 1961: 18, 79, note 3). Furthermore, there are textual elements that are the basis for affirmations that Duhem’s postures lead to a radicalization of the search for the precursors of an idea (Biard 2004: 16) as can be seen in the first page of Le système du monde:

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F. R. Leite In the genesis of a scientific doctrine, there is no absolute beginning; however far back one goes in the lines of thinking that prepared, suggested, announced that doctrine, one always arrives at opinions which in turn were prepared, suggested and announced. (Duhem 1913– 1959, v. 1: 5)

That being so, it follows that the point of departure chosen for the beginning of the description of the evolution of scientific ideas must always be a provisional one and will provide an opportunity for future investigations, which, going ever further into the unfathomable past, will reveal its harbingers. Actually, Duhem is not precise about which criteria he adopts to characterize a given thinker as being the precursor of another. Frequently, it is enough that a hypothesis or argument anticipates another for the connection to be established, despite the contextual divergence. In turn, identification of the anticipation is mediated by the existence of one or more formal or argumentative analogies, and a temporal sequence of analogies will establish a research tradition. (In many cases, the analogies drawn are summary and demand knowledge, imagination, and complacency on the part of the reader. Here are some examples of this kind taken from Le système du monde: Duhem 1913–1959, v. 1: 271 (between Damascius and Henri Bergson); 1913–1959, v. 7: 83 (between Albert of Saxony and Richard Dedekind); 1913–1959, v. 7: 134 (between Gregory of Rimini and Georges Cantor); 1913–1959, v. 7: 415 (between John the Canon and Henri Bergson); 1913–1959, v. 10: 347 (between Nicholas of Cusa and Hegel).) One of the most illustrative examples of that is the case of Oresme whom Duhem saw as being a precursor of Copernicus insofar as, in his commentary on Aristotle’s De caelo, Oresme defended the idea of the Earth’s daily rotation. The precursory link is obtained by argumentative analogy, that is to say, based on the similarity of the arguments used by the two in favor of terrestrial rotation. Duhem considered that the confluence of the passages in Livre du ciel et du monde and De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was so striking that one could read the latter as “a very compact and somewhat obscure summary” (Duhem 1909b: 873) of the theses Oresme presented in his commentary. Fortunately, in the article’s final paragraph, we come across a narrower determination, and we are informed that an “inspirer” would be a specific kind of precursor, namely, one who had a direct influence on an author. That criterion presupposes an author’s awareness of the source of inspiration. It is a distinction that facilitates the preservation of the thesis that Oresme had been a precursor of Copernicus even though the latter had not been directly inspired by him. That distinction, by no means a singular occurrence, was to be resumed in regard to Copernicus’s real inspirer, Aristarchus of Samos: “that astronomer [Aristarchus] had the glory of not only being the precursor, but furthermore, the inspirer of Copernicus, who was aware of the astronomer’s attempts and took support from them” (Duhem 1913–1959, v. 1: 418).

A Legalistic History Even though, in his mature work, Duhem would come to insist that men, in their aspect as agents of history, are free, the legalistic terminology he employed supports

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the conception that favors the existence of ineluctable rules against which man might revolt but he would be unable to overcome them. The laws of history have sufficient weight in his view for him to busy himself in declaring that his methodology could be historically confirmed and that it would be possible to foresee future aspects of physics theory. He gives several examples of those historical laws in his various publications, and some of them will be succinctly addressed below. Ever since his earliest writing, Duhem defended a kind of “sophisticated methodological falsificationism” (Maiocchi 1985: 97–98; Chiappin 1989: 230–240) and attributed to it the character of a historical law: When a law is attacked, generally the physicists’ first effort consists of circumventing the objections raised by experiment by means of skillful interpretations designed to rescue it. It is only when a new theory shows not only that the then accepted Law was false but also indicates a new law that should replace it that most spirits will renounce the long-respected error. We find a first example of that historical law when studying the vicissitudes of thermochemical theory. (Duhem 1893: 124; also 76–77, and Duhem 1895/2002: 158)

From the strictly epistemological standpoint, when a theory runs up against an experimental confrontation, the physicist’s only obligation is that of altering at least one of his hypotheses in order to restore the empirical adequacy of the theory. Given that it is always possible to impute the cause of the contradiction to an auxiliary hypothesis and logic does not offer any guidance in that sense, in principle, any hypothesis can be maintained unscathed. Innumerable factors guide the physicist’s choice such as the education he has received, his philosophical preferences, his own self-love, and powerful authorities who can motivate him to “compose skillful interpretations” with the aim of saving hypotheses that are dear to them from the claws of experiment, even when that means contradicting the most glaring experimental evidence. The weight of authority will only stop being determinant when a new theory demonstrates the falsity of the former hypothesis and exhibits its own superior empirical adequacy. There is a deeper reason that explains those “not very logical procedures”: “it is necessary to attribute them, above all, to the human spirit’s need to group together in some way the phenomena that it observes associated to certain ideas” (Duhem 1893: 176). Abandoning a theory immediately after an empirical contradiction of it would result in “the chaos of empiricism,” in the disorganization of our knowledge of the world. That explains and to some extent legitimizes the scientific community’s conservative attitude in many historical cases. Decreeing, as it does, that “A theory of physics which is formally contradicted by a well-established fact is a theory it would be absurd to defend” (Duhem 1895/2002: 158), epistemological analysis shows itself to be inadequate for describing the activities of scientists. The study of history under the aegis of a historical law would complement the dictates of epistemology. Only a historical epistemology is capable of describing how science really functions. If the anterior law makes the Duhemian theory of science richer and more complex, drawing it closer to the post-positivist analyses, then the next example is essential for sustaining the author’s very methodology and epistemology. Since the beginning of his publications, Duhem contrasts two views concerning the evolution

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of physical theory. On the one hand, it is associated with a “house of cards,” which totally collapses at the first occurrence of a failure, so much so that many feel the breath of “the wind of skepticism” (Duhem 1894: 122). On the other hand, he states that the careful historian will be capable of identifying a pattern behind that alternation, namely, “the thread of a tradition, of a slow but uninterrupted progress” (Duhem 1894: 123) obeying a “harmonious concatenation” (Duhem 1894: 125). To each one of those perspectives, the author connects a part of the theory: to the first, he attaches its explicative part, metaphysics, which seeks to define structure and the ontology as essential causes of the experimental laws; to the second, the representative part, he attaches a merely symbolic-mathematical classification of the experimental laws. According to Duhem, that second part conditions theoretical progress insofar as, in view of the precarious empirical adequation presented by the metaphysical explanation attempts, these last find themselves submitted to incessant, drastic reformulations. With that, therefore, the cause of disbelief in regard to the theory is identified. It stems from that historical analysis that “An attentive study of the laws which have governed the evolution of these theories for nearly three centuries would perhaps allow us to catch a glimpse of the rules that must be followed in order to achieve the reform” (Duhem 1895/2002: 191). It is the antimechanist reform that he defends in the name of a physics that concedes ample space to the qualities that Duhem refers to. Constructed in an autonomous manner, directly based on experimental laws and without appealing to metaphysical explanations, physics theory will thus evolve slowly and uninterruptedly. Questioned as to what would guarantee the maintenance of the uninterrupted progress provided that those conditions were satisfied, Duhem’s reply was in the form of another question: “Why should this evolution, whose law is manifested to us in this history, stop suddenly?” (Duhem 1905b/1991: 296). We can see in that legalistic conception of history a rationalizing vein that confers a selfregulating quality on theory evolution and guides it in a determined direction, that of achieving a maximally unified theory that is a totalizing and adequate representation of all known experimental laws. The role left to men, the lesser actors on a very broad stage, is to know the rules that pervade the development of history and to optimize scientific progress. (Nowhere did Duhem expressly manifest his views regarding the statute of laws associated to theory evolution. Consequently, we cannot know whether its relations with the idea of a providential governance are conflictual or harmonious. The fact is that, as he did not show any unease at a possible incompatibility, we suppose that the said relationship would be pacific. It is only left for us to determine whether the said laws were considered to be instituted by divine will and action and, if so, whether they were expected to continue to depend on them. Up until now we have not been able to offer an answer to those questions.) Up until now, everything leads us to believe that being condemned to undefined re-beginnings, metaphysics is reduced to the condition of an eternal battlefield in which any real advance would be impossible. Eternally posed by the human spirt, the philosophical questions receive disputable responses destined to be abandoned without delay. Even so, in the conclusions of Le mouvement absolu et le mouvement relatif, Duhem (1909a: 280) envisages the existence of progress in regard to such questions:

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However, when a philosophical theory, once in vogue, is taken up again after centuries of abandonment, the form in which it emerges is not exactly identical to that which it had at the moment when forgetfulness consumed it: it reappears clearer and more precise, rich in content; in short, more perfect.

With attention directed at the solving of problems alien to philosophy, the spirits indirectly foster the progress of a kind of knowledge that will help them in the future to solve the ancient philosophical problems. Thus, when they decide to apply themselves a second time to the same problems, that will do so with more profound knowledge; their tools will be better; new facts will be discovered; old prejudices will be cast aside; unsuspected points of view will be suggested. Not even the times when there was lack if any interest in philosophical issues have been in vain. That “general law that presides over the development of philosophy” in consonance with Duhem (1909a: 281) will manifest itself particularly when we think of the theories of movement that had already emerged in ancient Greece. The Greeks’ initial concern was revived by the fourteenth century medieval scholars and discussed a third time by the modern ones when it achieved an extraordinary degree of precision. In the long intervals in which the discussion died down, new evidence arose, stemming from areas like dynamics and astronomy, new arguments were elaborated, and when it was resumed in modern times, the decision favoring the existence of absolute movements imposed itself more convincingly. To sum up, philosophical responses may oscillate, but they are perfectible. Wishing to go beyond producing a simple empirical report of the discoveries and pursue the quest for more general evolutive laws that make it possible to find the reasons for them, Duhem treats history as a scientific discipline. Thus, the past can be explained and the future prognosticated even when going against the currently predominant opinion. Hence, the Bordeaux professor dared to prophesize the downfall of the neo-atomist school, supported on the model of the electron and the coming victory of its Energetics (Duhem 1917: 157). The sustainability of that prediction stemmed from the correct methodological conception: the object of physics theory is to classify and put in order the experimental laws and not to explain them as the atomists wish to do. Nevertheless, if the fecundity of the cosmological schools of which neo-atomism is a species is destined to be exhausted, what explains its undeniable past success would be another of those “laws that preside over the development of science” (Duhem 1892/1996: 18). According to Duhem, just like a child whose moment of greatest learning in infancy coincides with the height of its ingenuousness, in mathematical physics, a more accelerated development can be expected at its beginning, which will coincide with the period when its promoters are least well prepared to judge the value of their hypotheses. However, just as it is not the child’s ingenuousness that causes its learning, so also the mechanical nature of the theories is not the cause of their success. Thus, we have the concomitance of ingenuousness and learning in the child and that of the mechanical nature and theoretical fecundity in physics. Far from being negated, the initial progress of mechanical theories is actually explained. While the history of science seems to contradict Duhem’s methodology, his philosophy of history, on which the former comes to depend, takes on the task of eliminating the apparent contradiction.

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Duhemian (Dis) continuism in Question We have seen that the Duhemian philosophy of history induces a continuist interpretation of the evolution of theories, antagonistic to the existence of ruptures and revolutions. That aspect is constantly registered in Duhem’s use of metaphors (a potency that is actualized, the seed that germinates, the tree that bears fruit), and its context is linked to topics such as the notions of a “Providence” that initiates and regulates the evolution of theories; the assimilation of this to a logical demonstration; the teleological conception of theory development; the existence of historical laws; and the passivity of the physicist in his choice of hypotheses. To a considerable extent, the passages that sustain that interpretation are to be found in prefaces and conclusions of historiographic and philosophic works, and their language is universalizing. In contrast, especially in the body of his eminently historiographic works, when he is meticulously analyzing and comparing theories, Duhem never failed to acknowledge conceptual ruptures between theories, explaining the existence of greater or lesser revolutions in various areas of physics. The one he particularly appreciates is the revolution that gave rise to modern science, the “new physics” that would come to replace the Aristotelian physics. Thus, when he rejects the predominant vision that situates the founding revolution of modern science in the seventeenth century, he is not excluding the existence of revolutions in toto but merely pushing back the beginning of that revolution to the fourteenth century. The seventeenth century represents the culmination of a lasting process. Prior to and after his discovery of medieval science, Duhem acknowledges the existence of various singular individual revolutionary occurrences (the syntagm “scientific revolution” is absent from his works). Buridan’s revolution in dynamics was one “of the most profound” but not the only one. Among others that he acknowledged, we can mention Lavoisier’s revolution with his anti-phlogiston theory (Duhem 1895/2002: 135; 1902b/2002: 28; 1911/1996: 217; 1916a: 185); Proust’s, with his law of definite proportions (1902b/2002: 41) in chemistry; the revolutions of Copernicus (Duhem 1905–1906/1991: 258, 261, 317–318, 324, 349, 445; 1911/1996: 181; 1909a: 182; 1906–1913/1984, v. 2: 90, 269; v. 3: 374–375; 1913–1959, v. 1: 210, 241, 467; v. 3: 162; v. 9: 418; v. 10: 367) and Kepler in astronomy (Duhem 1911/1996: 195); Maxwell’s revolution with his electrodynamics (Duhem 1902a: 5, 55; 1919: 118); Black’s revolution with his discovery of latent heat; and Regnault’s, with the introduction of new experimental methods in the studies of the heat engine in thermodynamics (Duhem 1895/2002: 132; 1899: 392, respectively). In all those cases, the criterion used was that of subversion (bouleversement) of the principles of the most disseminated and accepted theories in each area. They were genuine conceptual ruptures with the introduction of new methods and concepts that were incompatible with the former ones. If we disregard the explicit appearance of the term “revolution” and concentrate on the changes made to those principles that had eventually and mistakenly been accepted as definitive, then we would also have a revolution in electrodynamics with Lorentz’s physics of the electron (Duhem 1915/ 1991: 103) and another in optics with the discovery of diffraction that clashed with the extant fundamental principle of that science:

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The history of physics shows us that very often the human mind has been led to overthrow such principles completely, though they have been regarded by common consent for centuries as inviolable axioms, and to rebuild its physical theories on new hypotheses. (Duhem 1914/1991: 212)

For a thousand years, insists our author, it was believed that light travelled in straight lines in a homogeneous medium. Immediately after Grimaldi discovered diffraction, physicists tried to attribute those observations of the “curving” of light to some kind of error until they audaciously decided to reject the theory of the rectilinear propagation of light and construct an optics based on “entirely new foundations.” Thus, drastic alterations can equally well lead to enormous progress. It is important to note that those conceptual ruptures, described above as revolutionary, take place in the representative part of the theories and not in their explanatory or metaphysical part. Examples like those described above show that even the principles of the most successful theories are subject to the control of experiment. Duhem’s historical fallibilism associated with his epistemological holism prevents any hypothesis, however well verified it might have been in the past, from being transformed into a convention subtracted from the control of experiment. In the light of its struggle with the experience of framing exceptions, physics incessantly submits itself to constant adjustments: Physics does not progress as does geometry, which adds new final and indisputable propositions to the final and indisputable propositions it already possessed; physics makes progress because experiment constantly causes new disagreements to break out between laws and facts, and because physicists constantly touch up and modify laws in order that they may more faithfully represent facts. (Duhem 1914/1991: 177)

Given that physical theory rests on provisional hypotheses that have nothing analogous to the axioms of geometry, whose certainty is immediate (Duhem 1907: 199), the veritably cumulative development is restricted to mathematics, the “sciences of reasoning” that can do without experimental confrontation (Duhem 1915/ 1991: 5–20). Exclusively in their case, new conquests do not pose any risks to those already conquered. In its modest way, physics limits itself to desiring a pacific and regular “continuous progress,” like that of mathematics (Duhem 1914/1991: 10). Not even the fact that physics became mathematicized could alter its nature so that its laws will maintain their provisional nature because they are irremediably approximate (Duhem 1914/1991: 171).

Conclusion In synthesis, between the two levels of discourse addressed in this chapter, that of the philosophy of history, which would seem to definitively overlook any possibility of abrupt revolutions, and the epistemological one, predominant in the historiographic works, which admits the existence of occasional, restricted, and particular

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revolutions, Duhem does not see any kind of incompatibility. Our philosopherhistorian plays with both those discursive levels, suggesting that there is no contradiction between a series of partial developments and, in the long term, the acknowledgment of a great revolution (Duhem 1913–1959, v. 7: 3–4) or even, in the short term, of a localized conceptual rupture. From the historical point of view, we will never have a great event without a cause; from the epistemological standpoint, concepts and theories are capable of revolutionizing an area of science. For that reason, we think that caution must be exercised before classifying the Duhemian position in one or other of the opposing “continuists versus discontinuists” poles given that whichever option is taken, without the observations put forward here, would possibly attribute to our author an anachronic contraposition that was not his own.

Cross-References ▶ Historical Epistemology: A German Connection ▶ The French Style in the Philosophy of the Sciences ▶ The Historiography of Scientific Revolutions: A Philosophical Reflection

References Agassi J (1967/2008) Towards an historiography of science. In: Agassi J (ed) Science and its history: a reassessment of the historiography of science. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 119–242 Biard J (2004) Le rôle des condamnations de 1277 dans le développement de la physique selon Pierre Duhem. Rev Quest Sci 175(1):15–36 Brenner A (1990) Duhem: Science, réalité et apparence. La relation entre philosophie et histoire dans l’oeuvre de Pierre Duhem. J. Vrin, Paris Brenner A (2004) Genèse, évolution et continuité du développement scientifique selon Pierre Duhem. Rev Quest Sci 175(1):37–58 Canguilhem G (1968) Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences. Vrin, Paris Chiappin J (1989) Duhem’s theory of science: An interplay between philosophy and history of science. PhD Thesis. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsbugh Duhem P (1892/1996) Some reflections on the subject of physical theories. In: Essays in the history and philosophy of science (ed and trans: Ariew, R, Barker P). Hackett, Indianapolis/Cambridge, pp 1–28 Duhem P (1893) Introduction à la mécanique chimique. Georges Carré, Paris Duhem P (1894) Les théories de l’optique. Rev Deux Mondes 4(123):94–125 Duhem P (1895/2002) Theories of heat. In: Mixture and chemical combination and related essays (ed and trans: Needham P). Springer, Dordrecht, pp 121–191 Duhem P (1896/2002) The evolution of physical theories from the Seventeenth Century to our day. In: Mixture and chemical combination and related essays, (ed and trans: Needham P). Springer, Dordrecht, pp 193–213 Duhem P (1898/2002) The phase law. In: Mixture and chemical combination and related essays (ed and trans: Needham P). Springer, Dordrecht, pp 235–251 Duhem P (1899) Usines et laboratoires. Rev Philomatique de Bordeaux et du Sud-Ouest 2(9):385– 400

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Duhem P (1900) Théorie et pratique. Rev Philomathique de Bordeaux et du Sud-Ouest 3(6):250– 262 Duhem P (1902a) Les théories électriques de J. Clerk Maxwell: Étude historique et critique. Hermann, Paris Duhem P (1902b) Mixture and chemical combination. In Mixture and chemical combination and related essays (ed and trans: Needham P). Springer, Dordrecht, pp 2–118 Duhem P (1903) L’évolution de la mécanique. Joanin, Paris Duhem P (1904) De l’accélération produite par une force constante: Notes pour servir a l’histoire de la dynamique. In: Claparède É (ed) Rapports et comptes rendus du deuxième congrès international de philosophie tenu à Genève du 4 au 8 septembre 1904. Henry Kündig, Genève, pp 859–915 Duhem P (1905a) Paul Tannery. Rev Philos 5(1):216–230 Duhem P (1905b) Physics of a believer. In: Duhem P (ed) The aim and structure of physical theory (trans: Wiener P). Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 273–311 Duhem P (1905–1906/1991) The origins of statics: The sources of physical theory (trans: Leneaux G, Vagliente V and Wagener G). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/ Boston/London Duhem P (1906) Le P. Marin Mersenne et la pesanteur de l’air: Le P. Mersenne et le poids spécifique de l’air. Rev Gén Sci Pures Appl 17:769–782 Duhem P (1906–1913/1984) Études sur Léonard de Vinci: Ceux qu’il a lus et ceux qui l’ont lu. Éditions des Archives Contemporaines, Paris Duhem P (1907) Compte rendu de Josiah-Willard Gibbs: “the scientific papers”. Bull Sci Math 31: 181–211 Duhem P (1908/1969) To save the phenomena: An essay on the idea of physical theory from Plato to Galileo (trans: Doland E and Maschler C). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Duhem P (1909a) Le mouvement absolu et le mouvement relatif. Librairie de Montligeon, Montligeon Duhem P (1909b) Un précurseur français de Copernic: Nicole Oresme (1377). Rev Gén Sci Pures Appl 20:866–873 Duhem P (1911/1996) History of physics. In: Ariew R, Barker P (eds) Essays in the history and philosophy of science. Hackett, Indianapolis, pp 163–221 Duhem P (1912) Préface. In: Maire A (ed) L’oeuvre scientifique de Blaise Pascal: Bibliographie critique et analyse de tous les travaux qui s’y rapportent. Hermann, Paris, pp i–ix Duhem P (1913) Lettre accompagnant le don de la troisième série des “Études sur Léonard de Vinci” à l’Académie des Sciences. C R Hebd Seances Acad Sci 157(14):535–538 Duhem P (1913–1959) Le système du monde: Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon. 10 v. Hermann, Paris Duhem P (1914/1991) The aim and structure of physical theory (trans: Wiener P). Princenton University Press, Princenton Duhem P (1915/1991) German science (trans: Lyon J). Open Court, La Salle Duhem P (1916a) La chimie est-elle une science française? Hermann, Paris Duhem P (1916b) Lettre accompagnant le don du quatrième tome du “Système du monde: Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic” à l’Académie des Sciences. C R Hebd Seances Acad Sci 162(18):666–670 Duhem P (1917) Notices sur les titres et travaux scientifiques de Pierre Duhem. Gauthier-Villars, Paris Duhem P (1919) De Maxwell et de la manière allemande de l’exposer. La Revue du Mois 20(115): 113–131 Jaki S (1984) Uneasy genius: the life and work of Pierre Duhem. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague/Boston/Lancaster/Dordrecht Koyré A (1961) La révolution astronomique: Copernic, Kepler, Borelli. Hermann, Paris Leite F (2012) Um estudo sobre a filosofia da história e sobre a historiografia da ciência de Pierre Duhem. PhD Thesis. Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo

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Leite F (2015) A gênese e a persistência do historiador medieval – O caso de Pierre Duhem. Rev Bras Hist Ciênc 8(1):26–43 Leite F (2016) Um Argumento a Favor da Existência de Deus Formulado por Pierre Duhem. Trans/ Form/Ação 39(4):33–58 Lemonnier H (1917) Les “Études” de Pierre Duhem sur Léonard de Vinci. J Savants 15:25–34 Maiocchi R (1985) Chimica e filosofia: Scienza, epistemologia, storia e religione nell’opera di Pierre Duhem. La Nuova Italia, Firenze Martin RND (1991) Pierre Duhem: philosophy and history in the work of a believing physicist. Open Court, La Salle Mentré F (1904) La simultanéité des découvertes scientifiques. Rev Sci 41(2):555–559 Patapievici H-R (2015) The “Pierre Duhem thesis”: a reappraisal of Duhem’s discovery of the physics of the middle ages. Logos Episteme 6(2):201–218 Stoffel J-F (2002) Le phénoménalisme problématique de Pierre Duhem. Académie Royale de Belgique, Bruxelles Stoffel J-F (2017) L’“Histoire de la physique” de Pierre Duhem: Contexte d’une publication singulière et historique de l’usage du terme “révolution”. In: Stoffel J-F (ed) Pierre Duhem, cent ans plus tard (1916–2016). Université de Tunis, Tunis, pp 271–300 Tannery P (1887a) La géométrie grecque: Comment son histoire nous est parvenue et ce que nous en savons. Gauthier-Villars, Paris Tannery P (1887b/1930) Pour l’histoire de la science hellène: De Thalès à Empédocle. GauthierVillars, Paris

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Contents Introduction: An “Almost Inevitable Passage” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Copernicus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Galileo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Descartes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Topography of a Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Uncertainty, Disarray, and the Way Out of the Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Problem of Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter endeavors to reconstitute the set of conditions in the period between the two world wars that made Alexandre Koyré’s work on the history of science possible and general conditions concerning the intellectual context of the day and more specific ones regarding the Russian born French historian’s intellectual trajectory must be considered. The first works on the history of science that Alexandre Koyré wrote and published date back to the 1930s. In 1934, he translated into French the text of the first chapters the first book of De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium for which he prepared an introduction (which he was to take up again in his own work, La révolution astronomique). It was that translation work that aroused his interest in Galileo. In the following year, he published À l’aurore de la science moderne: la jeunesse de Galilée, followed by his Études Galiléennes. Finally, in 1936, when he was a visiting professor in Cairo, he presented his Trois leçons sur Descartes

M. Salomon (*) Faculty of History, Federal University of Goiás, Goiânia, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_2

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which were published in the Egyptian capital 2 years later in a bilingual edition and reedited in 1944 in Paris and New York. The first decades of the twentieth century in France and in Europe corresponded to a considerable extent with the moment of the emergence and promotion of the history of science and the attempts to institutionalize it. Specialized journals (Archeion, Thalès), study centers, international associations, and university chairs dedicated to the discipline were all created during that period. While since the nineteenth century scientists and philosophers had primarily concerned themselves with the study of science’s past from the perspective of a tradition that we can trace back to the Enlightenment movement, from the interwar period on, academic historians sought to appropriate the study to themselves. That involved not only those that based themselves on a traditional conception of history like Aldo Mieli (who was a qualified scientist) but also those who were in the vanguard of the discipline such as the founders of the Annales (Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre). Koyré’s work belongs to that context and its importance lies in its definition of an object for the history of science that was distinct from that of the philosophers and the scientists. Nevertheless, he actually came to the history of science through philosophy. Having qualified as a philosopher, in the 1920s, he basically studied religious thought (Descartes, Saint Anselm) and mystic thought (Jacob Boehme). That was the path that led him to the history of science. In his Doctorat d’Etat thesis on the history of German mysticism, he understood that Boehme’s own Weltanschauung could only be entirely comprehensible if it were related to the radical transformation of the representation of the world that was implicit in the work of Copernicus. Just as with the past of other forms of thought, the study of the past of science, to Koyré, was fundamental insofar as it was a question of reconstructing the history of different Weltanschauungen, a term that he translated as “conceptions of the world.” During that same decade of the 1920s, he was strongly attached to the philosophy of science of Émile Meyerson. Every week, he and a group of young philosophers met with Meyerson to discuss the great issues that were agitating the science of those days. That reminds us that the period was understood by its contemporaries to be one of profound crisis. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the new scientific theories (relativity and quantum physics) had been destroying the traditional representation of the world basically founded on Newtonian mechanics. Discussions addressed not only “the crisis of science” but also the crisis of Western civilization itself (Paul Valéry). The three studies mentioned above that Koyré wrote in the 1930s were strictly dialoguing with that context of “crisis.” The text on Descartes, above all, explicitly drew a parallel between the “crisis” experienced by the author of Discours de la Méthode in the seventeenth century with that in the interwar period. In his text, Koyré presented an explanation and a solution for the “crisis.” More importantly, he translated the concept of “crisis” as the concept of “revolution” and presented the past of science as having been constituted by a series of “revolutions” and radical transformations.

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Keywords

Historiography of science · Theory and methodology of the history of science · Alexandre Koyré · Scientific revolution · Crisis

Introduction: An “Almost Inevitable Passage” Alexandre Koyré was one of the twentieth century’s most important historians of science. In the words of Antonino Drago, he was responsible for “a true revolution in the history of science” performing a “revolutionary role in the historiography of science” and “giving birth to a ‘new historiography’” (Drago 2018, pp. 124, 124). According to Yvon Belaval, he was a veritable “master of reading” responsible for “reinventing the art of the great commentators” of the philosophical tradition (Belaval 1964, p. 676). His studies of the history of scientific thought deeply marked the configuration of the historiography of science and the way in which it structured itself as a scientific discipline after the Second World War. His works on Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, among others, became obligatory references for any research into the constitution of modern science. In the second half of the twentieth century, his research made its mark on such fundamental personalities of the historiography of science as Georges Canguilhem and Thomas Kuhn. It is therefore necessary to go back to the origins of the Koyrean historiography of science and endeavor to define what was in play in its constitution, so particularly marked by the notion of scientific revolution. The “scientific revolution” concept that was to become omnipresent in the postwar historiography of science, especially in the USA, was largely introduced by Alexandre Koyré in the 1930s. There can be little interest in tracing its genealogy. Today, we are well aware that the importance of the Russian-born French philosopher lay not in the definition of that concept but, rather, in the formulation of a new theory and methodology of the history of science, based on which the very content of those revolutions acquired meaning (Redondi 1986a). Koyré not only broke away from the événementielle (event-driven) historiography of science founded on the chronicle of discoveries, their heroes, and dramas but also from that of a supposedly “pure” history of science, insofar as he insisted that the structure of scientific theories, those of the past or those of his own time, those of a Galileo or those of an Einstein, was intrinsically linked to questions stemming from religious, philosophical, or even artistic thought. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the context in France was propitious for the historical study of science. In the land of Auguste Comte, the importance attributed to that study was by no means a novelty. In 1892, Pierre Laffitte (1823–1903), one of Comte’s earliest scholars and the intellectual inheritor of the author of the Cours de philosophie positive and continuer of his work, was nominated as the “General History of Science” chair professor at the Collège de France; a chair whose conception and inspiration were based in Comte’s philosophy (Paul 1976). The turn of the century from the nineteenth to the twentieth witnessed a

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partial break from the Comtean tradition with the emergence of a new historiography captained by Pierre Duhem and Paul Tannery (the latter should have been nominated for the General History of Science chair after Laffitte’s death, but for political reasons, the chair went to Grégoire Wyrouboff). On the philosophical side, at that same time, Émile Meyerson and Léon Brunschvicg were insisting on the importance of historical studies to gain an understanding of the philosophy of science. Since its inception, Henri Berr’s publication Revue de Synthèse Historique had been exhorting the diffusion of works on the history of science in its pages. At the end of the 1920s, after the creation of the Foundation Pour la Science, Berr was to structure the Centre International de Synthèse in four sections one of which was explicitly denominated the “History of Science Section” (Blay 1997). Starting in 1929, Henri Berr’s Centre de Synthèse was able to count on the collaboration of Aldo Mieli by means of the International History of Science Committee and the Archeion review, a periodical dedicated to the history of science founded by Mieli in Italy at the beginning of 1919. It should be borne in mind that ever since the middle of the 1910 decade, the adjunct director of the Centre, Lucien Febvre, echoing Berr’s concern, had been advocating for the creation of a history and a “body of historians” of science and technology (Salomon 2015). In 1932, Abel Rey created the History of Science Institute at the Sorbonne. In the following year, the Institute launched Thalès, France’s first history of science review (Braunstein 2015). There was a series of other important events in different intellectual contexts in that period that are indicative of the promotion and institutionalization of a new discipline. In 1906, Karl Sudhoff founded the Institute for the History of Medicine at the University of Leipzig, which, as of 1925, was directed by Henry Sigerist (Almeida 2018, p. 76). In 1913, in Belgium, Georges Sarton was to found the Isis review, the first periodical dedicated to the history of science whose object was “to exhibit the finality and methods of the new discipline, of which it [Isis] is destined to become the organ” (Sarton 1913, p. 3). Without any intention of being exhaustive, we can add to those events the creation of the International Academy of the History of Science in 1928, the History of Medicine department at the Johns Hopkins University in the following year, and the PhD in the history of science degree at Harvard in 1936. Obviously, Alexandre Koyré was not indifferent to that context. It would not be difficult to identify in his historiographic reflections, reverberations of that context, interventions in it, or intellectual reactions to it. However, he was actually directly introduced into the epistemological debate of the day through an extra-institutional, intellectual micro-universe. The reference here is to the importance of his frequenting the intellectual group of Émile Meyerson. Polish-born Meyerson was Jewish and finished his high school and university education in Germany. After graduating in chemistry, he emigrated to Paris in 1882. He worked in industry for a time and then, because of his knowledge of several languages, he became the foreign editor for the Havas News Agency. However, he actually worked for a great part of his life from the late nineteenth century on for the Jewish Colonization Association, finally retiring in 1923 at the age of 64.

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In his condition as a foreigner and self-taught philosopher, he lacked the academic titles that would have given him access to a university position and his intellectual work developed on the outskirts of the academic field. It was only in 1909, with the publication of his book Identité et realité, that Meyerson was admitted to the philosophical community. The publication of that work was an important event in French philosophy. In the extant context of positivist conventionalism, he put forward a theory of scientific knowledge that totally broke away from the positivist legacy (Bensaude-Vincent and Telkes-Klein 2009; De Laclos 2009). After his retirement, Meyerson used to receive a group of young philosophers every week to discuss, above all, the contemporary issues in science and philosophy. Among them were André Metz, Jean Baruzi, René Poirier, Henri Gouhier, and Alexandre Koyré (Telkes-Klein 2007). Koyré had reestablished himself in Paris and resumed his studies on the philosophy of religion (Zambelli 2021). In the early years of the 1920s, discussions of the theory of relativity were in vogue. In 1922, Einstein visited Paris and discussed the theory with philosophers (Meyerson among them) and scientists at the Société Française de Philosophie and the Collège de France. That visit gave rise to a series of reflections and discussions – in 1922, Revue philosophique dedicated a special number to Einstein and the Theory of Relativity. In 1924, Meyerson published La déduction relativiste. The discussions of that little group pursuing its weekly “philosophical peregrination” (Poirier 2009 [1925], p. 755) to Meyerson were to make definitive marks on its members. In 1928, André Metz would dedicate a book to the author of Identité et realité (André Metz was not a philosopher; he graduated from a polytechnic school. Parallel to his military career, he was among those responsible for introducing the theory of relativity in France and that brought him into contact with Meyerson. He was active in publicizing the ideas of his master (Metz 1928).) René Poirier would write a book about the philosophy of physics and mathematics. In the letters he exchanged with Meyerson, Koyré, who at the time was writing his thesis on Jacob Boehme, discussed basic issues of contemporary science. In 1961, Koyré assessed the importance of that experience for his intellectual future in this way: [. . .] I knew him very well and, personally, I owe a lot to him. It may well be that under his influence, under the influence of the long weekly discussions – I used to go and see him almost every week on Thursdays –, discussions on science past and present, on philosophies of the past and those of the present, of his own work in course, that I must have finally orientated or re-orientated the history of philosophical thought to the history of scientific thought. Actually, when I met him, some time after the first World War, I was studying very different things, Saint Anselm, Descartes, Jacob Boehme. . . although I had always been interested in the epistemology and philosophy of science. And from the philosophy of science to its history, the passage is almost inevitable. (Koyré 1961, p. 115)

In 1939, he would dedicate his most important work of that period on Galileo to “the memory of Émile Meyerson.” It is not my intention, with this initial digression, articulating a certain intellectual context with a certain philosophical circle, to indicate a possible explanatory origin

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for the beginning of Alexandre Koyré’s studies of the history of science after a decade of work dedicated to the history of religious and mystic thought. I would rather first indicate how close the relationship was between the emergence of that interest in the study of the past of the ancient scientific theories and the discussions on the important epistemological transformations then in course. Furthermore, the final phrase of the above citation, taken from Message, which at the time, Koyré sent to the USA to be read in the section of the homage to Meyerson in Société, is highly revealing of the injunctions of an intellectual field and of a specific context of knowledge production: a philosophy of science should “inevitably” be made in relation to its history; that is to say, the study of history was, for those who wished to reflect philosophically on science in France, an injunction of the intellectual field. It would not be out of place, here, to recall that, in those days, the aspect of being “inevitable” and determinant would have been totally strange in other intellectual contexts. In that regard, suffice it to remember, that Koyré himself, when he was a young student in Germany interested in the study of logical-mathematical paradoxes, approached science in a manner totally distant from history (cf. Koyré 1991 [1922], 1912). One has only to observe the way in which he addressed the problem of “movement” (Koyré 1991 [1922]), when he was studying in that country, and the way he was to address it later in his Galileo Studies. It would not therefore be futile to raise questions about what the theoretical problems were that made history unavoidable for the philosophy of science. I will return to this later but what I wish to study and understand here is how, at a moment of profound transformations in science, the “inevitable” study of its past could have indicated that it might have some cultural importance or role for philosophy.

Copernicus The concept of scientific revolution and the new way of approaching science’s past were molded in the 1930s within studies dedicated to Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes. It was towards the end of the 1920s that Koyré became interested in the Polish canon’s astronomical work. Gérard Jorland has shown how the history of scientific thought became integrated to Koyré’s work. According to that French philosopher, at the beginning of his doctoral thesis work, Koyré intended to understand Jacob Boehme by interpreting his texts based on an alchemistic terminology (Jorland 1981, p. 49). Koyré himself stated that to achieve that end, there would be a chapter of his thesis “on alchemy and Paracelsus” (Koyré 2009 [1924], p. 236). However, Koyré’s “discovery” of Copernicus, or rather, of Copernican cosmology, led him to abandon that “false pathway” and, instead, to understand that “Boehme’s mysticism is rigorously incomprehensible without reference to the new cosmology created by Copernicus” (Koyré 1982 [1951], pp. 10–11). That is why, in Jorland’s view, the study of scientific thought was integrated to his work on mystic and religious thought and did not replace that research, as a chronological and stage-based analysis might suggest. Furthermore, it was precisely in relation to the religious repercussions of Copernicus’s work and its transformation into a reference

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for renaissance mystic thought that Koyré began his studies on Copernicus in his courses at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1934, he was to publish a translation, accompanied by notes, of the first 11 chapters of the first book of De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium, preceded by an introductory text (Copernic 1934). That was precisely where he developed the notion of “revolution.” It was not, however, a scientific revolution. Unlike the traditional historiographic periodization that identifies the fall of Constantinople or Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America as marking the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times, Koyré identified the publication of De Revolutionibus as being the “mark of the end of one world and the beginning of a new world” (Koyré 1934, p. 1). Indeed, Koyré underscored how the cut brought about by Copernicus was even more profound as it indicated “the end of a period that embraces the Middle Ages just as much as Antiquity [. . .]: it is only after Copernicus that man no longer finds himself at the center of the universe. The universe no longer gyrates for him” (Idem, Ibidem). Although he did not fail to consider the “scientific” implications of the publication of that work, Koyré underscored the more philosophical aspects of its effects. (This book was published in a collection that Abel Rey created in 1930 entitled “Texts and translations to serve the history of modern thought.” However, in the USA, it was received at the time as a contribution “of the highest importance for the history of Science,” in a review published precisely in Georges Sarton’s journal and almost anticipating the way Koyré’s mode of working would be received in that country starting in the 1940s (cf. Rosen 1936).) As he was to emphasize later, referring to that text of his written in the 1930s, it was not a question of discerning a simpler scheme for representing the cosmos in Copernicus’s astronomy, but instead, of showing how it produced “a new image of the world and a new feeling of being” (Koyré 1982 [1951], p. 11). Thus, the problem of the Copernican Revolution was not scientifical one, but metaphysical and ontological one.

Galileo It was based on that study of Copernicus that Koyré arrived at Galileo. In his introduction to De Revolutionibus, Koyré showed that in no way did Copernicus’s physics herald the physics of Kepler or of Galileo. Ever since 1933, in the courses he gave at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Koyré dedicated himself to Galileo and prolonged his efforts to differentiate him from Copernicus and Kepler. From that time on, he began to systematically use the term “Galilean revolution” – in the summary of his 1933 course, he already used that term (cf. Koyré 1986, p. 43). In the following year, he studied the formation of Galileo’s thinking and the first repercussions of his ideas. At the beginning of 1935, Koyré published the first part of a text entitled À l’aurore de la science moderne: la jeunesse de Galilée (I), in the Annales de l’Université de Paris. The second part would be published in the same journal, a year later. Later the two texts, with some additions would compose the first book of the Galileo Studies with the title À l’aube de la science Classique [At the dawn of classical science].

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As Pietro Redondi (1986b) has shown, Koyré’s introduction into consecrated institutional spaces dated back to the same period. In mid-1935, he presented a conference on Les débuts de Galilée at the International Committee of Historical Sciences directed by Aldo Mieli, and in the following year, a conference on Les années d’apprentissage de Galilée in the History of Science section of the Centre International de Synthèse. That same year, the second part of the abovementioned text was presented before the Belgian Committee for the History of Science in Brussels. Although the debate that followed the conference at the Centre recognized the originality of Koyré’s work in relation to Duhem’s, the institutionalized circle of the History of Science received his studies on the Pisan scientist with reservations and criticism. The consequences of that version of history for a traditional historiography of the sciences and for the positivist method were very clear. (Koyré was to respond rapidly to some of them in an initial note to his work “Galileo and the law of inertia” which would later become the third book of Galileo Studies (on this, cf. Redondi 1986a, pp. 36–37).) Koyré had identified the effort to geometrize space and mathematicize the laws of nature precisely with that which characterized the “scientific revolution of the seventeenth century,” and which marked the advent of a new physics. Once again, it is not a question of problems of a scientific order in all the debates that took place concerning the definition of terrestrial bodies or even the mobility of the Earth itself. It is about “[. . .] philosophy, ontology, metaphysics, not about pure science” (Koyré 1992 [1939], p. 231). Hence a scientific revolution expresses and implies a “profound intellectual transformation” (Idem, p. 14) at the same time. Thus, Koyré uses that terminology of “intellectual transformation” and “intellectual attitude” with some frequency and already, in 1935, takes up again Gaston Bachelard’s notion of “intellectual mutation” to conceptually define the scientific revolution – Bachelard had introduced this notion only a year before in his work Le nouvel Esprit scientifique with the intention of characterizing the profound transformations that marked the science of the day.

Descartes In the academic year 1936–1937, Koyré went back to Egypt. Three years earlier, at the end of 1933 and the beginning of 1934, he had been in the service of France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and placed at the disposal of the University of Cairo (Redondi 1986a; Zambelli 2021). At that time, many universities were conducting special activities to celebrate the tricentenary of the Discours de la méthode and so it came about that he presented his work Trois leçons sur Descartes in that Egyptian institution. It was published in Cairo in French and Arabic in 1938 and then in 1944, in Paris and New York with the title that it would bear from then on, Entretiens sur Descartes. Koyré took part in Parisian university events: his text “Galileo and Descartes” was published in the minutes of the Congrès Descartes, in 1937. In that very year, in a special number of the Revue philosophique dedicated to the author of the Discours, Koyré published his “The Law of Falling Bodies: Galileo

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and Descartes,” which was to become the second book of his Galileo Studies. Still in 1937, he was to publish, in the Annales de l’Université de Paris, his polemical “Galileo and the Pisa experiment: concerning a legend” (which, however, was not destined to appear in the abovementioned Studies) and in an Egyptian journal he published an article, La légende des expériences de Galilée, in which he addressed the same subject (Koyré 1937). It can be seen from the titles of the texts mentioned in the preceding paragraph that, at the time they were written, Koyré’s interest in Descartes was closely connected with his work on Galileo and the birth of modern science. Considering the Cairo conferences alone, at the very beginning of the text, Koyré characterizes the Discours de la méthode as being the “the announcement of an intellectual revolution of which a scientific revolution would be the fruit” (Koyré 1980 [1938], p. 12). Intellectual revolution, scientific revolution, spiritual revolution, Cartesian revolution, but also Cartesian reform, reform of ideas – that was the terminology he employed in his reading of the Discours. (During the same period, Koyré worked on a translation from Latin to French of the Traité de la Réforme de L’Entendement that was to be launched in 1938. In 1937–1938, he gave a course on a “Methodological Introduction to the Study of Spinoza” in which he situated the Dutch philosopher in relation to those Copernican, Galilean, and Cartesian revolutions that he had been studying since the early 1990s. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Spinoza faced a philosophical situation marked by “the decisive victory of Platonic a priori-ism over Aristotelean (and nominalist) empiricism; by the effective constitution of a mathematical science of nature; by the destruction of the medieval Cosmos” (Koyré 1986, p. 52). At the time, Koyré wrote innumerable reviews of then recent books dedicated to the author of Ethics.) The titles of the three chapters or of the three conferences, “The uncertain world,” “The vanished Cosmos,” and “The rediscovered Universe,” sum up very well the structure of Koyré’s book and of his argument. An important new notion appears here which it seems to me is key to the Koyrean argument: the notion of “crisis.” The Discours de la méthode is fundamentally a reaction, a response to a critical period, to an “era of crisis” (Koyré 1980 [1938], p. 20) in which Being, World, and Cosmos had become uncertain. I will now go back to addressing the question of the structure of that book. The notion of crises obliges us to articulate the reading of those texts of Koyré’s written in the 1930s with an important field of philosophical and cultural problematization of the interwar period.

The Topography of a Concept In the interwar period, Europe witnessed the emergence of problems which, in innumerable domains, were termed “crises”: the crisis of culture, of the spirit, of conscience, of the sciences, and, at the outside, the crisis of reason. In regard to what interests me here, namely, science, the then current perception was of the existence of a crisis in its very fundaments. The radical new discoveries in physics were destroying what, up until then, had been considered solid and definitive fundaments.

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The foundations of what was considered methodologically and philosophically to be science were crumbling in the sight of all. Thus, “crisis” was the term that was attributed to a mode of problematization of that experience in which an entire generation found itself implicated. Concomitantly with that image of the impossibility of elaborating a global, unitary theory of reality, the very ideal of a predictive and determinist science collapsed. From the philosophical point of view or even from a simple epistemological one, the crisis of science did not merely consist of a methodological issue but went much deeper, and it was a blow to reason itself; hence the pessimisms that emerged, but also the optimisms. Hence, also, the themes of irrationalism or of the end of progress. That is why the discourses of that age are traversed by a profound unrest and discomfort, and the terrain in which their intellectual topography is configured reveals itself as being uncertain and unstable. However, we must not reduce it or consider it to be simply an effect of the great discoveries of that period. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the identification of science with progress and the understanding that science progressed “as a cumulative and mechanical process” had been called into question. The possibility of a faillite de la science had indeed been announced (Rasmussen 1996). However, as Léon Brunschvicg would put it at a later date, the faillite de la science was much more of a failure of a type of philosophy of science (Gattinara 1998, p. 24) and had nothing to do with what he considered to be the crisis of science, identified with the crises of mechanicism and determinism, which had been called into question in a similar way ever since the end of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, that shows us how the radical discoveries in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century occurred in a theoretical and philosophical environment in which certain science conceptions were already the object of criticism, and, on the other, that the notion of crisis must be addressed in its plural aspect and not as a “precisely delimited historical category” (Idem, Ibidem). There were multiple reactions to that crisis, varying according to the domain under consideration, and it must be stressed that it was not a crisis in science alone; the reactions were also different according to the country under analysis. Thus, without a doubt, it is necessary to speak of crises in the plural, as Enrico Castelli Gattinara proposes. To that Italian philosopher, the originality of the French “reaction” to that crisis is characterized by what he called the “question of history”; that is to say, the transformation of the problem of the crisis in science, and the philosophical and epistemological problem of rationalism that it implied, into a question that was the concern of history. If the epistemology and the philosophical study of scientific thought were to become historical, then it was because the problematic of traditionalism had become a question of history. (Although a new way of articulating history and epistemology stemming from Léon Brunschvicg, Émile Meyerson, and Abel Rey was already being promoted, it was only with Bachelard and Koyré that reason came to be inscribed in history, marking what Gattinara considered to be a “point of no return” in the epistemology and philosophy of the sciences in France (cf. Gattinara 1998, pp. 55–57). What is interesting in the work of Gattinara is to show that those “two generations” actually shared a common ground, thereby making it possible to think them in the same plane. That mode of

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understanding marks an explicit distancing from the historiography of the 1960s and 1970s which thought of those “two generations” in terms of rupture through the opposition between the continuity and discontinuity and the immobilism and dynamism of reason. In that aspect, it affiliates with Gérard Jorland’s interpretation which showed that Koyré’s history of thought was a synthesis of those of Brunschvicg (creative activity) and Meyerson (cheminement) (cf. Jorland 1981, pp. 90–102).) With the crisis, reason lost its a priori fundaments. The absolute, definitive, static, and architectonic image of reason collapsed. With that, it ran the risk of becoming an absolutely incoherent and meaningless fig. A new conception of reason would constitute itself there, open, polemical, and dynamic, and its tracks could be accompanied through the study of a science in movement. Thus, that affirmation of the historicity of reason implied the temporalization of its very fundaments. From then on, a priori, it would itself become historical. By thinking science in terms of its historicity and attributing mobility to it, the possibility arose of also thinking it in terms of an open movement by means of which it would be possible to recognize the transformations of its fundamental categories. It was in history that reason encountered its own meaning and coherence. Thus, there is a profound meaning in that affirmation of Koyré’s cited earlier about the inevitability of the passage of the philosophy of science to history: it was the very definition of what science that was at stake in that passage. In Steven Shapin’s view, therein lies the innovating, radical aspect of Koyré’s work: “just imagine: science as an authentically historical phenomenon” (Shapin 2013, p. 6). The Koyrean concept of intellectual revolution was a philosophical response to that field of problematization. Thus, it is not a case of comfortably inscribing his work in a supposed philosophy of science “tradition” that was not indifferent to the study of history, but, instead, of articulating the geography of a “thinking” with a “happening” that reconfigures its landscape. It is a case of understanding the type of theoretical problem that makes history unavoidable and urgent for the philosophy of science, no longer as simply a place from which materials and examples can be taken for the purpose of philosophical speculation but as one having its own fundaments. If then history became “inevitable” for the French philosophy of science, it was because it was a case of founding reason itself in history. Koyré’s concept of scientific revolution belongs to that plane; it inscribes itself in that topography of thought. The theme of crisis articulates with the problem of revolution: only by means of an intellectual revolution does it become possible to come out of a crisis.

Uncertainty, Disarray, and the Way Out of the Crisis Thus, it would seem that the studies on Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes echo that topography and, in a way, achieve a certain problematic unity. Those echoes are explicit, however, in the conferences pronounced in Cairo. “Philosophy’s present [actualité] comes from just as far back as philosophy itself. And perhaps there is no more current [actuelle] philosophical thought today than that of Descartes” (Koyré 1980 [1938], p. 9). I do not believe that statement to be a confession of Cartesianism

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or a mere rhetorical ornamentation on the occasion of a determined event; Koyré was not given to that kind of flourish. So where would the presente [actualité] of the Cartesian text come from? Its important novelty lay in the fact of its having been constituted in the seventeenth century in reaction to a profound crisis of the day that can be summed up in two words: uncertainty and disarray [désarroi]. The Discours is a book that tells the story of a series of crises that Descartes experienced. The first, in his youth, is a crisis of doubt and deception on discovering that everything he had been taught in school failed to lead him to firm and secure reasons as to what the world is, what the soul is. However, to Koyré, that state of uncertainty the Discours refers to is not individual. “It is a crisis of culture. Not a personal crisis of Descartes’s” (Idem, p. 31). Furthermore, Koyré does not disguise the relation of that crisis with the one in course in the interwar period. It was a problem of Descartes time “and of ours” (Idem, p. 18). It was not only the renovation of ideas, an effort to found a new science, a set of discoveries in time and space that amplified the “historical, geographic and scientific image of Man and of the world” (Idem, p. 19) that were the mark of the seventeenth century. It was also an era characterized by criticism, dissolution, and destruction of those old beliefs, conceptions, and truths “that had given Man certainty of knowledge and security of action” (Idem, Ibidem). The world had become uncertain and the man who lived in that world suddenly felt insecure. The destruction of the Aristotelian and medieval ontology led the Renaissance to a magic ontology for which everything was possible. If everything is possible, nothing is true, and “only error is right.” Doubt installed itself. It is not exactly Koyré who offers that diagnosis of the Renaissance, but three of his contemporaries who proffer that pessimistic, resigned, and skeptical characterization, namely, Agrippa, Sanchez, and Montaigne. However, in Koyré’s view, those attitudes to the crisis were not definitive, and ever since the end of the sixteenth century, there had been a visible movement of reaction to the desperation, to the resignation, and to the renunciation of thinking the world that characterized them. Pierre Charron marks the reaction based on faith, Francis Bacon takes support from experience, and it is René Descartes who supports himself on reason. Charron, a man of the church, does not retain any skepticism insofar as he evoked a religious sentiment at a time when God was a God, no felt, but proven. Francis Bacon, a man of the State, recommends a regal reform based on experience, action, and practice. To the uncertainty of reason, he opposes the security of an ordered experience. For that author of Novum Organum, whose success was purely literary, “Man is agent rather than thought” (Idem, pp. 22–23). Developing an argument of Étienne Gilson’s, Koyré proposes that it is not to the Aristotelians and ecclesiastics that one should trace back the Discours but to Montaigne, at one and the same time principal master and adversary of Descartes. Master insofar Descartes prolongs Montaigne’s work of destruction and liberation: “the fight against the ‘superstitions’ and the ‘prejudices,’ the ‘ready-made opinions,’ the ‘false Scholastic rationality’” (Idem, p. 24). He prolongs it, however, because he has at his disposal the “most formidable war machine – war against authority and tradition – that man ever possessed” (Idem, p. 17), namely, that which Galileo had constructed in his Dialogue and which he, Descartes, set out to perfect. With

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Descartes, doubt stops being a state and becomes a method which, making use of the truth of the new science, transforms itself into an instrument of “criticism” and a means of discerning the true from the false. Adversary, insofar as Descartes combats Montaigne’s skeptical attitude to the hilt. His greatness lies precisely in the fact of his having persisted on a course, despite the risks and obstacles, at the heart of which he could discover “the clarity of spiritual liberty” and the “certainty of intellectual truth.” Translating those concepts, but keeping to the Koyrean terminology to think on the trajectory of the transformation of reason, one could say that the singularity of Descartes was his having had the daring and audacity to construct a system of science and of the universe, of having had the courage and run the risk of setting himself to traverse the very same labyrinth in which others, like Montaigne, had failed and to create a new logic, a new physics, a new metaphysics, and a new world. To do that, however, it was necessary to begin by destroying the scientific system and the very notion of Cosmos that had been breaking down since Copernicus. That is what Koyré defines as the Cartesian revolution, as a reform of scientific and philosophical reason, and with that, he declares, the way out of the crisis will be found. Koyré’s analysis shows that at least the crisis of culture and the crisis of reason were not unprecedented or exclusively contemporary. That does not mean to say that Koyré visualized an exemplariness in it, because if it was indeed a crisis of reason, it would not occur on the same ruins of that which, at the outside, marked the birth of the modern world. (We cannot fail to point out that those texts constitute the registration of a philosophical invention. From here on, we will refer to it as the history of reason based on the concepts of revolution, mutation, transformation, rupture, and discontinuity. Such concepts are indissolubly linked to at least two contemporary books of Bachelard’s Le nouvel esprit scientifique and La formation de l’esprit scientifique. Surprisingly, they were written between 1933 and 1938 and their contemporaneity with Koyré’s texts does not seem to have previously been pointed out.) Nevertheless, by presenting the thinking in the past in an open movement and in a polemical and dynamic manner, he made it implicit that the intellectual crisis that swept over Europe at the time did not correspond to the decadence of the Occident, to the end or disappearance of reason, and he transformed history into a figure of eminent importance in that contemporary scenario of uncertainty and disarray. On the other hand, however, his analysis also made it possible to think on the problem of philosophy in the space of that specific scene.

The Problem of Philosophy Hence, he insists on the importance of a philosophical attitude that emerges with Cartesianism in the seventeenth century (Idem, p. 10). It was only in the last paragraph of his Entretiens sur Descartes that Koyré presented a series of questions that in 1937 demonstrated the actualité of Cartesian philosophy – not of Descartes concrete work itself, of which, by the time of that tricentenary, nothing remained, but rather of an attitude that was born with it. What seems to me the most important point

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is that in the author of Méditations, Koyré situated a mode of relating philosophy with the problem of the crisis that he then considered to be absolutely actual. What was at stake there was the relation between science and philosophy. The elaboration of an Aristotelian-type physics based on common sense and sensory perception does not need to begin from a metaphysics base because its very fundaments conduce to metaphysics. The elaboration of a geometric physics of the Cartesian-type, however, cannot do without a beginning in metaphysics; on the contrary, it needs metaphysics because, if it is to define that the principles that construct reality are mathematical ones, then it needs to support itself on some point other than empirical data and sensory reality. That is the problem of philosophy, the problem of the fundaments, and the problem of the principles of knowledge. In its march, science frequently ignores that comprehension or even rejects it altogether. Philosophy, however, cannot do without it, much less forget it. So what, then, constitutes a crisis? What is a crisis in essence other than a profound shock to the fundaments? To Koyré, a “moment of crisis” was a moment of “discontinuity, of violent rupture, of radical opposition to the past” (Koyré 1954, p. 52). That was the problem Descartes faced at the end of the seventeenth century and which led him to his “method,” to the philosophical effort of founding his physics, his logic. The difference in relation to that crisis is that, at the beginning of the 1930s, the task that is philosophy’s own seems to have been forgotten. Koyré stated that textually in the Entretiens sur Descartes. “We have forgotten it. Our science advances without bothering much about its own fundaments. Success is sufficient for it, until the day comes when a crisis – ‘a crisis of principles’ – reveals to science that there is something lacking; namely an understanding of what it does” (Koyré 1980 [1938], p. 58). In that sense, the series formed by those three texts briefly commented on above should be related to another series made up of smaller, but no less important, papers. During the period when Koyré was writing his texts on Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes, he was particularly interested in the discussions on the contemporary epistemological transformations, most certainly within the setting of his frequenting Émile Meyerson’s circle. During the 1920s, in the wake of the advent of quantum physics, a series of problems arose of a scientific and philosophic order. The result obtained by scientists based on quantic models were incompatible with the classical theories; the principles on which the models were based were considerably unknown; the very definition of “material” became a problem insofar as there was the affirmation of the corpuscular behavior of waves and the wave behavior of corpuscles. The description of the random behavior of the subatomic world was flagrantly irreconcilable with the science of the day (Bem-Dov 1996, pp. 128–140). Those profound transformations in the sciences led the representatives of the new physics to abandon the very principles of scientific knowledge, especially the law of causality and the univocal determination of natural phenomena (Koyré 1932, p. 315). At the same time, in the absence of a fundamental theory that could accommodate those novelties and effects and in the face of the practical results provided by the quantic models and their capacity to predict the behavior of measurable quantities, some actors of that new knowledge were prematurely led to

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renounce “real” knowledge of the behavior of those “phenomena,” thereby opening the way for the promotion of a neopositivist conception of science. The French reception of that debate, the opposition between a phenomenist and realist conception, which at the turn of nineteenth to the twentieth century had dominated the epistemological debates, returned with force. (Throughout his trajectory as a historian of scientific thinking, Koyré always emphasized not only the struggle but also the affirmation of mathematical realism in the face phenomenalism, especially in relation to the history of astronomical theories, as can be seen in his 1934 text on Copernicus. There we find that the history of that combat articulated a question that was notably current in the interwar period. In those lesser papers of Koyré’s, it is very clear that his position is contrary to a phenomenist conception that he largely identifies in Arthur Eddington (the victim, in those texts, of Koyré’s incisive style) and favoring a conception that he identifies particularly in Paul Langevin. Those texts also enable the accompaniment of his position in regard to the “genial author of the principle of uncertainty,” Heisenberg.) It was that skepticism, resignation, and renunciation that Koyré identified as the typical epistemological attitude that had emerged in past moments of crisis. Ever since 1930, a series of reviews that he wrote bore witness to his interest in the debate, as does his actual participation in them. In 1930, he reviewed a special issue of a journal dedicated to discussion in science on the “continuous” and the “discontinuous” (Koyré 1930); in 1932, he analyzed a set of scientists’ conferences on the “current orientation of science” (Koyré 1932); in 1934–1935, he undertook the recension of three publications: L. Silberstein’s book on the relation between causality and determinism (Koyré 1934–1935a); P. Langevin’s conference on the problem of the structure of the atom and the fundamental ideas of the creators of quantum physics (Koyré 1934–1935b); and the texts presented at the Fifth International Synthesis Week, dedicated to the scientific notion of a Law (Koyré 1934– 1935c); in 1935–1936, he analyzed A. Eddington’s popularization of science book (Koyré 1935–1936a) and W. Heisenberg’s book on the transformations in the fundaments of physics (Koyré 1935–1936b). We could list other texts correlated with that period, but what is important here is to underscore the underlying problem that traversed them all and is at stake in them: all those texts, according to Koyré, “show [ed], very well, the disarray [désarroi] that reigns today” in the epistemological discussions (Koyré 1934–1935b, p. 438). Hence the trait that marked science at the time: the “necessity of philosophy,” and that was so in two complementary aspects. On the one hand, the problems that physics brought up and that constituted the nucleus of the discussions among scientists were “problems of a philosophical order”; problems that were not external to science considering that its own evolution had led it to formulate them. The problems that inflame physics and that scientists discuss today [. . .] are problems of a philosophical order. And it is not for reasons external to science that the physicist today is led to present them: it is the very evolution of science, the admirable development of experimental technique, the prestigious élan of mathematical invention that oblige him to

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M. Salomon [undertake] that conversion of principles and imperiously require a revision of the logical categories of his thinking. For the physicist of today, philosophy cannot be limited to the preface of his works; it overflows into the body of the work itself. Determinism, causality, probability, continuity, discontinuity etc. the physicist needs a logical elaboration of these notions: work which, logically, the philosopher should take on; philosophy, however, let us freely admit it, has been incapable of providing the physicist those analyses and results that he needs. Generally confined in the past, three centuries behind in comparison with presentday thinking, it prefers to keep itself at a distance. Well, given that dearth of philosophy, science itself has had to forge a philosophy. The philosophy of scientists is not always very fortunate on its own, but if it is not, then philosophy alone is responsible for that. The scientist has done his work and is even beginning to do that of the philosopher, who has lazily neglected to do his own. And it is not contentment, but a feeling of unease and embarrassment that I experience, reading the philosophical discussions of the physicists. (Koyré 1932, p. 318).

We can see how harsh Koyré was in regard to what he considered an absence, a negligence, and a distancing on the part of the philosophers in the face of the problems that arose in the midst of the then recent scientific activity. In this first aspect, he called attention to need for the revision of a series of logical categories of thought without which the world would become totally incoherent; that is, it was necessary to reform its own fundaments, the principles that made it possible to understand what science does. As can be seen, the “crisis” was not scientific but fundamentally a philosophical one; it was basically due to philosophy; in this case, its prolongation was due to the inanition of philosophy. That is what we can conclude if we consider his argument about the seventeenth century crisis: the affirmation that a geometrical physics, unlike the Aristotelian one, could not do without a metaphysics from the outset. That means the affirmation of a geometrical physics depended on a new conception of the world, of a colorless world, without qualities, totally different from that of a Paracelse or of a Jacob Boehme. That had already been his argument in his 1935 study of Galileo: the “decision” to use geometrical language to interrogate nature “corresponds to a change of metaphysical attitude” (Koyré 1992 [1939], p. 16). Was it not precisely a new metaphysics that the new quantum physics was calling for then? Did not “a revision of the logical categories” imply, at the outside, a new conception of the world? On April 6, 1946, Koyré began a class he was teaching to students at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand with a commentary on philosophy’s interest in the study of the history of the ancient scientific theories, and before passing on to Galileo, which was the theme of his elocution that day, he once more related the crisis of the seventeenth century with the one being experienced at the time. He reiterated part of an argument that he had previously used at the beginning of his 1935 text on Galileo namely, that it is because we learn, in school, certain difficult things – the law of falling bodies, for example – that we become accustomed to certain categories of thought, propositions, and ideas and consider them to be evident and natural, that we forget that they are not plausible or acceptable except in the interior of certain systems of action, of notions, of a certain conception of the world; let us put it frankly, a certain philosophy. That is why the

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great crises of scientific thought, the great crises of the 17th century and the great crisis we are experiencing today, are more than anything else, and in the final analysis, crises of philosophical thought. (Koyré 1946, p. 3)

We can see that for Koyré, the problem of those years was the same as that of Descartes’s time. The Cartesian injunction became more actual than ever, for the “world [had] once more become uncertain” (Koyré 1980 [1938], p. 65). It was experiencing a new era of uncertainty, disarray, uneasiness, and discomfort: there was a need for a new conception of the world, an ontology, a new metaphysics, and a new philosophy to accommodate the new science. That actuality [actualité] enabled the remembrance of what philosophy’s own problem was, one which it seemed to have forgotten, and why thinking and culture found themselves in the midst of a profound crisis. At that moment, Koyré’s diagnosis is quite clear: the crisis (not the same as Krisis) does not stem from science’s withdrawal from the world of life; instead, it results from philosophy’s distancing itself from its proper task, namely, understanding or defining what the particular world of a new science is. Furthermore, if science needed philosophy, it was because the construction of a new physics implied the elaboration of a new metaphysics in which, however, God, who had been dead since the nineteenth century, would not have any role to perform. (Here is what he wrote in 1938: “Is science, or at least modern science, not the opposite of metaphysics? Is it not justifiably proud of its autonomy and even of its autocracy? Has it not affirmed that, ever since it originated? And is Descartes not one of its creators? Well now, far from proclaiming science’s absolute independence, Descartes teaches us precisely the opposite. He tells us that that Science actually needs a metaphysics. And, what is even more serious, he tells us that it [science] must begin with the latter” (Koyré 1980 [1938], p. 54). In 1940, Bachelard stated that: “The spirit can change metaphysics; what it cannot do is get by without metaphysics” (Bachelard 1987 [1940], p. 15).)

Conclusion For the author of Newtonian Studies, philosophy played a fundamental cultural role; he saw it as the only means of getting over the crisis that Europe was going through in the interwar period – at least in the case of the “science” crisis. What was at stake in that moment was philosophy’s ability to produce truth, clarification, and to make a world that had become obscure and uncertain clearer, and with that, to make it possible to escape from the state of uncertainty into which man had once again been plunged. To Koyré, the place of truth did not lie in science alone: philosophy is Itinerarium mentis in veritatem, recherche de la vérité. That then is the backdrop against which we can visualize the emergence of the concept of intellectual or scientific revolution or of the type of problem with which its affirmation was indissociably linked. That shows us how Alexandre Koyré’s history of scientific thought became possible because of the turmoil of science in the interwar period but was also forged at the heart of profound epistemological and

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philosophical discussions of the fundaments of the new knowledge and the role of philosophy in the face of those radical transformations. It was that philosophical backdrop which those historians who were to appropriate his “scientific revolution” concept in the postwar period, especially in the USA, would completely forget.

Cross-References ▶ Gaston Bachelard and Historical Epistemology: A New Perspective for the History of Science in the Twentieth Century ▶ Pierre Duhem: Between the Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History ▶ The Case of Life in the Historiography of Modern Science: Canguilhem’s “Biophilosophy” ▶ The French Style in the Philosophy of the Sciences ▶ Thomas Kuhn’s Legacy for the Historiography of Science Acknowledgments This chapter is part of a broader study of Alexandre Koyré’s conception of history and it enjoys the support of the National Scientific and Technological Development Council (CNPq) in the form of a productivity grant. Translated by Martin Charles Nicholl.

References Almeida TS (2018) Canguilhem e a gênese do possível: estudo sobre a historicização das ciências. LiberArs, São Paulo Bachelard G (1987 [1940]) A filosofia do não. Filosofia do novo espírito científico (trans: Ramos J), 4th edn. Presença, Lisbon Belaval Y (1964) Les recherches philosophiques d’Alexandre Koyré. Critique XX(207–208): 675–704 Bem-Dov Y (1996) Convite à física (trans: Borges ML). Jorge Zahar, Rio de Janeiro Bensaude-Vincent B, Telkes-Klein E (2009) Introduction. In: Meyerson É (ed) Lettres françaises. CNRS, Paris Blay M (1997) Henri Berr et l’histoire des sciences. In: Biard A, Bourel D, Brian E (eds) Henri Berr et la culture du XXe siècle. Histoire, Science et philosophie. Albin Michel, Paris, pp 121–137 Braunstein J-F (2015) Abel Rey et les débuts de l’Institut d’Histoire des Sciences et de Techniques (1932–1940). In: Bitbol M et al (eds) L’épistémologie française, 1870–1970. Matériologiques, Paris, pp 163–180 Copernic N (1934) Des révolutions des orbes celestes: livre premier (introduction, traduction et notes d’Alexandre Koyré). Félix Alcan, Paris De Laclos FF (2009) L’épistemologie d’Émile Meyerson. Une anthropologie de la connaissance. Vrin, Paris Drago A (2018) Koyré’s revolutionary role in the historiography of science. In: Pisano R et al (eds) Hypotheses and perspectives in the history and philosophy of science. Springer, Cham, pp 123–141 Gattinara EC (1998) Les inquiétudes de la raison. Vrin/EHESS, Paris Jorland G (1981) La science dans la philosophie. Les recherches épistémologiques d’Alexandre Koyré. Gallimard, Paris Koyré A (1912) Sur les nombres de M. Russell. Rev Metaphys Morale XX(5):722–724 Koyré A (1930) Review of “Continu et discontinue”. Rev Philos CX:317–319

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Koyré A (1932) Review of “L’orientation actuelle des sciences”. Rev Philos CXIV:315–318 Koyré A (1934) Introduction. In: Copernic N (ed) Des révolutions des orbes celestes: livre premier (introduction, traduction et notes d’Alexandre Koyré). Félix Alcan, Paris, pp 1–23 Koyré A (1934–1935a) Review of “Causality, a law of nature or a maxim of the naturalist?. Philos Res IV:435–436 Koyré A (1934–1935b) Review of “La notion de corpuscules et d’atomes. Philos Res IV:436–438 Koyré A (1934–1935c) Review of “Science et loi”. Philos Res IV:438–440 Koyré A (1935–1936a) Review of “New pathways in science”. Philos Res V:455–456 Koyré A (1935–1936b) Review of “Wandlungen in den Grundlagen der Naturwissenschaft”. Philos Res V:457–458 Koyré A (1937) La légende des expériences de Galilée. La bourse égyptienne, Cairo, 4 de dezembro Koyré A (1946) Cours dactylographié corrigé sur Galilée du 9 avril 1946 donné au Lycée Louis-leGrand. Centre Alexandre Koyré, Fonds Alexandre Koyré, manus. CAK Koyré AP. c 7 d 2 Koyré A (1954) Intervention. In: Wahl J (ed) “Un renouvellement de la métaphysique est-il possible?”. Bull Soc Franç Philos, séance du 27 février, pp 51–61 Koyré A (1961) Message d’Alexandre Koyré à l’occasion du centenaire de la naissance d’Émile Meyerson. Bull Soc Franç Philos 53:115. (Reedited in Koyré A (1986) In: Redondi P (ed) De la mystique à la science. Cours, conférences et documents – 1922–1962. EHESS, Paris) Koyré A (1980 [1938]) Considerações sobre Descartes (trans: Godinho H). Presença, Lisbon Koyré A (1982 [1951]) Orientação e projetos de pesquisa. In: Estudos de história do pensamento científico (trans: Ramalho M). Forense-Universitária/EdUnB, Rio de Janeiro/Brasília, pp 10–14 Koyré A (1986) In: Redondi P (ed) De la mystique à la science. Cours, conférences et documents – 1922–1962. EHESS, Paris Koyré A (1991 [1922]) Observações sobre os paradoxos de Zenão. In: Estudos de História do Pensamento Filosófico (trans: de Lourdes Menezes M). Forense Universitária, Rio de Janeiro, pp 1–22 Koyré A (1992 [1939]) Estudos Galilaicos (trans: Ferreira da Fonseca N). Dom Quixote, Lisbon Koyré A (2009 [1924]) Lettre à É. Meyerson. In: Meyerson É (ed) Lettres françaises. CNRS, Paris, pp 235–237 Metz A (1928) Une nouvelle philosophie des sciences: le causalisme de E. Meyerson. Alcan, Paris Paul HW (1976) Scholarship and ideology: the Chair of the General History of Science at the College de France, 1892–1913. Isis 67(3):376–397 Poirier R (2009 [1925]) “Lettre à E. Meyerson”, de 13 de junho. In: Meyerson É (ed) Lettres françaises. CNRS, Paris, p 755 Rasmussen A (1996) Critique du progrès, « crise de la science »: débats et répresentations du tournant du siècle. Mil neuf cent 14:89–113 Redondi P (1986a) Note et documents. In: Redondi P (ed) Koyré, Alexandre. De la mystique à la science. Cours, conférences et documents – 1922–1962. EHESS, Paris, pp 36–37 Redondi P (1986b) Préface. In: Redondi P (ed) Koyré, Alexandre. De la mystique à la science. Cours, conférences et documents – 1922–1962. EHESS, Paris, pp IX–XVII Rosen E (1936) Review of “Des Révolutions des orbes célestes” by Nicolas Copernic. Isis 24(2): 439–442 Salomon M (2015) Entre história das ciências e da religião: o problema da temporalidade histórica em Lucien Febvre e Alexandre Koyré no entreguerras. Hist Historiogr 19:107–123 Sarton G (1913) L’histoire de la Science. Isis 1(1):3–46 Shapin S (2013) Nunca pura. Fino Traço, Belo Horizonte Telkes-Klein E (2007) Meyerson dans les milieux intellectuels français dans les années 1920. Arch Philos 70(3):259–373 Zambelli P (2021) Alexandre Koyré, un juif errant? Museo Galileu, Florence

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Gaston Bachelard and Historical Epistemology: A New Perspective for the History of Science in the Twentieth Century Fa´bio Ferreira de Almeida

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Perspective for the History of Science: The Bachelardian Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter presents the importance of Gaston Bachelard’s work in the constitution of the French intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. The importance lies principally in the novel perspective of his epistemology which, given its eminently philosophical stance in the face of the profound transformations in the sciences (particularly physics, chemistry, and mathematics) that marked the early decades of the twentieth century, has become historic. To that end we endeavor to place the Bachelardian philosophy in relation to its antecedents and to the context of the period and then exhibit the most important elements in the constitution of his epistemological reflection. The chapter closes with a brief localization of Bachelard’s epistemological reflection in relation to his literary philosophy, reinforcing the importance of the role that work represented in the constitution of contemporary French philosophy. Keywords

Bachelard · Epistemology · Science · History · Philosophy

Translated by Martin Charles Nicholl. F. F. de Almeida (*) Faculty of Philosophy, Federal University of Goiás, Goiânia, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_3

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Introduction Born in provincial Bar-sur-Aube, in 1884, to a shoemaker and his wife, from early on Gaston Bachelard showed great aptitude for intellectual life. In spite of the excellent results he obtained in competitive school examinations, his simple origins obliged him to go to work as a mail service employee as soon as he had finished his basic schooling. His deeper knowledge of mathematics, physics, and chemistry was largely self-taught. It was only after the First World War in which he had served in the trenches that Bachelard obtained a post as a teacher in his native city. An avid reader of the poets who molded the art of that period, of the French symbolists, and of German romanticism, in 1927, under the tutorship of Abel Rey, Bachelard defended his main philosophy thesis, Essai sur la connaissance approchée, and a complementary thesis, Étude sur un problème de physique: la propagation thermique dans les solides, tutored by Léon Brunschvicg. By that time Bachelard was 43 years old and from then on the books to come would pave a new way for reflection: work that would guarantee an increasingly important role for philosophy in that intellectual context, profoundly transforming the French intellectual landscape. Pascal Nouvel considers that, at the time, Bachelard’s work came to occupy a position that was simultaneously marginal and central (Nouvel 1997, p. 5). Bachelard’s importance in the scenario of twentieth-century French philosophy is mainly founded on the realization of the intuition that Léon Brunschvicg’s thinking had been preparing. What Brunschvicg (1922) perceived towards the end of the nineteenth century, mainly based on mathematics and with a rationalist inspiration coming from Spinoza and Pascal, was that the task of philosophy moved away from being a determination of science to being a reflection on science. It was in that movement, inaugurating a new pathway for reflection completely different from that which his contemporary, the philosopher Henri Bergson, was constructing, that Brunschvicg launched the bases of a rationalism which Bachelard did not merely vindicate but actually configured for the century. That is to say, the philosopher was not a mere continuer of his mentor’s ideas in the way that Édouard Le Roy, for example, was a faithful propagator of Bergsonism. (In his text “La vie et l’oeuvre d’Édouard Le Roy,” written to pay homage to the philosopher who succeeded Bergson at the Collège de France, Bachelard declares that: “He comes to Bergsonian philosophy with the lucidity of mathematics, with the profundity of a meditative man, and ever since his first study, he will help the Bergsonians to gain an awareness, a clearer awareness of the master’s philosophy” (Bachelard 1972, p. 156).) Bachelard was capable of realizing that which, albeit prepared, had not yet been situated in Brunschvicg’s work: an idealism, which far from that metaphysics which subordinates the real to the idea, acknowledges a precedence that science has, both in relation to the empiricist’s determinism and in the face of the realist’s objectivism, and which, in an even more resolute way, rejects all utilitarianism and all pragmatism, even that which could still be detected in Bergson’s thinking after he drew away from the philosophy of William James. (In the article “La philosophie scientifique de Léon Brunschvicg,” Bachelard underscores how: “all the philosophical values of Brunschvicg’s rationalism are attached to difficult and detailed

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scientific thoughts, they are contemporaries of well-formulated problems; they emerge even at moments of the failure of dogmatism, when the experience of thought and the experience of the laboratory realize their fecund synthesis. It is on that third aspect, that of fecundity, that I would now like to insist on to define the Brunschvicgian scientific philosophy” (Bachelard 1972, p. 175). Gerardo Ienna (2019) brought to light a conference with the title “Physique et métaphysique” that Bachelard proffered at the colloquium that the Spinoza Society organized in 1932 to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of the author of Ethics. Brunschvicg was the guest of honor. That text, like many others, was never authorized by Bachelard for publication.) It is that rationalist idealism that can be found at the heart of the Bachelardian philosophy and which guides the constitution of a philosophy whose style has yet to stop propagating its influence.

A Perspective for the History of Science: The Bachelardian Epistemology In the context of the period between the World Wars, when “European humanity” found itself “in check,” on the one hand, from the rise of totalitarian regimes in the West and, on the other hand, from degradation of Marxism into Stalinism, science played a fundamental role in the various diagnoses of that situation. Husserl’s identification of a “crisis” reflects the anxiety and unrest that marked the period in which the place claimed by man in the face of nature, the source of humanism since at least as far back as the sixteenth century, evolved as a problem and a threat, bringing with it the most diverse appeals for the refoundation of reason. In that movement of the spirit, the sciences would come to be read through the lenses of a subjectivity that was merely renewed and rationality would be judged according to criteria of that subject which determines itself in relation to the world, and do so, as much from the perspective of a renewed transcendentalism as by means of neopositivist logicism. Thus, as it is in the midst of that spiritual movement in which certain adjustments endeavor to coordinate with profound transformations that the Bachelardian philosophy constitutes itself, so the affirmation of a precedence of science made earlier, must be very well understood. In the last of a series of epistemological works, Le matérialisme rationnel (1953), Bachelard formulates one of the most remembered aphorisms of all his work, a synthetic expression of that which had been the point of departure for his epistemological reflection: “science does not have the philosophy it deserves” (Bachelard 2000, p. 20). That affirmation echoes the radical realization presented long before in his 1934 book, Le nouvel esprit scientifique, that “science in effect creates philosophy” (Bachelard 1984, p. 3). To understand the significance of that central aspect of Bachelard’s epistemology, suffice it to say that it was precisely what was at stake in a dialogue between Georges Canguilhem and Jean Hyppolite recorded for French television. (See “Philosophie et vérité.” Anexe VII in Canguilhem, G., 2015a, pp. 1211–1227.) What is revealed in that precious document is the confirmation of the fecundity of Bachelard’s epistemological provocation. While it falls to the

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philosopher to investigate that “sense of totality that we cannot evacuate from our lives,” the sciences, it is necessary to state them in the plural form and concern themselves with specific domains and it is these that are constituted by the truth as such and by the values that are their very own. In effect, scientific thought is conducted by means of rigorous, concrete disciplines, and among them human existence, in its totality, in its principles and values, and in the very essence of truth, is what will constitute the authentic domain of philosophy. Canguilhem goes on to conclude that “the less the sciences seem like philosophy, the clearer the intellectual need for philosophy will become” (Canguilhem 2015a, p. 1123). That being so, if there can only be scientific truth – the Bachelardian thesis that gave rise to the dialogue – then the question or meaning of truth is that they are philosophical problems for which, in the end, no answer can be deemed true or false. The understanding that there only exists scientific truth is what, from the beginning, leads the Bachelardian reflection to a veritably scientific philosophy. The expression scientific philosophy is not uncommon in Bachelard’s work and it is important to clarify its meaning at this point. Far from indicating any kind of “scientificism,” the expression scientific philosophy indicates a demarcation. It is, in effect, a reflection that strictly distinguishes itself from scientific thought and resolutely draws away from philosophy as such. Already in the introduction to Le nouvel esprit Scientifique, Bachelard underscores the meaning of that “scientific philosophy.” It would not be difficult to show that, in forming scientific judgments, the most determined rationalist daily submits to the instruction of a reality whose ultimate structure eludes him, while the most uncompromising realist does not hesitate to make simplifying assumptions just as if he believed in the principles on which the rationalist position is based. One may as well admit that, as far as [scientific philosophy] is concerned, there is no such thing as absolute realism or absolute rationalism, and that judgments of scientific thought should not be couched in terms of general philosophical attitudes. Sooner or later scientific thought will become the central subject of philosophical controversy; science will show philosophers how to replace intuitive, immediate systems of metaphysics with systems whose principles are debatable and subject to experimental validation. (Bachelard 1984, p. 2–3) (It is strange to observe that the American translator of the book translates “philosophie scientifique” as “philosophy of science” as does Mary McAllester Jones, who is a renowned scholar of Bachelard’s work. It is even stranger to observe that in other passages of the same book, Goldhammer does not avoid the expression “scientific philosophy.” Actually, in English language studies and translations, we do not find many occurrences of the expression “scientific philosophy” to translate “philosophie scientifique,” the more constant solution being “philosophy of Science” which in our view is imprecise. A philosophy of science ( philosophie des sciences, philosophy of Science) is a well-established domain of philosophical reflection, close to being a theory of knowledge and far more prone to be elaborated as a “general philosophical attitude.” Perhaps this is a case that illustrates the transformations that stem from the transit of ideas, that is, the transportation of a notion to a reflective framework other than the one in which it was conceived. Albeit we cannot fully explore this aspect here, it is worth noting that Alexandre Koyré wrote in his work From the closed World to the infinite universe, “Scientific philosophy” (Koyré 1957, p. 43), which in the French version of the book was translated as “philosophie scientifique” (Koyré 2003 p. 65). For a general vision of the characteristic aspects of the epistemology, see Gérard Lebrun (2006), “A ideia de epistemologia,” and for a presentation of the fundaments of epistemology,

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especially in the early decades of the twentieth century, see Michel Fichant (2000), “L’épistémologie en France.” For a broader outreach, see Michel Bitbol and Jean Gayon (2016), L’épistémologie française, 1830–1970.)

Obviously presenting the intellectual context of the early decades of the twentieth century as if it were a kind of dispute between Brunschvicg’s philosophical rationalism and Bergson’s intuitive metaphysics, even exclusively in regard to the reflection on the sciences, would be a vulgar caricature of the period. Albeit we can recognize in what Bachelard calls “general philosophical attitudes” the thinking of those two philosophers, the epithet can also embrace an epistemology like that of Émile Meyerson, whose influence was particularly strong at the time. Actually, the philosophical attitude elaborated in Meyerson’s Identité et réalité (1908), the most representative work of his philosophy, remains founded on the understanding that epistemology should constitute itself as a philosophical determination of science. It is to configure his philosophy of science that Myerson’s anti-positivism enables the recognition of a metaphysics at the heart of scientific research, and the latter constitutes itself on the understanding that the task of scientific research is that it should unveil the properties of reality itself, properties that hide under the irrationality that defines and protects it. (On this, see Fruteau de Lacolos 2009, p. 10. It is certainly this idea of science that makes it possible to draw Meyerson’s thinking closer to Bergson’s philosophy and that also explains the enthusiasm of a philosopher like André Koyré for his work.) Bachelard’s epistemology, however, going beyond a reflection on science and falling short of a philosophical determination of it, requires that the epistemologist should place himself in the school of the scientist; only in that way will he be capable of perceiving “the essential complexity of scientific philosophy” (This is the title of the introduction of The new scientific spirit. In French: “La complexité originelle de la philosophie scientifique.”) which refuses any kind of closed and fixed metaphysical position, as well as any absolute comprehension, whether it be of the rationality of research or of the objectivity of experience. In addition to its decisive philosophical outreach, that complexity stems from the fact that the scientific object is no longer real as such, it is no longer given of itself, that is to say, it matters little or nothing to scientific thought what reason knows by sensory means, that which is given to the spirit by direct experience of the world. (Here it is worth mentioning Georges Canguilhem’s celebrated conference, “L’objet de l’histoire des sciences.” The text was taken up again in the introduction to the book Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Canguilhem 1972, pp. 11–23).) From Bergson (see his 1922 essay, Durée et simultanéité, on Einsteinian relativity) to Meyerson (for whom quantum mechanics is an “evolution” of physics rather than a “revolution” (Bensaude Vincent (2010, 166) addresses this theme in his article “Meyerson rationaliste?”)) and even passing through Brunschvicg’s dynamic rationalism (for which the main model was mathematics), it is in nature that one finds the object of scientific research; it is the contact with things that sets the problem and it is the obstacle that science, however evolved it may be, must overcome and, above all, an obstacle to life, an obstacle to existence.

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As can be seen, and in spite of everything, (Henri Gouhier (1959), in the preface he wrote for the edition of Bergson’s Oevres, to commemorate the centenary of the philosopher’s birth stated that one of the significations of Bergsonism is that it closed the Cartesian era of philosophy (pp. VII–XIV). We would say however, that although Bergson closed the doors of the Cartesian edifice, he remained on the inside. With that we agree that Gouhier is right when he states that “Bergsonism presents itself as the advent of awareness of a new situation in the history of the sciences” (p. XII).) until Bachelard, epistemology is actually still Cartesian. “But behold, contemporary physics arrives with messages from an unknown world.” That formula, which appears in the important 1931 essay, (This article was originally published in the first number of the yearbook, Recherches philosophiques, that Alexandré Koyré founded, and it was republished in the volume Études.) “Noumène et microphysique” (Bachelard 1970, p. 12), expresses very well the meaning of what we can identify as being the Bachelardian moment of epistemology. (It is Frédéric Worms who suggests the division of twentieth-century French philosophy into three “moments”: the spirit (1900 moment), the existence (Second World War moment), and the structure and the living being (1960s movements). In that scholar’s view, Bachelard’s rupture with Bergson regarding the metaphysical issue of time represents “the point of unity of twentieth century philosophy in France” (Worms 2009, pp. 275–303). It is with that (ingenious) division into moments in mind and the role it represents in the said rupture that we propose the idea of a “Bachelardian moment of epistemology.”) Also, it is not hard to perceive the philosophical outreach of those “messages.” In the era of the new scientific spirit, the unknown does not reveal itself through sensory intuition but through a physics that is new precisely because it has distanced itself from immediate experience. Once thought had abandoned the general phenomenology, that rationalism which Meyerson activated against the world’s persistent, irrational character (Bensaude Vincent 2010) made way for the effort to comprehend the rationality of a specific or exclusively scientific reality. That is why, right in the foreword of the book La formation de l’esprit scientifique, Bachelard emphasizes that: “In any case, the task of [scientific philosophy] is very clear: it is to psychoanalyze interest, to destroy all utilitarianism, however disguised its form and lofty the status it claims, and to turn the mind from the real to the artificial, from the natural to the human, from representation to abstraction” (Bachelard 2002a, p. 21). (See note 8 supra.) Ever since we entered into the “scientific city,” the real has become a rational abstraction, experience is artificial, and there is no obstacle opposing life, for in it there is no life that is not thought, that is not theory. The case here is of a discontinuity in the history of sciences in the face of which a psychanalysis of knowledge imposes itself. After all, the new scientific spirit “came along and deformed primordial concepts that we thought were fixed forever.” From then on, reason multiplied its objections, dissociating fundamental ideas and then making new connections between them, trying out the boldest of abstractions. Over a period of twenty-five years, ideas appear that signal an amazing intellectual maturity, any one of which would suffice to shed lustre on the century. Among these are quantum mechanics,

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Louis de Broglie’s wave mechanics, Heisenberg’s physics of matrices, Dirac’s mechanics, abstract mechanics, and doubtless there will soon be abstract physics which will order all the possibilities of experience. (Bachelard 2002a, p. 19)

It is necessary to highlight that audaciousness whereby reason reveals its greater maturity in bringing in those “messages” from an unknown world. The philosopher, a child of the world and of the necessities that are inherent to him, must abandon those appeals to listen to them. But how? By study, that is, by conceiving that the sciences evolve when they abandon their first intuition, the immediately given, and the imperatives of the senses, and do so by means of a growing refinement of reason, of an increasingly acute, penetrating, and perspicacious objectivity. It is in that sense that Bachelard, exercising the freedom he always allowed himself, appropriates the Comtean idea of the progress of science. From that perspective of progress, the history of science that accompanies and even confounds itself with epistemology could be identified as non-positivist. In his celebrated study of Gaston Bachelard’s historical epistemology, despite the natural limitations of a text of his youth, Dominique Lecourt (1978, p. 77) already underscored that fundamental trait: “the history of the sciences can only pronounce its judgments under the instruction of epistemology.” The instruction of epistemology is not a philosophy, nor does it speak down from the heights of a theory of knowledge, far less support itself on a philosophy of history. Lecourt continues on the same page: Historical epistemology, however, teaches us at once that the progress of science takes place in jerks, by brusque mutations, by the reorganization of principles: in short, by means of frank dialectics. It is the reason for which the history of the sciences must itself be dialectic: it will particularly connect itself with those ‘critical’ moments in which the bases of a science reorganize themselves.

Thus scientific philosophy needs to be capable of situating itself to judge the progress of knowledge, the history of a concept. But where? Well, wherever those “frank dialectics” are established, that is, in the “scientific city” (cité scientifique). The expression “scientific city” first appears in the work La formation de l’esprit scientifique (Bachelard 2002a, p. 216–217) (Here it is worth underscoring once more that Mary McAllester Jones translates “cité scientifique” as “scientific community.” Unfortunately, we have been unable to verify how the term has been translated in other works in which it takes on a more significant conceptual weight. In any event, we consider that solution to be limiting and liable to generate confusion. See note 8 supra.) precisely to express the exactitude and the invariability of scientific technique in relation to the instrument. It is the eminently rational nature of the technique that extracts scientific information from the trivial living experience in which one can discuss the reliability, the precision, of a piece of information. A cheating tradesman “proves” to his victim that he is not lying simply by pointing to the adulterated scales. What is the distance separating the “proof” presented in that dishonesty from the Cartesian Malin Genie? What is the distance separating the “proof” presented in that dishonesty from the Cartesian “proof” of the existence of god, or the ball of wax argument? Without a doubt, the distance is enormous.

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Actually, it would be incomparably easier to show the housewife that she had been deceived, to show her the strategy of deceit so that she would be forewarned, than to get her to understand the Cartesian metaphysics. However, does not the sublimity of Descartes’ argument lie exactly in the simplicity of his evidence? When all is said and done, the rationality is the same in both cases. Thus, in the expression “scientific city,” the adjective completely displaces the noun it is bound to, in the same way that the concept “weight” is displaced according to whether it refers to salt purchased in the market or the atomic weight of sodium. (Here I take up once more the images that appear in Chap. VI of the book Le rationalisme appliquée, under the heading “Common knowledge and scientific knowledge.”) What is most important, however, is that naturally the housewife does not want to acknowledge the error, whereas scientific thought is always in quest of the error; that is the function of those “frank dialects.” They are what coordinate the city in which there are neither housewives nor traders. That is why in his article “Le surrationalisme” Bachelard declares: So then, we find ourselves faced with a redoubled ambiguity. The initial dialects of the a priori notions find themselves before the final dialects of the experimental notions. Nothing more can oppress us. Unleashed, the ‘real’ echoes our freedom of spirit. In particular, it is no longer incumbent on reality to tell us we are wrong. Its irrationalism will only remain massive if we approach it with poorly rhythmed reason. (Bachelard 1972, p. 11)

It was only in the epistemological works of the 1950s (They are Le rationalisme appliquée (1949), L’activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine (1951), and Le matérialisme rationnel (1953). On the cité scientifique notion, see also the 1950 conference, “De la nature du rationalisme,” published in the collection L’engagement rationaliste (1972, pp. 45–88).) that the expression “scientific city” would became more frequently used. The “final dialectics of the experimental notions” that surpass both Cartesian certainty and Kantian intuition constitute what the philosopher must learn with the objective sciences, to discern that city and understand that, given that there is no bridge whatever that connects it with the civil city, then one cannot pass from one to the other without a radical transformation of the spirit. That scientific dialectics is what Bachelard displays in La philosophie du non. Georges Canguilhem, whom it would not be an exaggeration to say was the most refined reader of the philosophy one who had been his mentor, wrote in his article “Dialectique et philosophie du non chez Gaston Bachelard”: “the philosophy of No is a philosophy of work, in the sense of working a concept and of making its extension of comprehension vary, generalizing it through the incorporation of exceptional traits, exporting it beyond its region of origin and taking it as a model or, inversely, seeking a model for it; in short, progressively conferring on it, by means of regulated transformations, the function of a form” (Canguilhem 1975, p. 206). Thus, the “scientific city” is where the spirit realizes concrete works, where reason performs the pluralism of its activity in a more rhythmed and coordinated manner, where thought encounters the freedom of abstraction. It is also there that the philosopher can gather lessons for a scientific philosophy, lessons that will enable him to judge the past of a science and the progress of the notions and concepts. That

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is why we will not understand the perspective of Bacherlardian epistemology without understanding the temporality of those judgements, that is, the “when” of scientific philosophy. Scientific philosophy is realized in the actuality of the sciences. Only the most elaborated thought is capable of situating the errors that constitute the past of a knowledge field; it is in the most developed stage of its trajectory that mistaken knowledge reveals how it was and, accordingly, can be “psychoanalyzed”; only at its peak can reason know its age. “Even when it first approaches scientific knowledge, the mind is never young. It is very old, in fact, as old as its prejudices. When we enter the realms of science, we grow younger in mind and spirit and we submit to a sudden mutation that must contradict the past” (Bachelard 2002a, p. 24–25). It was not by chance that Bachelard presented the most significant text in that regard in Palais de la Découverte where one can see, provided one enters with active thought, that there is no science that causes a regression of knowledge, and that knowledge has a verticality that an inert history of science would not know how to recognize. (It was a conference with the title “L’actualité de l’histoire des sciences” (Bachelard 1972, pp. 137–154).) Well, rather than personalities, dates, or actions, scientific philosophy, insofar as it experiments the dialectics of the concepts, the dynamics of the notions, learns with the sciences that scientific thought is in constant evolution. Thus, on teaching that the spirit does not go over its own tracks, scientific philosophy reveals for thought that it is error that offers the prospect of progress. That is why the exhibitions of the Palais de la Découverte do not constitute a spiritual teratology but instead portray the vitality of the thought. A curious person passing through the Palais de la Découverte with the idle eye of philosophy and the anxious feeling of life will never understand what was not understood at a given moment. In a way, that also reveals the non-Bergsonianism of Gaston Bachelard’s historical epistemology. After all, it is in refusing to constitute itself as a philosophical determination of science, and in surpassing the pretention to be a reflection on science, that epistemology becomes historical. That is the prospect Bachelard inaugurated. Without creating a school, historical epistemology ended up conferring a style on reflection and the twentieth century could get to know philosophical thought that transgressed the identity that the history of philosophy usually attributed to it. Without a doubt, Georges Canguilhem is among the intractable inheritors of that Bachelardian epistemology. In a wellknown 1957 essay published in a collective volume to pay homage to the philosopher of the new scientific spirit, Canguilhem writes: Affirming that “Science is not a pleonasm of experience”, that it is elaborated against experience, against perception, against all the usual technical activity and knowing that in that way he places science in a strange position, Bachelard is hardly concerned to know whether his contemporaries’ intellectual habits will allow them to assimilate his theses. Science becomes a specifically intellectual operation that has a history but not an origin. It is the Genesis of the Real but its own Genesis cannot be narrated. It can be described as a recommencement but never apprehended in its attempts. It is not the fructification of a pre-knowledge. An archeology of science is an establishment that has a meaning, a prehistory of science is an absurd. (Canguilhem 2015b, p. 731)

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It is not hard to identify those whom, in the philosophy of the twentieth century, especially in France, Canguilhem recognizes as companions along the trails opened by the Bachelardian epistemology. Far more than being mere continuers or disciples, authors like Alexandre Koyré, Michel Foucault, and Canguilhem himself, among so many other, recommence the perspective Bachelard offered based on other problems, other concepts, from other “regions.” Of course! Constituted in the school of the scientist, Bachelardism would never be a school. Therein lies its fecundity.

Conclusion In the trajectory of Bachelard’s work, the 1930s draws attention; it was when the books in which epistemological reflection makes way for a more specifically metaphysical meditation were published. There are two works from that period in which the metaphysical problem of time is developed in a confrontation with Bergsonism; that is explicit even in the titles: L’intuition de l’instant (1932) and La dialectique de la durée (1936). In addition to those two principal books, the theme of time is addressed in an exceptional essay on the poet who inspired the surrealist revolution and movement, Lautréamont (1939), and to that list can be added a conference he proffered in 1937 to the Société Française de Philosophie, “La multiplicité et la continuité temporelles” and also the article “Instant poétique, instant métaphysique” (1939). That reflection on time which the philosopher would never resume afterwards has two primordial and connected functions: opposing temporal discontinuity to the absolute continuity of real duration on which the Bergsonian system is founded provides the metaphysical support for the kind of epistemological principle enunciated in La formation de l’esprit scientifique in these words “For a scientific mind, all knowledge is an answer to a question. If there has been no question, there can be no scientific knowledge. Nothing is self-evident. Nothing is given. Everything is constructed” (Bachelard 2002a, p. 25). Thus, the perspective elaborated in those books enables an understanding of that well-known aphorism from La philosophie du non: “The mind can change its metaphysics; it cannot do without metaphysics” (Bachelard 2002b, p. 13). That metaphysical pluralism which, as we have seen, coordinates the history of the sciences is what makes the Bachelardian epistemology unique; it is what enables the comprehension of that which we previously identified as the “Bachelardian moment of epistemology.” With it, the notion of progress surpasses the positivist meaning of the term on breaking away from the continuous linearity of the idea of evolution. Now it is the actuality that enables the identification, in the past of a science, of the failures, the impasses, the disorders, the horrors, in short, concepts and notions that, in the actuality, have all expired. That is why the past of a science must be judged, for the figures that constitute its history will never be eliminated once and for all, the spirit does not arrive at the actuality ex nihilo and no set of knowledge emerges as a miracle or a “discovery.” Thus, the formation of the scientific spirit requires a psychoanalysis of the

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knowledge and, like any other psychoanalysis, it must be constant and constantly reiterated. In that dialectic movement, objective thinking surpasses the Aufhebung of the preceding dialectics and the history of scientific knowledge progresses without contradictions or syntheses, for it is a history of recommencements. That psychoanalysis is effectively in play in La psychanalyse du feu which, albeit many identify it as marking the beginning of the reflections Bachelard dedicated to images and reveries, must be read as a continuation of La formation de l’esprit scientifique; in fact, they were both published in the same year. When we carry out inner experiments, we inevitably contradict objective experiment. Again it must be repeated that in this book when we talk of our personal experiences we are demonstrating human errors. Our work is offered, then, as an example of that special psychoanalysis that we believe would form a useful basis for all objective studies. It is an illustration of the general theses put forward in our recent book, The Formation of the Scientific Mind. The pedagogy of scientific instruction would be improved if we could demonstrate clearly how the fascination exerted by the object distorts inductions. (Bachelard 1964, p. 5)

Indeed, if we observe the chronology of the works, we will see that only after La philosophie du non did the epistemological books give way to a literary reflection. The first book of the so-called poetic strand was L’eau et les rêves (1941) and it does not mark a rupture. The whole 1940s is dedicated to a reflection on poetic imagery, dream, and literary reveries which are the negatives of scientific rationality, so that it is objective knowledge that reveals the true function of images to the philosopher. Thus, a psychoanalysis of the dreamed materials is just like that of the rational concepts, and at the same time they seek to preserve scientific objectivity; they guarantee the “Pure Realm kingdom of the Poetic” (Bachelard 1988, p. 62). “The poetry inspired by matter is dangerously seductive. Requiring caution, but awakening sensibilities, it draws forth an ambivalent response from Bachelard the epistemologist. Like fire, poetry can be both destructive and fascinating” (Smith 2016, p. 68). In that realm in which awareness becomes distant from the truth, the idea continues in force or rather the realization that nothing is evident, nothing is gratuitous, and everything is constructed. In its endeavor to apprehend and reveal thought in movement, in action, at work, epistemology shows, at the same time, and this is also its historical significance, that there is no spiritual purity and that the faltering and hesitations of objective knowledge cannot be explained by a flaw or some kind of lack. Error, after all, has deep roots. In the night of the spirit, the soul awakes. The history of the sciences from which epistemology cannot disconnect itself is a history of mistakes and failures, because it is a history of the progress of the spirit. While the soul carries the memory of the commencement, the spirit advances by recommencements. In the Bachelardian philosophy, images are taken to be phenomena of the origin, while notions bear witness to the more vigorous activity of reason. Thus, if it is necessary to define rationalism, the Bachelardian considers that “it will be necessary to define it as clearly being recommenced thought and thought that is

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recommenced every day. Today cannot be founded on yesterday when one is truly a rationalist” (Bachelard 1972, p. 49). That is the meaning of the novelty, which is also the meaning of the “No” of non-Euclidean geometry, of non-Newtonian physics, of the non-Cartesian epistemology, and of the philosophy of No. In that perspective of recommencement, the Bachelardian history of the sciences has come through to the twenty-first century without losing its vigor and fearless of the end, which may be near.

Cross-References ▶ Pierre Duhem: Between the Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History ▶ The Case of Life in the Historiography of Modern Science: Canguilhem’s “Biophilosophy” ▶ The Origins of Alexandre Koyré’s History of Scientific Thought

References Bachelard G (1964) The psychoanalysis of fire (trans: Ross ACM). Routledge & Kegan Paul, London Bachelard G (1970) Etudes. Paris, Vrin Bachelard G (1972) L’engagement rationaliste. PUF, Paris Bachelard G (1984) The new scientific spirit (trans: Goldhammer A). Beacon Press, Boston Bachelard G (1988) Fragments d’une póetique du feu. PUF, Paris Bachelard G (2000) Le matérialisme rationnel. PUF, Paris Bachelard G (2002a) The formation of scientific mind (trans: McAllester Jones M. Clinamen Press, Manchester Bachelard G (2002b) La philosophie du non. PUF, Paris Bensaude Vincent B (2010) Meyerson rationaliste? In: Corpus revue de philosophie – Émile Meyerson, n 58 Bitbol M, Gayon J (2016) L’épistémologie française, 1830–1970. Éditions Matériologiques, Paris Brunschvicg L (1922) L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique. Alcan, Paris Canguilhem G (1972) L’objet de l’histoire des sciences. In: Études d’hitoire et de philosophie des sciences. Vrin, Paris, pp 11–23 Canguilhem G (1975) Dialectique et philosophie du non chez Gaston Bachelard. In: Canguilhem G (ed) Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences. Vrin, Paris, p 206 Canguilhem G (2015a) Philosophie et vérité. In: Canguilhem G (ed) Oeuvres t. IV – Résistence, philosophie et histoire des sciences 1940–1965. PUF, Paris, pp 1121–1138 Canguilhem G (2015b) Sur une épitémologie concordataire. In: Canguilhem G (ed) Oeuvres t. IV – Résistence, philosophie et histoire des sciences 1940–1965. PUF, Paris, pp 729–740 Fichant M (2000) L’épistémologie en France. In: Châtelet Fr (ed) Histoire de la philosophie, vol VII, pp 135–178 Fruteau de Lacols Fr (2009) Le cheminement de la pensée selon Émile Meyerson. PUF, Paris Gouhier H (1959) Préface. In: Bergson H (ed) Oeuvres. PUF, Paris Ienna G (2019) Natura constructa et phénoménotechnique: spinozisme et pensée des mathématiques chez Gaston Bachelard. In: Braunstein JF, MoyaDeiez Y, Vagelli M (eds) L’épistémologie historique – histoire et méthodes. Éditions de la Sorbonne, Paris, pp 43–58 Koyré A (1957) From the closed word to the infinite universe. The John Hopkins Press, Baltimore Koyré A (2003) Du monde clos à l’univers infini, Traduit par Raissa Tarr. Gallimard, Paris

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Lebrun G (2006) A ideia de epistemologia. In: Lebreun G (ed) A filosofia e sua história. Cosac & Naify, São Paulo, pp 129–144 Lecourt D (1978) L’épistémologia historique de Gaston Bachelard. Vrin, Paris Nouvel P (1997) Actualité et postérités de Gaston Bachelard. PUF, Paris Smith RC (2016) Gaston Bachelard, philosopher of science and imagination. State University of New York Press, Albany Worms F (2009) La philosophie em France au XXe siècle. Gallimard (Folio), Paris

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The Case of Life in the Historiography of Modern Science: Canguilhem’s “Biophilosophy” Charles Wolfe and Giulia Gandolfi

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Canguilhem’s Historical Epistemology and His Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Historical Epistemology of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scientific Facts as Vital Facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Epistemologist or Philosopher of Life? One or Many Canguilhems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Obstacles to Scientific Knowledge of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History of Science, Historical Epistemology, and Historical Epistemology of the Life Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biological Philosophy and Vitalist Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Thanks notably to the work of Georges Canguilhem, the approach to the history and philosophy of science known as “historical epistemology” turned its attention away from its standard objects like physics and astronomy and reoriented toward the life sciences. But what exactly is a historical epistemology of the life sciences? In recent years, it seems to mean (with Rheinberger) a historicized reflection on concept construction in, e.g., molecular biology, with attention paid to instrumental contexts. But was this Canguilhem’s approach? We suggest that Canguilhemian épistémologie (i.e., historical epistemology) is at bottom a philosophy of life, of the living. Canguilhem sometimes terms this “philosophie C. Wolfe (*) Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse, France e-mail: [email protected] G. Gandolfi Universita Ca’Foscari Venice, Venice, Italy Université Paris 1 Sorbonne, Paris, France © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_4

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biologique,” a project that is by no means identical with “philosophy of biology” as practiced in the anglophone world since the 1960s. Canguilhem himself likes to play one identity against another, denying that he was a real philosopher but also at times acknowledging that his project in the history of science was at bottom a philosophical project, one also fascinated with questions of truth and error. Canguilhem could present himself as a kind of philosopher, one interested primarily in concepts, without proposing a metaphysical foundation for the life sciences, but also in knowledge, understood as a way of overcoming the obstacles that the subject comes across in her relationship with the environment: knowledge is a normative and therefore vital activity. This kind of biophilosophical approach can also be seen in his best-known work, The Normal and the Pathological. But with respect to historical epistemology, the question remains: To what extent is a historical (genealogical, excavating, contextualizing) project subservient to, or implicitly overdetermined by, if not a metaphysics of Life, then a philosophy of Life? That is the question we seek to address in this chapter. Keywords

Historical epistemology · Biological philosophy · Biology · Vitalism · Canguilhem

Introduction Thanks notably to the work of Georges Canguilhem, the approach to the history and philosophy of science known as “historical epistemology” turned its attention away from its standard objects like physics and astronomy and reoriented toward the life sciences (Foucault 1985; Méthot 2018; Wolfe 2023). But what exactly is a historical epistemology of the life sciences? In recent years, it seems to mean, notably with Rheinberger and Morange, a historicized reflection on concept construction in, e.g., molecular biology, with attention paid to instrumental contexts. But was this Canguilhem’s approach? In the following essay, we suggest that Canguilhemian épistémologie (i.e., historical epistemology) is at bottom a philosophy of life, of the living. Canguilhem sometimes designates this as “philosophie biologique,” a project that is by no means identical with “philosophy of biology” as practiced in the anglophone world since the 1960s (on this distinction, see Gayon 2009; BognonKüss and Wolfe 2019; Méthot 2023). This was to be understood in a fairly idiosyncratic sense, distinct both from existentialism or phenomenology and from the more Romantic forms of Lebensphilosophie which were fashionable in the early years of Canguilhem’s career (although Canguilhem expresses intriguing sympathy for this tradition over and against what he sees as the predominant “Cartesianism” in France: Canguilhem 1947a; Wolfe forthcoming). If we try to take the lead from Canguilhem’s own self-presentations, it is not much easier, as he often likes to play one identity against another, denying that he was a real philosopher – but at times acknowledging that his project in the history of

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science was at bottom a philosophical project, one also fascinated with questions of truth and error (Canguilhem 1971a), given that “every historian of science is necessarily a historiographer of Truth” (Bachelard, quoted in Canguilhem 1977, 21; Canguilhem 1988, 11). Canguilhem presented himself as a kind of philosopher, one interested primarily in concepts (Schmidgen 2014) without proposing a metaphysical foundation for the life sciences. As Fleck had already done a generation earlier (Fleck 1981), Canguilhem focuses his attention on the context in which concepts are born and the context in which theories are formed through them. He sometimes writes almost confrontationally that history of science “cannot any longer be a collection of biographies or a chart of doctrines in the manner of natural history. It has to be a history of conceptual filiations” (“L’histoire des sciences dans l’œuvre épistemologique de Gaston Bachelard” in Canguilhem 1968, 1994, 235).1 It is incidentally a mistake to locate Canguilhem, as some readers have done, in the earlier Lovejoy-style history of ideas, both because he never indicates any commitment to any sort of independent existence of ideas or “memes” throughout history and because ultimately his historical epistemology is indissociable from actual material shifts in the life sciences: see the example of the discovery of DNA and how it impacts on the history of biology below. As demonstrated in his collection Knowledge of Life, first published in 1952 and collecting lectures given notably in 1946–1947 (Canguilhem 1952, 1980, 2008), themselves based on a lecture course of the same years entitled “Philosophie et biologie” (Canguilhem 1947a), concepts are not to be considered antecedents (as they are in Kant) to practice but rather the product of the subject’s activity and normative power. The production of concepts puts them in a tension between deriving a concept (or an idea) from a practice and imposing one upon it (Rheinberger 1997; Rose 1998). For Canguilhem, knowledge is a way of overcoming the obstacles that the subject comes across in her relationship with the environment: knowledge is a normative and therefore vital activity (Canguilhem 2008, 24–28; Wolfe 2015).2 This kind of biophilosophical approach can also be seen in his best-known work, The Normal and the Pathological. But with respect to historical epistemology, the question remains: To what extent is a historical (genealogical, excavating, contextualizing) project subservient to, or implicitly overdetermined by, if not a metaphysics of Life, then a philosophy of Life? That is the question we seek to address in this chapter.

Canguilhem’s Historical Epistemology and His Time When seeking to address Georges Canguilhem’s rather unique project in the context of reflection on what it meant to work in the framework of “history of science” (HPS, épistémologie in the French sense), the first and presumably most striking feature is 1 2

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are our own. On the impact of this kind of thinking for science itself, see Etxeberria and Wolfe (2018).

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his focus on the life sciences. As Foucault says in an elegant and moving homage to his mentor, In the history of science, such as it was practiced in France, Georges Canguilhem brought about a significant shift. Broadly speaking, the history of science concerned itself by preference, if not exclusively, with disciplines which were “noble” in terms of the antiquity of their foundation, their high degree of formalization and their fitness for mathematization; in terms of the privileged position they occupied in the positivist hierarchy of the sciences. (Foucault 1985, 7–8, 1989, 13)

Foucault adds that Canguilhem focused almost entirely on the history of biology and medicine, knowing full well that the theoretical importance of the problems raised by the development of a science are not perforce in direct proportion to the degree of formalization reached by it. Thus he brought the history of science down from the heights (mathematics, astronomy, Galilean mechanics, Newtonian physics, relativity theory) toward the middle regions where knowledge is much less deductive. . . (ibid.)

But this is not announced as such as in Canguilhem’s methodological statements on what it means to do history of science. He clarified his idea of history of science in a 1972 interview with F. Proust (Canguilhem 1972, reprinted in Canguilhem 2018), stating that the term covers very different realities: the criticism of a scientific text, the republication of an old scientific text, its translation, its connection with other texts of the same period or of an earlier or later period to bring out the borrowings it owes, the originalities it states and the epistemological break it marks the beginning of, or its delay with respect to the state of science, a reasoned biography of a scientist, the description of the obstacles to scientific progress – all of this is the history of science. (Canguilhem 2018, 564)

The object of the history of science, as Canguilhem argues, is neither the logical consequence nor the culmination of an earlier stage of a particular science that carries with it a reflection from it. It is related “not only to a group of sciences without intrinsic cohesion but also to nonscience, to ideology, to political and social practice” (Canguilhem 1968, 18, 2005, 204). He emphasizes that we pay attention to the different valorization of an epistemic object and its entanglements with scientific and extra-scientific spheres.3

3

For example, the intellectual aptitude at the center of Binet’s studies relates to the institution of compulsory schooling and the establishment of criteria for defining backwardness, or the symptom studied by Cabanis as a fundamental element for medical practice presupposed the formation of hospital centers and the interest in formalizing protocols of the management of the space in which to place the sick person, i.e., the ward.

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The Historical Epistemology of Life So our first question is, what is the particular status of “life” (e.g., cell theory, monsters, the theory of organism and organic regulations, vital normativity) as compared to that of atoms, electrons, forces, gravitation, or numbers as objects of épistémologie? For instance, Rheinberger and Müller-Wille discuss the gene as a concept “in flux” (Rheinberger and Müller-Wille 2017, 4), unproblematically borrowing this notion from Elkana’s influential analysis of force as a concept in flux (Elkana 1949, 1970), that is, shifting from the history of the physical sciences to the history of the life sciences. While Canguilhem would not reactively “block” such an option on ontological grounds, he often seeks to differentiate the concepts and at times the ontologies of these two types of scientific traditions and cultures. What is special about “life” as an object of (a) scientific inquiry and then (b) épistémologique inquiry? The immediate answer to this question is that the domain of the living is one in which “fact and value” are impossible to separate; as Kurt Goldstein (an author who had an immense impact on Canguilhem’s thought) might say, the laws governing an organism and the activity of an organism are the same (Wolfe 2015). And this question regarding the “peculiarity” of life in relation to other scientific objects leads to another: Can vital facts be considered as scientific facts? Otherwise stated, given that life is a particular object of research to be studied differently from other scientific objects, when we proceed to analyze the characteristics, factors, data, etc., that we define as vital facts, do they retain the same distinctiveness that we grant to life? Or rather can they be treated as scientific facts? François Jacob’s well-known pronouncement on the change of course taken with the molecularization of biology, which Canguilhem also discussed (Jacob 1970; Canguilhem 1971c, and discussion in Etxeberria and Wolfe 2018), namely, that biologists no longer inquire into “life” as an object of study, tacitly implies that if a vital fact is treated as a scientific fact, it loses the former quality and status. But rather than reflecting once again on Jacob and Canguilhem, let us turn instead to Canguilhem’s definition of science, to find an answer. Although Canguilhem’s reflections on science have not often been analyzed in such terms, they can be seen as constructivist. In speaking of constructivism with regard to science, we do not mean to argue that Canguilhem can somehow be inscribed ante litteram in traditions particularly influential in STS (Science and Technology Studies) such as the Strong Programme in the sociology of the social sciences promoted by the Edinburgh school. In fact, in Canguilhem, we never find the four tenets of this tradition stated, namely, symmetry, impartiality, causality, and reflexivity, nor do we find a relativist-reductionist approach such as that proposed by the Bath school, according to which the focus should put upon controversies and on the actual practices and expertise of the scientists involved. Canguilhem always opposed the idea that thanks to a phenomenological immersion in the self-same practices of the scientist and by repeating these practices, philosophers or sociologists can actually understand what scientists are doing (Collins 1984). On the other hand, Canguilhem’s idea of a socially constructed science is not at all close to that of Robert Merton, to whom we might imagine Canguilhem addressing a critique

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similar to Whitley’s (1972); that is, scientists, according to Merton, could produce anything such that Merton’s theory could apply equally well merely by needing the inputs and outputs. On Whitley’s view, the content of the science does not seem to figure into the Mertonian approach. Similarly, Canguilhem would have criticized the above theories on the one hand for becoming a mere “doubling” or reenactment of science by attempting to emulate what scientists do in order to describe scientific facts in a social genealogy. On the other hand, Canguilhem would have criticized the above theories for not sufficiently investigating the content of scientific research, thus lacking a genuine epistemic commitment. According to Canguilhem, scientific constructivism should be grounded in vital activity itself. Canguilhem’s originality as compared to the abovementioned thinkers as well as to theories such as Kuhn’s or Latour’s lies in the connection he seeks to make, revise, and reiterate between science as a practice (thus social) and how this reflects an understanding of knowledge as itself vital activity.

Scientific Facts as Vital Facts In an early unpublished manuscript entitled “Experience and Scientific Experiment” (“L’expérience et la science expérimentale,” Canguilhem 1932), which is probably the transcript of a lecture Canguilhem presented in Douai, he reflects on comparative epistemology and the history of science in a way that is surprisingly consonant with his work many decades later. Indeed, he included the transcript of this lecture in a file dated 1971–1973 that served in the preparation of lectures he gave at the Institut d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences. Here, he addresses the status of science. Scientific facts are not a starting but an arrival point of scientific practice, he states. It is a fact, for instance, that the Earth revolves around the sun, but it is necessary to have pursued the project of astronomical science in a particular way (Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler) in order to arrive at this fact (Canguilhem 1932, 7). Opposing Poincaré’s view, Canguilhem argues that there is no distinction between “brute facts” (“faits bruts”) and “scientific facts” since even “the most brutal affection cannot separate itself from judgments” (Canguilhem 1932, 6). Of particular interest for our above question (namely, is it possible to treat scientific facts as vital facts?), Canguilhem emphasizes that the path leading to the formation of scientific laws starting from scientific facts is normative in character. Without dwelling here on the axiological value of knowledge according to Canguilhem (1971a), we suggest that knowledge arises from vital activity itself: Canguilhem argues that the construction of scientific facts comes second to technological practice. Science and technology are not two conflicting moments; rather, they exist in a dialectical and correlative relationship (technology is the condition of possibility of science, while science becomes the social infrastructure in which technical practices are determined). This means dropping the old Enlightenment precept of a practice (technology) guided by a method (science), considering instead that technology is the grounding point of science. As Canguilhem writes in his 1961

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course, “Statut social de la science moderne,” “Science appears in a world of technical objects. It presupposes instruments, and ultimately tools, laboratories, and beyond, the entire world of work. It presupposes cultivated minds in a double capacity: cooperation in knowledge and acceptance of knowledge and its requirements” (Canguilhem 1961, 38). Science as the activity of establishing laws to organize a set of judgments has its beginning in practice. Technical activity, understood by Canguilhem as the response to needs through the setting up of a set of infrastructures, working models, and tools, is one way for the living being to relate to its environment (Canguilhem 1974). As already argued, this applies to the production of concepts as well. Technology and science are two normative moments in which the living creates ways of relating to the environment. But if, then, science, pushed by technology, is definitively a vital moment, should scientific facts be considered as vital facts, since although they can differ in form they share the same vital character? Canguilhem does not give in to what we might term a “naive vitalist” temptation (on his relation to vitalism, see below, especially section “Biological Philosophy and Vitalist Themes”). Although from his earliest works on, he stressed the constructivist character of science and its relation to the vital characteristics of the human subject, he never confused scientific facts and vital facts. Scientific facts indeed have an ex post normative “construction.” By contrast, vital facts refer back to the living both as the investigating subject and the investigated object. Hence, Canguilhem recognizes in vital facts – e.g., disease understood in the clinical and not simply physiological sense – an irreducible circularity: it is because the human being’s activity qua living being produces its vital facts that they are knowable as such. Interpreting Canguilhem’s theorization of the discovery of DNA as that of a “logos” inscribed in life in this light, we can easily understand why he never tended toward a reduction of the vital to the rational, even when faced with the new theories of genetic information (Canguilhem 1968, 323). The human being as both a biological and historical subject provides the material for its research and the methods of such research.

Epistemologist or Philosopher of Life? One or Many Canguilhems But this leads us to a second question, in response to a somewhat less obvious issue. That is, many of Canguilhem’s major works, such as The Normal and the Pathological, seem very far removed from a “historicist” project (which Canguilhem also endorses: “A philosophy which looks to science for the clarification of concepts cannot disregard the construction of science”; Canguilhem 1952, 1980, 84, 2008, 60). They seem closer to a “philosophy of life” (with deliberate echoes of Lebensphilosophie, a category that can be related to Canguilhem’s thought: see Bianco 2019; Bianco et al. 2023, notably T. Ebke’s chapter on Plessner and Canguilhem) or a “philosophy of medicine” (in a more naturalized sense, as in Giroux 2010). So as with the celebrated case of Aristotle according to Werner Jaeger,

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or the now-passé debates on “Wittgenstein I and Wittgenstein II,” one could ask if there is something like a first Canguilhem and a second Canguilhem. The Canguilhem of the Normal and the Pathological and other essays from the 1940s until the 1960s thinks of the aim of his work as legitimizing and bringing together a biological philosophy (Canguilhem 1947b, 15), which is no longer the case in the later phase of his writing, from the 1960s onward – and was also not present in his earliest work, prior to 1940 (what Braunstein refers to as “Canguilhem prior to Canguilhem”: Braunstein 2000), in which life is neither an object of philosophical inquiry nor a kind of “problematic” challenge that requires the scholar (ultimately, the historical epistemologist) to examine methods of research and historicization. Life, for Canguilhem in works including the co-authored Traité de logique et de morale (1939), is considered on a par with all other scientific objects as reducible to general laws designed to rationalize it; biology was seen as a science on par with physics and mathematics (Canguilhem and Planet 1939, in Canguilhem 2011, 824). And the history of science was for Canguilhem at the time simply an account in temporal order of scientific theories. By contrast, in the works of “Canguilhem I,” i.e., from the 1940s to the 1960s, there is a sustained body of reflection on the status of the biological sciences, including a critique of rationalizing methods typical of the hard sciences, which end up assimilating living beings to machines (see notably the essay “Machine and Organism”). In this essay, collected in Canguilhem (1952, 1980) (see also Canguilhem 1941, 1971b), Canguilhem criticizes the assimilation of the living being to the machine on two different but related grounds. First, Canguilhem considers the assimilation of the living to the machine to be politically dangerous: considering the living as a machine would make conceivable a rational management of social and biological life through the control of the living’s physiological plan (Canguilhem 1941). Second, to equate machines and living beings would reduce biology and medicine to physiology. Just as a machine can be regulated through a careful study of its mechanics, the same could be done for the investigation of life through careful physiological analysis. As we shall see below in the next section, “The Obstacles to Scientific Knowledge of Life,” Canguilhem strongly opposes any kind of reductionism: life cannot be studied through physiology only. The question Canguilhem asks is, what are then the sciences, if any, that can study life? This reflection on the life sciences leads Canguilhem to defend the specific role and function of a philosophical approach to life. Not even with the discovery of DNA, which forced him into a reexamination of his critical philosophy of biology, as discussed by Limoges (Canguilhem 2018, 29), does Canguilhem change his position regarding the relationship between science and philosophy. Throughout the 1960s, Canguilhem seeks to understand and incorporate the new theories of information as applied to biological processes. But here too, it is up to philosophy, starting from the concepts provided by science, to rework their scope to an extrascientific, social level, since philosophical problems are problems for everyone, not only for the philosopher (“Du concept scientifique à la réflexion philosophique” in Canguilhem 2018, 128); this includes issues of determinism raised by modern genetics and the social dimensions of normativity he studies in the second part of The Normal and the Pathological, added in 1966. This is why Canguilhem argues

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that life is a philosophical concept, not a scientific concept, notably in his essay “Aspects of Vitalism.” Later essays (i.e., the period we might think of as “Canguilhem II”) focus more on the constitution of concepts, their relationships within and outside the disciplines, and their development: this is the task of historical epistemology.

The Obstacles to Scientific Knowledge of Life As argued above, according to Canguilhem, knowledge of life cannot be based on considering vital facts in the same way as scientific facts. In a course he gave in 1942, Canguilhem says course entitled “Obstacles to the Scientific Knowledge of Life” (“Des obstacles à la connaissance scientifique de la vie,” a course that was clearly preparatory for the work ultimately published as Knowledge of Life in 1952) wonders whether or not it is possible to know life scientifically and secondarily which obstacles any attempt at scientific knowledge of life would face. Canguilhem here sets out clearly what has been theorized above: life is a normative activity; that is, living means creating judgments of value; life is a valuative process. Canguilhem writes, with reference to Pradines’ work Le sens du besoin (Pradines 1932): To live is to value (valoriser), i.e. to choose, prefer and exclude. Needs and defences (see Pradines) are value judgments. Food and excrement are values. Medicine and poison are values. Life is hierarchical and it institutes hierarchies relating to specific choices (what is excrement for one species is food for another). (Canguilhem 1942, 2)

Knowledge, in turn, as a key dimension of the living being’s way of relating to its environment, is also normative, since (1) it derives from a practical-technical activity and (2) it is always goal directed. For this, Canguilhem excludes the possibility of knowledge for knowledge’s sake: knowing only in order to know is hardly more sensible than eating in order to eat, killing in order to kill, or laughing in order to laugh, since it is at once an avowal—that knowledge must have a meaning—and a refusal to find in knowledge any meaning other than itself. (Canguilhem 2008, xvii)

Knowledge’s4 normative dimension has both an objectifying and rationalizing tendency. In other words, as Canguilhem writes: “To know is to devalue, to reduce 4

To speak of scientific knowledge is a pleonasm according to Canguilhem since knowledge can only be scientific; there is no truth except scientific truth (Canguilhem 1965, 2015). See also the discussion of scientific facts, including the case of Galileo seeking to produce the evidence demanded by Tycho Brahe, in Canguilhem’s 1964 essay on Galileo, “Galilée: la signification de l’œuvre et la leçon de l’homme” (Canguilhem 1968, 1994, 46). In a text on Bachelard’s thought, Canguilhem added another piece to the puzzle: science is true only thanks to its historical character (Canguilhem 1968, 1994, 183–184). We return briefly to the theme of science and truth in the Conclusion.

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all experiences to the same plane, that of measurement, an essentially relative operation . . . any object can indifferently serve as a reference to any other” (Canguilhem 1942, 3). He continues, on what we understand ordinarily as the objectivity of knowledge: “All knowledge presupposes the indifference of the objects in the subject’s eyes, and this is what is called objectivity. Knowledge strives little by little to compose a homogeneous representation” (ibid.). Rationalization is a way that knowledge objectifies the hierarchy of values that the human being proposes to its experience, thanks to its own normative capacity – that is the basis of knowledge; and if this sounds at all Kantian, it should (on Kantian elements in Canguilhem’s thought, see Gandolfi 2023). Referring to an example he takes from the Encyclopédie française (Mayer 1937), Canguilhem states that “it is only to our tree-dwelling eyes that there is any difference between a whale and an apple; seen under a microscope, this difference vanishes (Mayer). Biological science should account for the qualitative alterations that sensory apparatuses and technical instruments bring about in the experience of living beings” (Canguilhem 1942, 3). It seems a bit odd to speak of our species as tree-dwellers, but that is a question for Mayer’s 1937 Encyclopedia, not for Canguilhem himself, who simply cites this example. In our opinion, the questions raised by Canguilhem stem from the concept of life as he understands it. There is not the space here to analyze this concept in depth – Canguilhem discusses it at length in The Knowledge of Life (Canguilhem 2008) – which today remains a thorny issue that some authors have attempted to address (Wolfe 2015; le Blanc 2002). We limit ourselves here to indicating that Canguilhem’s definition of life is not based on the physiological features of living beings but derives from its capacity to “debate” with its environment and to create norms. The 1942 course is particularly interesting for our analysis here because Canguilhem clarifies the nature of the two obstacles to scientific knowledge of life. The first obstacle is the affective overdetermination of the living in science: either by an extreme rationalism or by resorting to metaphysical explanations. Canguilhem gives two examples to explain this obstacle: on the one hand, the replacement of the living being with the machine, as in the case of mechanism, and on the other hand, its reduction to a metaphysical explanation as in the theory of spontaneous generation. In both cases, Canguilhem through a historico-epistemological analysis of the concepts of generation, metamorphosis, and substitution shows how science by means of rationalization tends to erase the traces of its past in order to show itself as absolute and objective. In a line of argument that might recall Kuhn’s and Fleck’s theories, Canguilhem instead traces science back to non-science and in particular, first, to myth, and, second, to practice (technology is the second obstacle Canguilhem will point to). In myth, we can find the sources of the affective and emotional charge of “life,” understood as irreducible, which science attempts to eliminate in order to make life knowable and objectifiable. In myth, life is not classified, analyzed, or still investigated through its biological functionalities but remains regarded as a complex object. By the latter, Canguilhem means an object, “the dynamics of which are so interdependent that an excitation at any point of the complex always risks setting the entire [object] into motion” (Canguilhem 1942, 6).

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Interestingly, this definition closely resembles the one Canguilhem provides of the organism. For him, the characteristic of the organism is to be a totality, in which each part justifies the others, such that it is not the mere sum of the parts, but the condition of reorganization by interdependence of the parts (Canguilhem 1968, 1994, 345–347). Such complexity reflects that of life, and it is a tacit recognition of the irreducibility of the living. The second obstacle Canguilhem lists in his course is technical importance (Canguilhem 1942, 7). As we have already noted, according to Canguilhem, practice is not posterior to science but precedes it: technology is a “tâtonnement” based on attempts. Unlike science, it does not aim to fix a particular practice over another. Technology thus considered as a vital activity shows how a scientific study of life runs into a methodological obstacle: the object of its research cannot be studied through the method of science. In other words, while science operates by analysis, deconstruction, and classification, technology is an activity that does not break down the complex; rather, it creates new complexities. Canguilhem speaks of “an incompatibility between the technical use of the living and analysis” (Canguilhem 1942, 8). In our opinion, the aim of the 1942 course is to support a thesis that Canguilhem would propose almost unchanged in later years (Canguilhem 1968, 1994, 300–340, 2008): that the breakdown and analysis of life into simple phenomena – significant at the physiological and biological levels – are not sufficient to have knowledge of it. This is why, Canguilhem says, researchers “often wonder why [although] all the elements of a rational explanation [of life] are given, this explanation is slow in coming”; this may be traced back to the character of life that clashes with the applied research method: “In fact it is because this explanation has to overcome a long resistance of human affectivity” that a rational explanation of life can hardly be found by the researcher (Canguilhem 1942, 6). Given the impossibility of any scientific knowledge of life in its totality and complexity, the question arises: What kind of knowledge of life can we have? By which method? We argue that the method for obtaining knowledge of life is historical epistemology, as this is capable of restoring life in its complexity without denying its historical characteristics that are too often erased in science.

History of Science, Historical Epistemology, and Historical Epistemology of the Life Sciences Canguilhem’s “epistemological” project – obviously, but it bears saying – is not synonymous with or even expressible in terms of an “epistemology” as understood in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which aims at defining the conditions of possibility, the cognitive models, and the fields of science, or history of science understood as the historical narration of scientific events often reported in a chronological order and divided by field or subject (physics, chemistry, geology, etc.). Canguilhem’s project is instead (a) “historical epistemology.” The term “historical epistemology” raises difficulties of definition. Namely, all versions of historical epistemology share some common fundamental contents, such as the relation between science, technology, sociology and philosophy, historicity,

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and the dynamism of knowledge; yet at the same time, historical epistemology is not a unitary tradition: it presents strongly heterogeneous characteristics with respect to the geographical and cultural context of reference.5 French historical epistemology – a current which owes its name to Dominique Lecourt and in which one can include Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Abel Rey, and Jean Cavaillès, for example – is not unitary (and is something of a post facto construct, however alluring; see Braunstein (2002) on this “French style” in history and philosophy of science). There are important differences between Lecourt and Canguilhem, as well as between Canguilhem and Bachelard, which oblige us to define Canguilhem’s historical epistemology by paying attention to its particular characteristics. “Historical epistemology” as a term seems to have originated in a debate in Parisian circles between Canguilhem and his then-student Dominique Lecourt, recounted by Jean Gayon in an essay on Bachelard and the history of science (Gayon 2003, cf. Lecourt 1969, 1972, 1975), although Braunstein has pointed out that the term was already used at the beginning of the century, in 1907 by Abel Rey to describe his own work (Braunstein 2002, 33). On the one hand, Lecourt proposed that Bachelard’s philosophy be described as “historical epistemology,” a tradition to which Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault also belong, while on the other hand, Canguilhem, as Gayon reports, favored the idea of “epistemological history.” For Canguilhem, as he argues in his work Ideology and Rationality (Canguilhem 1977, 1988), the historical dimension is to be considered as prevalent in research practice. It is as if historical epistemology in general sought to address – and transform – traditional questions about knowledge, by taking cases of what we tend to view as the most advanced form of knowledge, namely, scientific knowledge, and then historicizing them while nevertheless treating these scientific cases as productive of ‘concepts’. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger glosses on much the same idea and writes, “by epistemology we mean the reflection which concerns, on the one hand, the historical conditions under which, and the means by which, things are transformed into objects of knowledge and, on the other hand, the ways in which the process of scientific production of knowledge is initiated and maintained” (Rheinberger 2014, 5). “Thus, historicizing epistemology meant subjecting the theory of knowledge to both an empirical and a historical regime and, instead of subjecting its object to a transcendental presupposition or to an a priori defined norm, conceiving it as historically variable” (ibid., 6). But we should not follow Rheinberger in exclusively emphasizing the historicist dimension; the last sentence of Canguilhem’s well-known essay “The object of the history of science” reads: “To do the history of science, in the most operative sense of the term, is one of the functions, and by no means the easiest, of 5

Different lineages or styles can be adduced here, with the German context of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, itself bringing together elements of heritage from a Soviet tradition such as Boris Hessen’s, visible in Jürgen Renn’s and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s work, and a more Anglophone heritage with figures like Thomas Kuhn and Ian Hacking – although Hacking prefers to describe himself as belonging to the stream of historical meta-epistemology – and Lorraine Daston.

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philosophical epistemology” (Canguilhem 1968, 1994, 23, 2005, 206). Similarly, with a slightly more specific example, history of medicine serves as a “laboratory of biological philosophy” (Canguilhem 2018, 565). Indeed, the historical epistemology of the life sciences (i.e., Canguilhem’s distinct contribution to the discipline) inquires into concepts generated within a framework bounded by life and death that are, as Canguilhem notes and Foucault reiterates, “never in themselves problems of physics” (Foucault 1985, 12, 1989, 20). Even in his more ‘historicist’ mode, Canguilhem recognizes and indeed emphasizes that the specific historical attention paid to the life sciences must fully take into account that these are sciences dealing with normatively laden entities: entities whose core definition involves features or processes like self-preservation, regulation, adaptation, and reproduction (Foucault 1985, 11–12, 1989, 18; for more discussion of the implications of Canguilhem’s views on normativity including for the human sciences, see Rose (1998) and le Blanc (2002)).

Biological Philosophy and Vitalist Themes Now, Canguilhemian historical epistemology can be practiced with biological and perhaps presentist motivations: as he says in his study of reflex action, “In writing the history of the formation of the reflex concept for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I wanted to contribute to something that, with Bachelard, I call in reference to biology ‘a recurrent history, a history that is illuminated by the finality of the present’” (Canguilhem 1955, 166–167; Chirimuuta 2021, 416 f.). Interestingly, this influence of what one might be tempted to call a vitalist position, on a scholarly, that is, a historical project, can also be seen outside of “biological philosophy,” in the context of actual biological science. Consider Canguilhem’s quite telling statement that the difference, say, between a history of biology like Charles Singer’s (second edition, 1950) and François Jacob’s (1970) is not just explainable in terms of the differences between their individual authors, or even the amount of information each of them had, or the historical and scientific context; it is rather that the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 led to “new concepts being introduced into biology” – some of them using older names like “adaptation” or “heredity” and others using brand-new names like “program” and “teleonomy” (Canguilhem 1977, 27, 1988, 16–17). Lest this sound too heavily conceptual, consider the very recent statement by Staffan Müller-Wille in his overview of Mendel and the history of heredity: “The opening up of biology for a plurality of inheritance systems in the last two decades has drawn attention to a whole range of potential areas of historical inquiry into heredity that we still know far too little about” (Müller-Wille 2021, 120). Does the Canguilhemian historical epistemologist address the central topics of the life sciences – and at their center, perhaps, “life” itself (leaving aside the genuinely concerning issue of whether the life sciences have a concept at their center or not) – in strictly historical terms, or is there something like a “logic” of life (Etxeberria and Wolfe 2018), or further, a philosophy of life involved?

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Canguilhem’s answer takes several forms, depending on whether he emphasizes a properly epistemological project, i.e., a historical and philosophical inquiry into the foundations of the life sciences (in particular medicine, physiology, and protobiology), or a “biophilosophical” project, which he sometimes calls “biological philosophy” (Canguilhem 1947a, discussed in Wolfe forthcoming). In the first approach, the historical (in fact, historico-conceptual) contextualization of the doctrines of biological life (whether it is the cell theory, transformism, Bernard’s physiology, or different type of vitalisms) feeds, generates, and irrigates a richer concept (thinking of the focus on this term in his essay “Le concept et la vie” (1966), in Canguilhem 1968, 1994, 335–364) of Life with a capital “L” that overhangs – we will not say “transcends” – the concrete episodes with their potential refutations. This is not the place to compare “biological philosophy” and what we are more familiar with as “philosophy of biology,” a discipline dating back to the 1960s (see Gayon 2014; Méthot 2023). We shall simply note that the expression “biological philosophy,” which Canguilhem uses without any indication that it is an unusual or rare one, was used originally by an author on whom Canguilhem also wrote, Auguste Comte, in volume 3 of the latter’s Cours de Philosophie positive (on “chemical philosophy and biological philosophy,” which appeared in 1838) (see Clauzade 2018). Now, this expression did not continue to be central in Canguilhem’s work, but some of his major other writings, like Le normal et le pathologique (Canguilhem 1943, 1978), should be seen as a contribution to this genre as well (including in his response to molecular biology). The question of how Canguilhem shifted from “biological philosophy” to “historical epistemology,” or sometimes blended them, is a large interpretive question which some have sought to address in other places but that remains – perhaps necessarily – unresolved.6 It would also be an interesting exercise to compare Canguilhem’s approach to much more straightforwardly “historical” approaches to biology, including the historiographic remarks (focusing on Darwinism) proposed in Richards (2003). One notable difference is that most Anglophone historical treatments of biology are significantly less focused on the “conceptual” dimension – indeed, they sometimes present this as a drawback of the Canguilhemian approach. As we have suggested above, what is striking though in Canguilhem’s attention to conceptuality but also to the connection between scientific practice and vital activity is that there is a significant dimension of “practice” (if not quite praxis) there (explicit, e.g., in his manuscript on “the social status of modern science”) (Canguilhem 1961). In the less historicized, more “biophilosophical” approach in Canguilhem’s work, the normative dimension moves to the foreground. Notably in the best-known works of our author, such as The Normal and the Pathological (first published in 1943, expanded with a second part, 1966: Canguilhem 1943, 1978), where it is not a question of a historicity of the living but of an intrinsic normativity, a vital power, but also in a much less well-known text, the 1947 article “Note sur la situation faite en

6 See P.O. Méthot’s Introduction to the volume he recently edited (Méthot 2020) and C. Limoges’ Introduction to volume IV of Canguilhem’s complete works (Canguilhem 2015).

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France à la philosophie biologique” (“Note on the situation in France of biological philosophy”) (Canguilhem 1947a), in which Canguilhem complains about the fate of this discipline that has not yet emerged, at least in France according to him, and demands, precisely faced with a kind of incipient molecularization, an approach that will not be intimidated by “the prestige of the physico-chemical sciences” (Canguilhem, “Aspects du vitalisme” (1946–1947), in Canguilhem 1952, 1980, 83). Biological philosophy as called for in the 1947 article seems to be identified with a broadly holistic and conceptually oriented approach to the biological disciplines – a kind of approach exemplified by the work of Goldstein and differently practiced in the mid-twentieth century by thinkers such as Grene (Méthot 2022, 2023). We note for the sake of precision that Canguilhem does not always respect the distinction we have just proposed between these two “axes” of his work. For example, in an indubitably scholarly work, his study on the formation of the concept of reflex in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Canguilhem 1955; still untranslated into English), thus a contribution to epistemology, Canguilhem speaks strangely of “defending vitalist biology” and states that “Life disconcerts logic” (“la vie déconcerte la logique”: Canguilhem 1955, 1977, 1). Indeed, Canguilhem often refers to vitalism in his work, going as far as describing himself as one in the first sentence of the Foreword of the abovementioned work on reflex action: “Il nous importe peu d’être ou non tenu pour vitaliste. . .” (“It does not matter to us whether or not we are held to be vitalists...”) (ibid.). Additionally, some years earlier, he had devoted an article to the topic, “Aspects du vitalisme” (originally lectures at the Collège Philosophique in Paris in 1946–1947, published in Canguilhem (1952, 1980, 83–100)). In this text, Canguilhem asserts from the outset that when the philosopher inquires into biological life, she has little to expect or gain from biology if it understood as a mere “satellite of these [physico-chemical] sciences” (ibid., 83). In other words, the philosopher in this position is almost inexorably led to a vitalist positionnement – roughly that of the project of “biological philosophy” he called for in the 1947 article, as mentioned above. The biologist may not ask whether or not her scientific practice differs from that of the mineralogist. But the historian of biology is not barred from asking whether or not the theoretical history of the biologists’ scientific practice reveals a difference between the object of the biologist and the object of the mineralogist. In earlier work, one of us pointed to Canguilhem’s “vitalism,” which most commentators wrongly discount, in our view (e.g., Debru and Lecourt in Balibar et al. 1992). The suggestion there was that he was not a strong metaphysical vitalist but rather a weaker, more existentially or “attitudinally” focused vitalist: one for whom a distinctive characteristic of living beings was to have a point of view on other living beings (Wolfe 2011; for more on Canguilhem as an “attitudinal vitalist,” see Van de Vijver and Haeck (2023)). But what happens if one focuses not on his “theory” of vitalism but on his “practice” as a historical epistemologist of life? The obvious case is his theory of the normal and the pathological. There we find a kind of weak vitalism in actu which is not theorized as such, in the sense that normality and pathology are not properties of stars or machines but of living bodies: “There are no

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monstrous machines,” nor pathological stars (“Machine et organisme” in Canguilhem 1952, 1980, 119, 2008, 90, translation modified). Moreover, they are irreducible properties of living bodies. We are not the first to note that there is an unusual combination here of the historical and the normative, or the scholarly and the speculative. In a little-known but interesting book entitled La notion d’organisation dans l’histoire de la biologie (Schiller 1978), which is marred by frequent polemical outbursts (these also contribute to rendering it interesting), Joseph Schiller targeted the historian of the life sciences Jacques Roger, Foucault, and Canguilhem as anti-Cartesians who attempted a “vitalist” revision of the history of science, so as to deemphasize the key role of Descartes in particular and the mechanistic “paradigm” in general. Schiller opposes “good” history of science, which he understands as being in agreement with what the scientists say, and thereby mechanistic, from Descartes to Bernard and beyond, to “bad” history of science, which obeys certain philosophical imperatives, in this case, vitalistic ones. It is methodologically worthwhile to notice that Schiller, despite his ahistorical commitment to a “true” mechanistic standpoint which according to him all good life scientists displayed, including Lamarck and Claude Bernard, puts his finger on a surprising dimension of Canguilhem’s œuvre. After all, Canguilhem took his commitment to a “philosophy of life” far enough that he also studied medicine, completing training as a medical doctor, not in order to gain expertise in “scientific truth.” Further, Canguilhem drew on thinkers like Uexküll and Goldstein in order to trace the production of concepts itself back to a biological process of interaction between organism and environment.7 But we do not mean to suggest that he somehow abandoned the more historical project. For one thing, the essays theorizing historical epistemology are mainly from a later period, such as those collected in the Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Canguilhem 1968) and his subsequent reflections on scientific ideology (Canguilhem 1977, 1988), while the more strongly biophilosophical writings include The Normal and the Pathological (of which the publication story makes periodization of Canguilhem’s thought difficult), the 1947 article, and many of the essays first collected in 1952 (Canguilhem 1952, 1980, 2008). For another, sciences including biology and medicine, even when they are objects of reflection and appropriation for the philosopher, may have irreducibly historical dimensions.

Conclusion Canguilhem is one of the great figures of historical epistemology, a project more than a rigorously specified doctrine, which is not limited to some golden “heyday” of the mid-twentieth century or shortly thereafter. Indeed, if one thinks of the rapidly evolving landscape of the neurosciences and their various social ramifications, or 7 See his essay “Le vivant et son milieu” in Canguilhem (1952, 1980, 2008) and comments in Schmidgen (2014).

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other extremely current and urgent domains like ecology, evidence-based medicine, or public health (a.k.a. “biopolitics” to some), it seems striking that a Canguilhemian approach can be fruitful (see D’Abramo et al. (2021) for some hints). Our analysis focused on the relation between his historical epistemology and his erstwhile “biological philosophy.” But one can also look forward to evaluate this project. We suggest that it continues to be fruitful because it employs both the tools of historicist, contextualist, evaluative disciplines, and a very close engagement with scientific practice itself (albeit treated as a kind of laboratory of concepts), without giving in either to naive positivism (witness Canguilhem’s firm critiques of psychology and neuroscience) or to an equally rigid moralism. It is also possible to seek to pursue a Canguilhemian project, whether more on the side of historical epistemology or of biological philosophy, in closer dialogue and in a spirit of mutual influence, with philosophy of biology, as Jean Gayon did (Méthot 2018, 2022). We have suggested that Canguilhem’s historical epistemology should be understood as a particular approach and methodology for inquiry into life. Indeed, this can be seen by an overall chronological and developmental reflection on how he developed his approach: except for his early period (1924–1935), when “life” was not a theme of interest in his writings, since the mid-1930s life is a central object of inquiry for Canguilhem. He shifted from solely treating it in terms of “knowledge” to a focus on life as a self-contained, autonomous theme. The period of his medical thesis (Canguilhem 1943, 1978) to 1955, through Knowledge of Life, saw Canguilhem formulate a philosophy of biology and medicine that we can define as a philosophy of life. This is clearly distinguished from a historical-epistemological approach. Canguilhem as philosopher of life is not interested in the historical and political dimension that the concept of life possesses or acquires as an epistemic concept. Rather, he proposes a history of the science of life by showing the developments and consequences of certain fundamental concepts, e.g., that of reflex action (Canguilhem 1955). As Limoges has shown (Limoges 2012), the explicitly “historicalepistemological” approach in Canguilhem’s work appears relatively late, after 1963 (Limoges 2012, 56). We would add that he also pays additional interest to the political dimension of life: Canguilhem’s historical epistemology is also political when it deals with the concept of life, as one can see, for instance, in his attention toward the connection between life, power, and medical practice in the texts collected in Canguilhem (1968), particularly the essays on “The Power and Limits of Rationality in Medicine” (“Puissance et limites de la rationalité en medicine”) and “The Epistemological Status of Medicine” (“Le statut épistemologique de la médecine”). Also striking – and unusual for someone whose career was primarily identified with the careful study of science – is Canguilhem’s sensitivity to “scientific ideologies,” as he termed them, and thereby to the diverse workings of truth (the production of truth, the dialectics of truth and error, etc.): “to undertake to [write] the history of truth alone is to undertake an illusory history” (Canguilhem 1977, 45; the sentence is, strangely, omitted from the English translation, at Canguilhem 1988, 39–40); “every historian of science is necessarily a historiographer of Truth” (Bachelard, quoted in Canguilhem 1977, 21, 1988, 11), and, conversely, “Truth is not constituted in a history of truth but in a history of science” (Canguilhem 1971a, 175).

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Cross-References ▶ Gaston Bachelard and Historical Epistemology: A New Perspective for the History of Science in the Twentieth Century ▶ Pierre Duhem: Between the Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History ▶ The Beginning of the Epistemological History of Science: Gaston Bachelard’s Responsibility ▶ The Origins of Alexandre Koyré’s History of Scientific Thought Acknowledgments Thanks to Pierre-Olivier Méthot for his remarks on an earlier version of this chapter.

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5

Ludwik Fleck: Thought Style and Thought Collective in the Historiography of Science Mauro L. Conde´

and Paweł Jarnicki

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Thought Collective and Its Thought Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Biological Model for the Historiography of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

In this chapter, we present Ludwik Fleck’s conception of epistemology and the history of science, structured around the concepts of thought style and thought collective. We aim to demonstrate that, besides introducing the idea that social and historical factors condition scientific knowledge, Fleck was also a pioneer in conceiving biology as a model for epistemology. Unfortunately, the Kuhnian reading of Fleck’s work emphasized this social approach and ignored that biological influence. Thus, in the wake of Kuhnian influence, Fleck’s social conception of science was widely disseminated, and the role of biology was ignored, even by significant authors of the historiography of science. Highlighting the influence that Fleck received of biology connected to social and historical factors enables an interpretation more in line with the reflections of the Polish thinker on the history of science and its epistemology.

M. L. Condé (*) Department of History, Federal University of Minas Gerais – UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] P. Jarnicki Warsaw University of Technology, Warszawa, Poland © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_5

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Keywords

Ludwik Fleck · Thought style · Thought collective · Epistemology · Historiography of science

Introduction Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961) was a Polish physician and microbiologist1 who made a series of innovative reflections on the nature of scientific activity besides contributing a vast scientific production in microbiology.2 His philosophical and sociological ideas about science and its history were published, in Switzerland, in the 1935 book Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache (Fleck 1935/1980) (Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact) and in a few other articles. Although very relevant and nowadays widespread among historians and philosophers of science, Fleck’s contribution to the theory of science was practically neglected in his day. That situation was partially due to difficulties such as those brought about by the Second World War. However, it was also because of the originality of the ideas in Fleck’s book. He characterizes the knowledge of an epoch with what he called a “thought style” (Denkstil) (Fleck 1935/1979, 39). In different historical periods, different groups that Fleck called “thought collectives” (Denkkollektiv) (Fleck 1935/ 1979, 39) construct their thought styles or knowledge from their social activities and interactions with nature. In his analyses, Fleck innovatively proposes the idea that making science is not something individual but necessarily a collective, social, and historically dependent activity. Any “scientific fact” – rather than being a mere description of nature – is forged in that interweaving of empirical and social aspects over many years. Only in 1962, a year after his death, did Fleck’s name effectively enter the scene of the historiography of science when his book was mentioned in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, affirming the role of social aspects in science. “Fleck’s work made me realize that those ideas might require to be set in the sociology of the scientific community” (Kuhn 1962/1970, vi–vii). Indeed, many similar aspects between his work and Fleck’s were never entirely recognized by the American historian and philosopher of science (Condé 2005, 2018) (Jarnicki and Greif 2022). 1

For a short biography and a descriptive analysis of Fleck’s work, see Fleck (1935/1979, 149–153), Schäfer and Schnelle (1980, vii-xlix), and Schnelle (1982). 2 The first list of Fleck’s scientific publications appeared in Schäfer and Schnelle (1983, 182–195) and was expanded in Werner and Zittel (2011, 656–672); the most up-to-date bibliography can be found in Ciesielska and Jarnicki (2021). Originally published in different journals in Polish or German, philosophical articles were republished in German (Schäfer and Schnelle 1983) and English (Cohen and Schnelle 1986). They are “Some specific features of the medical way of thinking” (1927); “On the crisis of ‘reality’” (1929); “Scientific observation and perception in general” (1935); “The problem of epistemology” (1936); “Problems of the science of science” (1946); “To look, to see, to know” (1947); and “Crisis in science” (1960), the last of which remained unpublished until 1983.

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However, at that time, Kuhn had not yet realized the value of the biological model for epistemology, which he would conceive many years later (Kuhn 2000). Even if Fleck’s work enjoyed greater visibility from the 1930s to the 1960s, it would probably have hardly aroused interest due to the significant difference between the originality of his proposal and the prevailing epistemological conceptions in that period, which were not very receptive to the idea of science as a historical and social product. Fleck was an author ahead of his time, thus challenging to interpret in his own time. For his work to be discussed, it was necessary to change the epistemological context in which it was produced, but paradoxically, his book was precisely one of the primary keys to changing that context. The solution to the paradox, that is, the practical exposure of his masterpiece, did not occur. In effect, the Polish thinker did not achieve recognition at the time. Moreover, the history of science and epistemology took a few decades to arrive at conceptions similar to those Fleck had already developed in the 1930s. Only after a long and gradual change in the historiography of science did Fleck’s work gain visibility and find its readers. The Polish thinker started writing in the late 1920s, and his book was published in the effervescent 1930s. In that decade, the development of science, especially physics,3 demanded a reflection on the foundations, the limits, and the possibilities of scientific knowledge. Fleck developed a unique understanding of the complicated relationship between science and society, incorporating sociological, historical, and epistemological aspects. The author of Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact understood that these social aspects are not only the basis for knowledge but that every cognitive process is, above all, a social process. As Fleck states: Every epistemological theory is trivial that does not take this sociological dependence of all cognition into account in a fundamental and detailed manner. But those who consider social dependence a necessary evil and an unfortunate human inadequacy which ought to be overcome fail to realize that without social conditioning, no cognition is even possible. Indeed, the very word “cognition” acquires meaning only in connection with a thought collective. (Fleck 1935/1979, 43)

We can radically conclude from Fleck’s work that there is no knowledge outside the collective, outside the social. Since this process takes place in time, there is no knowledge outside its history. Thus, by analyzing an episode in the history of medicine, how the disease we know as syphilis arose, Fleck’s main objective was to demonstrate science as a historical, social, and cultural product. His path was highly innovative in regard to the hegemonic historical and epistemological currents of his time. Fleck understood the relationship between the two poles – science and society – in an organic way and not just as a juxtaposition. For him, all knowledge arises from the social practices themselves. “Cognition is the most sociallyconditioned activity of man, and knowledge is the paramount social creation [Gebilde]” (Fleck 1935/1979, 42).

It is significant that one of Fleck’s first published articles, “On the Crisis of Reality” (1929), stems precisely from a discussion established in physics at the time.

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To understand Fleck’s thought and its insertion and importance in the historiography of science, in this chapter, we first discuss Fleck’s theory of science structured around the concepts of thought style and thought collective. Then, in the final part, we address issues concerning the historiography of Fleck as an innovative, evolutionary model inspired by biology.

The Thought Collective and Its Thought Style Fleck’s book certainly has a story as unique as its author.4 During the Nazi occupation of Poland in the Second World War, as Jews, Fleck and his family were sent to concentration camp where the Nazis forced him to work on a typhus vaccine. Although he, his son, and his wife managed to survive, they suffered the many consequences of this tragic and traumatic fact. However, even though the war hampered the dissemination of Fleck’s work, it was not the only substantial reason for his works not being known. His book did not have the reception it deserved at the time for various reasons, among others, the originality of the ideas it contained in an epistemological scenario that was not favorable to receiving them. Having circulated precariously and mostly among medical professionals until it was “found” by Kuhn,5 Fleck’s book did not receive any further significant attention from philosophers or historians of science. Superficially considered, the book was understood as just another “case study” of a disease – syphilis – apparently with little appeal to its history. Added to that was the fact that Fleck never abandoned science to embrace a career devoted to the history and philosophy of science, as many other epistemologists of equal stature did (Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Bachelard, Canguilhem). When published without sponsorship, in 1935, his book had no introduction, only a short preface of one and a half pages by the author himself. It symbolically reflected his situation since he did not dialogue directly with the Vienna Circle, the proponent of the dominant epistemology at the time and the target of some sharp

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Latour refers to the book as the white whale Moby Dick that appears and then submerges to emerge from time to time; see Latour (2008, 251). For a history of the editorial process of Fleck’s book, see Graf (2009). 5 Kuhn declared that he had learned of the existence of Fleck’s book in a note from Experience and prediction (Reichenbach 1938, 224) written by logical empiricist philosopher Hans Reichenbach (Kuhn 1979, viii). In that book, Reichenbach formulated his well-known distinction between “the context of discovery” and “the context of justification.” Kuhn reported that he had been excited to find Fleck’s book reference and said: “if someone wrote a book with that title, I have to read it!” (Kuhn, 2000, 283). For the American philosopher, it was surprising that a fact had a “development” (Kuhn, 2000, 283). For more on how Kuhn came to know Fleck’s book and the possible genealogical relationship between the theories of both philosophers, see Jarnicki and Greif (2022).

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criticism from Fleck. Although he sought support for publishing his book6 from one of the leading representatives of the Vienna Circle, Moritz Schlick, that help did not come in Schlick’s response.7 Furthermore, Fleck did not interact directly with the logical empiricist thought collective represented by the Vienna Circle8 since that school was not concerned with thinking about science’s historical and social aspects.9 Thus, to a large extent, the lack of interest in his ideas occurred because Fleck, at that time, to use his concepts, launched the “pre-ideas” (Präideen) or the “proto-ideas” (Urideen) (Fleck 1935/1979, 23) of a new thought style10 that would only effectively develop about three decades later. In the 1960s, the pre-idea of historical and social aspects for understanding science began to gain importance. In other words, Fleck identified proto-ideas, such as the “atom” and “syphilis,” and one can include “social aspects of science” as ideas that arise remotely and are transformed over time by being taken up by different thought styles. Indeed, the Fleckian proto-idea that science has a solid historical and social component only came to fruition with the advent of the historical thought style of the philosophy and history of science of the 1960s and onward. Fleck’s book is dense and complex, but its architecture is relatively simple. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact has only four chapters in which the author tries to demonstrate that scientific fact is not something given but something that, beyond a description of the empirical, is established and developed through a complex process of social interactions over a long time. Therefore, historical and

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According to correspondence between Fleck and Schlick dated September 5, 1933, in which Fleck asked Schlick for assistance in finding a publisher willing to publish his book, whose initial title was Die Analyse einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Versuch einer vergleichenden Erkenntnistheorie (The analysis of a scientific fact: an attempt at a comparative theory of knowledge), see Werner and Zittel (2011, 561–562). 7 Schlick replied to Fleck more than 6 months later, on March 16, 1934, apologizing for the long delay, saying he was interested in the topic but reporting the difficulties of publication and finally informing him that he would not be able to help. See Werner and Zittel (2011, 562–563). 8 Fleck spent 1927 studying medicine in Vienna at the Government Institute for Serotherapy, thus being closer to the atmosphere of the Vienna Circle. That same year he also began his career as an epistemologist, publishing the article “Some specific features of the medical way of thinking.” 9 One exception was Edgar Zilsel, who, after immigrating to the USA, developed a new approach to the history of science, presenting an epistemological perspective based on historical, social, and technological aspects. See Condé (2022). 10 Although Fleck gave this expression his philosophical conceptualization, it was first used by Mannheim in 1925; see Trenn (1979, xv). It is also interesting to note that Carnap – the target of Fleck’s criticism – in the preface of the 1928 first edition of his book Der logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical Construction of the World), uses the expression Denkstil when characterizing the change in the way of doing philosophy started by the Vienna Circle. In clarifying what changes in the new philosophy of science, Carnap points out, “this new attitude changes not only the thought style (Denkstil) but also the task” of philosophy (Carnap, 1961 [1928], xix). Alexandre Koyré also uses the expression “thought style.” In his 1930 text, “La pensée moderne,” later presented in his book Étude d’histoire de la pensée scientifique, Koyré uses the expression “style” to characterize what he calls the Zeitgeist of modernity or the “style of our time” using, ultimately, the expression “style de pensée” (thought style) itself (Koyré, 1973 [1966], 18).

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social factors underlie every scientific fact. If not the first, Fleck was one of the first authors to realize science’s psychological, social, and historical aspects. For him, science is a collective activity. Namely, it is constituted by a community of practitioners, both in its theoretical and practical aspects, what he called the “thought collective.” Moreover, science is an activity that occurs amid social relations involving the scientific and the non-scientific. Although ultimately the science criteria are legitimized within science itself, they are also, to varying degrees, influenced by activities outside science. As Fleck realizes, this is a central point in determining science as a historical and social product. The separation between nature and culture is not as sharp as Reichenbach’s distinction would try to demonstrate. In other words, it does not seem so easy to distinguish between what is from “the context of justification” and what is from “the context of discovery” (Reichenbach 1938). To develop his theory of science, as mentioned, Fleck chooses to narrate the history of syphilis to show how the modern understanding of this disease was established in its historical aspects from the late fifteenth century until the so-called “Wassermann reaction,” discovered in the early twentieth century. Different times and contexts elaborated varied explanations for syphilis. According to Fleck, what we now call “syphilis” was understood differently in several thought collectives – or historically situated scientific communities – which produced the scientific theories and practices that determined the problems and the way they were perceived. Thus, Fleck introduces us to thought style and thought collective concepts. If we define “thought collective” as a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction, we will find by implication that it also provides the special “carrier” for the historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock of knowledge and level of culture. This we have designated thought style. (Fleck 1935/1979, 39; in italics in the original)

A scientific community thus defines its thought style, that is, its ability to perceive problems and articulate solutions based on the values and practices that define the “reference system” (Bezugssystem) (Fleck 1935/1979, 50) in which that thought style is created. We can therefore define thought style as [the readiness for] directed perception, with corresponding mental and objective assimilation of what has been so perceived. It is characterized by common features in the problems of interest to a thought collective, by the judgment which the thought collective considers evident, and by the methods which it applies as a means of cognition. The thought style may also be accompanied by a technical and literary style characteristic of the given system of knowledge. (Fleck 1935/1979, 99; in italics in the original)

Indeed, for Fleck, interposed between the subject and object of the traditional theory of knowledge, there is the scientific community – a thought collective – that plays a vital role in the constitution of knowledge. “Cognition is therefore not an

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individual process of any theoretical ‘particular consciousness’. Rather it is the result of social activity since the existing stock of knowledge exceeds the range available to any individual” (Fleck, 1935/1979, 38). Therefore, a fact can never be something like a pure description that an isolated subject makes of the object. On the contrary, it is seen as a thought collective from a thought style. “Because it belongs to a community, the thought style of the collective undergoes social reinforcement” (Fleck 1935/1979, 99). Thus, concepts, theories, or facts are never something isolated, but “a stylistic bond exists between many, if not all, concepts of a period, based on their mutual influence. We can therefore speak of a thought style which determines the formulation of every concept” (Fleck 1979/1935, 9). To sum up, thought collective guides what is to be researched, that is, what constitutes a problem for scientists, thus providing the support and the reference system for producing scientific knowledge. From that viewpoint, Fleck positioned himself contrary to the epistemology prevailing at the time, that is, the epistemology of the Vienna Circle, according to which the observational data described by “protocol sentences” refer us to the positivity of the fact as a criterion of objectivity, independent of social and historical aspects. From his epistemological perspective, Fleck directs his criticism at Rudolf Carnap, wishing that eventually, the logical empiricist philosopher “might discover the social conditioning of thought. This would liberate him from absolutism in the standards of thought, but of course, he would also have to renounce the concept of ‘unified science’” (Fleck, 1935/1979, 177). The logical empiricism of Carnap and the Vienna Circle, also known as logical positivism, structured its epistemology on two basic tenets: (1) the affirmation of empiricism or positivity of facts and (2) the belief that a rigorous logical language made possible by mathematical logic would lead knowledge along a safe path based on empiricism. Fleck criticizes not only the idea of a pure fact – since our perception is always socially conditioned – but also does not believe that the logical language used to understand science can accomplish the Vienna Circle’s intentions. Fleck recognizes the critical role of language but also that the language of science would be much closer to everyday language than to a logical theory of language, as postulated by Carnap. It would be an illusion to believe that logic could purge language of its social aspects. As Fleck points out, “the very structure of language presents a compelling philosophy characteristic of that community, and even a single word can represent a complex theory. To whom do these philosophies and theories belong?” (Fleck 1935/1979, 42). The supposedly pure logical language intended by Carnap would divert attention from ordinary language and its essential role in scientific practices and institutions, in short, the role of everyday language in the construction of scientific concepts. The historicity of science is also transmitted through language. Fleck warns us that Whether we like it or not, we can never sever our links with the past, complete with all its errors. It survives in accepted concepts, in the presentation of problems, in the syllabus of formal education, in everyday life, as well as in language and institutions. Concepts are not spontaneously created but are determined by their “ancestors.” (Fleck 1935/1979, 20)

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Finally, for Fleck, language and facts are processed entirely differently from logical empiricism ideals. Thus, he emphasizes the active role of language with its “technical terms” in objectivizing thought. The mood of the thought collective of natural science is further realized in a particular inclination to objectivize the thought structures [Denkgebilde] that it has created. This is the counterpart to the obligation of the scientist to withdraw as a person. This tendency to reify and objectivize the conceptual creations of scientific thought [Denkgebilde] arises, as has already been described, during the migration of ideas throughout the collective and is inseparably bound up with it. Graduated in several steps, it begins with statements by different scientists as well as the historical development of a problem, so that it becomes depersonalized. Special expressions or “technical terms” are introduced. To these are added special symbols and possibly a whole sign language such as is used in chemistry, mathematics, or symbolic logic. Such a lifeless [lebensfremde] language guarantees fixed meanings for concepts, rendering them static and absolute. (Fleck 1935/1979, 144)

What seems fixed, objective, and absolute to us goes through a long social and linguistic evolution process. This idea of evolution or development shows Fleck’s affiliation with a Darwinian perspective, as we will see in the next section. In effect, denying the Vienna Circle empiricism tenets, Fleck sustains the development – evolution – of a scientific fact from the social conditioning of thought. He shows us that, contrary to what the Vienna Circle postulated, “nothing is factual or fixed. Things can be seen almost arbitrarily in this light or that. There is neither support, nor constraint, nor resistance, and there is no ‘firm ground of facts’” (Fleck 1935/ 1979, 92). Despite involving the empirical, fact is a social and linguistic construction of thought collective. This is how a fact arises. At first, there is a signal of resistance in the chaotic initial thinking, then a definite thought constraint, and finally a form (Gestalt) to be directly perceived. A fact always occurs in the context of the history of thought and is always the result of a definite thought style. (Fleck 1935/1979, 95, in italics in the original)

Indeed, we see that Fleck uses the concept of Gestalt in his own way. For him, Gestalt is essential in forming the thought collective because it is up to it to give form to the result produced by the interactions within that collective. Although there is not exactly an observation without presuppositions, for him, one can establish a scale between a vague vision and a vision fully developed as a Gestalt. This Gestalt of the scientist is acquired by experience and training. First, the scientist learns to perceive form (Gestalt). Direct perception of the form [Gestaltsehen] requires being experienced in the relevant field of thought. The ability directly to perceive meaning, form, and self-contained unity is acquired only after much experience, perhaps with preliminary training. At the same time, of course, we lose the ability to see something that contradicts the form. But it is just this readiness for directed perception that is the main constituent of thought style. (Fleck 1935/ 1979, 92)

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For Fleck, we see the world from our thought style, and the Gestalt of the other thought style prevents us from seeing anything that contradicts our Gestalt. However, even if the Gestalt prevents us from seeing what others see immediately from their presuppositions (Fleck 1935/1979, 133), it does not mean to say that it radically prevents us from understanding another Gestalt, another thought style, completely. Although representatives of different styles cannot fully understand each other – always having major or minor misunderstandings between them – thought styles, even as closed systems, through intercollective circulation, to some extent penetrate and fertilize each other. This conception helps the “evolution” of the thought style since, for Fleck, there can be a continuous flow of information, ideas, and practices between the different thought styles. It is possible for a “communication” or “traffic” to exist between different thought styles; this circulation does not occur exclusively inside the same thought style. In other words, for Fleck, the dynamics of the production of scientific fact happen in the “intracollective circulation of thought” (intrakollektiver Denkverkehr),11 where the thought style directs the knowledge production of its collective, but there is also the possibility of an “intercollective circulation of thought” (interkollektive Denkverkehr) (Fleck 1935/1979, 119). Therefore, a thought style is never as closed as a paradigm. It has a prevalence of ideas, “proto-ideas” or “pre-ideas” from the past, present in a thought style that is the bridge to other thought collectives, even if the new style shapes them. Thus, radical changes without any ties to the past are infrequent. The scientific community does not go to sleep a “duck” and wake up a “rabbit” or, in Kuhn’s words: “What were ducks in the scientist’s world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards” (Kuhn 1962/1970, 111). According to Fleck, this process of transformations of ideas and practices is much longer and more detailed than the Kuhnian paradigm shift assumed. Different ideas and practices within one thought style can connect with other thought styles. Even if a thought collective has an internal cohesion guaranteed by a “harmony of illusions” (Harmonie der Täuschungen) (Fleck 1935/1979, 27, 136), which makes its members see the same Gestalt, thus maintaining the “system of opinions” (Meinungssysteme) (Fleck 1935/1979, 27), there is an opening within a thought style that can allow gradual future changes of the collective and its thought style. In short, this circulation of ideas and practices – not only within a thought style but also between different thought styles (both past and contemporary) – gives porosity to the thought style. Still, in this sense of the circulation of ideas, according to the author of Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, knowledge has an “esoteric circle” (esotericher Kreis) and “exoteric circle” (exoterischer Kreis) (Fleck 1935/ 1979, 105). The esoteric circle is intended for specialists. To a more superficial degree, the exoteric circle is for non-specialists of a particular area (we all use

In the North American edition of Fleck’s book, intracollective and intercollective “communication of thought” (Fleck 1935/1979, 108, 119) – see Jarnicki (2016) for reasons why it is better to translate this concept into English as “circulation.”

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mathematics, but we are not all mathematicians, for example). All this flexibility in the circulation of knowledge composes the structure of knowledge. Thus, only with the possibility of this circulation of information and practices is the reference system organized, and objects and scientific practices are determined, producing the knowledge itself. It should also be pointed out that besides having connections with other thought styles, a particular thought style is not in itself something hegemonic. On the contrary, it accepts a certain degree of contradictions and disagreements; that is, although it is united by the “harmony of illusions” that maintains its cohesion, it also contains differences and contradictions inherent to its thought collective. Fleck brings an entirely new way of understanding “objectivity” and “subjectivity” from this postulate of the social in the characterization of scientific knowledge. In other words, one of the central points of his theory of knowledge is the establishment of the concept of “passive connections” (passiven Koppelungen) and “active connections” (aktiven Koppelungen) (Fleck 1935/1979, 10). According to Fleck, it is up to the subject (always a collective subject) as an “active connection” to organize (with the active association) the different objects by establishing the “passive connections” (passive association), or what the epistemological tradition has called facts. Considering the above, Fleck’s epistemological proposal for understanding science and its history highlights the dynamics of scientific knowledge. Science is constantly in motion, but this dynamic does not come only from the fact that science has a historical and social perspective. Science can also be understood analogously to biology. A scientific fact has a “genesis” and a “development” like the dynamics of life itself. Let us take a closer look at Fleck’s biological perspective.

A Biological Model for the Historiography of Science The biological framework shapes Fleck’s entire conception of the history of science. Epistemologically, biology enables the analogy between evolution and science. From a historical viewpoint, he uses the history of medicine as a model for the history of science, different from the “physics model.” This double presence of the biological model in epistemology and the history of science has significant consequences for Fleck’s thinking. He begins his opus magnum by pointing out that a “scientific and medical fact” is illustrative for understanding science and its history. He states that “a scientific fact taken from the annals of medicine is particularly suitable for our observations because it is very rich in history and content but has not yet been thoroughly examined epistemologically” (Fleck 1935/1979, xxiii). Despite the importance of biology for Fleck, his work became well known for his affirmation of the social aspects present in the production of science. As mentioned, that emphasis on the social perspective probably came from Kuhn’s interpretation, as he declaratively emphasized this social interpretation (although closer analyses show that there is little from sociology left in Kuhn’s theory) and ignored the importance of biology. Consequently, key authors of the historiography of science such as Latour

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(1979/1996, 16–17), Bloor (1983, 34–46), and Shapin and Schaffer (1985, 16) were conditioned by Kuhn’s reading, ignoring biology’s importance in the foundation of Fleck’s epistemology. Indeed, Fleck’s social and historical approaches to science are fundamental, but they alone do not set up his complete epistemological understanding of science. The analogy between the history of science and biological evolution that Fleck promoted allows us to understand more clearly the complex system of theories and artifacts organized by humankind in producing knowledge. Furthermore, this analogy shows us, among other things, that very abrupt changes, from an evolutionary point of view, do not seem to exist in the development of knowledge. Contrary to Kuhn’s viewpoint presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, from an evolutionary perspective, the transition from one thought style to another is hardly a radical paradigm shift. Therefore, to understand Fleck’s work, we must overcome the Kuhnian interpretation and point out biology as one crucial point of Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Fleck transposes the dynamics of evolution into epistemology. It is not a reduction of epistemology to biology but an analogy in which every field of knowledge has its autonomy. Thus, scientific development is viewed analogously to Darwinian evolution in its “historical development” (entwicklungsgeschichtlich).12 “Biology taught me that a field undergoing development should always be investigated from the viewpoint of its historical development” (Fleck 1935/1979, 20). Science has an evolution, and in this process, its transformations are much more “mutations” or “metamorphoses” than revolutions, as the tradition to which Kuhn belonged purported. Knowledge evolves from one thought style to another. Thus, there are “mutations of the thought style” (Mutationen des Denkstiles) (Fleck 1935/ 1979, 26). We can even see in a particular thought style the remnants of an old style, just as a thought style may also contain the proto-ideas that foreshadow future ideas, concepts, and theories of a new thought style that has yet to emerge. With his biological metaphors, Fleck accents the existence of bridges between different thought styles. There are mutations or metamorphoses between them, where one part of the elements remains and the other changes. There is intercollective circulation among different thought styles. As he points out when analyzing the history of syphilis, We described the passage of the syphilis concept from one thought community to another. Each passage involved a metamorphosis and a harmonious change of the entire thought style of the new collective arising from the connection with its concepts. This change in thought style, that is, change in readiness for directed perception, offers new possibilities for discovery and creates new facts. This is the most important epistemological significance of the intercollective circulation of thoughts. (Fleck 1935/1979, 110)

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Darwin’s book title On the Origins of Species in German is Die Entstehung der Arten; one can see a similarity with Fleck’s book title in German, Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache.

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Fleck was acquainted with the Vienna Circle’s theory of science (Fleck 1935/ 1979, 50), so he knew that his “biological model” was an alternative to the “model of physics.” Physics had hitherto governed epistemology, but at that moment, an opportunity was arising for thinking about epistemology from the biological perspective. Therefore, it is not exactly a coincidence that Fleck’s formulation of an epistemology based on the biological model was presented in that context. Not only had the development of biology and the life sciences been accelerating since the nineteenth century, but the limits of Newtonian mechanics and the rise of new knowledge in physics had led to a crisis in an epistemology based on the matrix of classical physics. That change, brought about by modern physics, motivated Fleck since he vividly inserted himself in the epistemological debate about quantum mechanics. In one of his first articles, “On the Crisis of ‘Reality’” (1929), he addresses the question of the observation of a natural phenomenon based on Niels Bohr’s quantum postulate. The postulate states that in quantum phenomena, the measuring instrument interferes with the measurement. Fleck endorses Bohr’s position saying that “to observe, to know is always to test and thus literally to change the object of investigation” (Fleck [1929] 1986b, 53). Again, as he presented in his masterpiece, “cognition modifies the knower so as to adapt him harmoniously to his acquired knowledge. This situation ensures harmony within the dominant view about the origin of knowledge” (Fleck 1935/1979, 85–86). Faced with this new framework brought about not only by the advances in biology and biomedicine but by the science of physics itself, Fleck was to find a more favorable ground to develop the epistemological consequences of the tradition to which he was affiliated, that is, the medical, biological, or life sciences tradition. Of course, that tradition goes back a long time, but only in the context of the epistemological crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century did medicine and biology seem to find space to consolidate themselves as sciences. Moreover, life sciences found their epistemological model in that context. Indeed, it was inserted in that context that Fleck, inspired by biology, projected a new epistemology. To him, the evolution of ideas should be thought of as analogous to the evolutionary processes present in nature (Fleck 1935/1979, 20). Although historical and social phenomena are autonomous and not reduced to natural phenomena, their dynamics are similar. In science, analogously to biological phenomena, scientific ideas are “born,” “develop,” and “die” by becoming obsolete or decontextualized. We can find specific historical laws governing the development of ideas, that is, characteristic general phenomena concerning the history of knowledge, which become evident to anyone who examines the development of ideas. For instance, many theories pass through two periods: a classical one during which everything is in striking agreement, followed by a second period during which the exceptions begin to come to the fore. (Fleck 1935/1979, 9)

If, for Fleck, theories evolve and transform themselves, consequently, facts described by these theories are also seen differently, and, somehow, the facts change themselves. Therefore, what seemed to positivist epistemology to be possible, that is,

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to establish the fact as something fixed, objective, and absolute, for Fleck, analogously to biological processes, a fact goes through a long process of social, historical, and linguistic evolution. Science has an evolution, and in the process, its transformations are gradual and not abrupt, or radical ruptures or revolutions, as purported by the Kuhnian notion of paradigm shift. In other words, a given epoch’s thought style in science is part of an extended historical context of transformations. Therefore, such historical changes in the scientific process are seen not as a “scientific revolution” but an “evolution of science.” In this sense, changes in scientific knowledge are not exactly revolutions but “mutations in thought style” (Fleck 1935/ 1979, 26). Indeed, contrary to what Kuhn would have us believe with his notion of scientific revolution stated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for Fleck, the mutations undergone by a scientific thought style are not necessarily complete ruptures because not everything is either only changing or only permanent. On the contrary, in the changing thought style, we can even see the remnants (though often modified) of an old style through its proto-ideas or pre-ideas. Similarly, a contemporary thought style may also contain proto-ideas or pre-ideas that prefigure future ideas, concepts, and theories of a new thought style that has yet to emerge. Furthermore, according to Fleck, we can easily see many examples in the history of science that illustrate this statement, as was the case with the idea of the atom (Fleck 1935/1979, 24) or the very concept of syphilis that he illustrated in detail throughout this book. Thus, the biological model is Fleck’s reference for developing a unique epistemological understanding of what science and its history are, bringing a new understanding of the problem of the relationship between society and nature. For the Polish thinker, knowledge simultaneously incorporates natural and social aspects and, because it develops in time, historical aspects. Thus, the thesis of the historical and social character of science he defended is directly linked to his biological reference because even though every cognitive process is, first of all, a social process (Fleck 1935/1979, 42), cognitive processes should be seen in a way analogous to biological evolution. Science is a process similar, but not identical, to the life of a biological organism that is born, develops, reproduces, and dies. However, it should be noted that this biological reference is not an ultimate metaphysical foundation but the theoretical and methodological path he followed. Therefore, what Fleck embraces as a fundamental principle is the social and historical dimension of knowledge, and biology is an essential field for us to understand this historicity analogously. In fact, unlike the static conception of fact proposed by traditional epistemology, Fleck points to the dynamics inherent in the biological model. The very title of his book already reflects this biological perspective: a scientific fact has a “genesis” and a “development” – and, eventually, a death. However, science is much more than a purely biological mechanism. It is an activity that occurs amidst social relations involving the scientific and the non-scientific. This social aspect reinforces the non-teleological character of science, first due to the analogy with the idea of evolution and science and, second, due to science’s social dimension. Science does not present inexorable progress toward a predetermined destination. Instead, it is

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subject to the dynamics of the natural and social processes that constitute it and can take different directions. By constituting his epistemological conception inspired by biology, Fleck starts from the idea that there is no exact limit between the normal and the pathological (Fleck [1929] 1986a, 39) to create a new axis to understand what “objectivity,” “precision,” “certainty,” and “development of knowledge” are. As the very limit between normal and pathological needs to be defined, the same applies to our objectivity criteria. How certain is it that a given disease is syphilis or not? How does the “thought collective” construct the criteria for determining “objectivity” and “precision” that guarantee us the “certainty” of the statement about what is considered syphilis? How does the history of science – the history of theories and practices circumscribed in space and time – define those criteria? It is answers to such questions that Fleck’s view of science seeks to provide. To answer those and similar questions, more than pioneeringly establishing a comparative analogy between the idea of evolution and science, Fleck creates his concepts considering the social dynamics as something analogous to biological dynamics. He understands that knowledge is evolutionarily constructed in this historical interaction between humanity and nature. To illustrate this, he goes out in the field, showing in detail how science works in its daily life, in its theoretical, material, technical, social, and natural interactions through time. In other words, to develop his theory of science, Fleck narrates the historical aspects of syphilis by showing how the modern understanding of this disease was established from the end of the fifteenth century until the so-called “Wassermann reaction,” discovered in the early twentieth century, which established the diagnosis of the disease. For the Polish thinker, syphilis was not discovered as a given, ready-made scientific fact. On the contrary, the scientific notion of syphilis was built from a long process with many setbacks and numerous comings and goings. Moreover, different times and contexts have elaborated varied explanations for syphilis. Thus, what we understand today as a scientific fact called “syphilis,” with diagnosis and treatment, was understood differently in several thought collectives situated historically, which produced various thought styles or scientific theories and practices conditioned by these various historical and cultural contexts in which they were created. Syphilis is not just about the etiologic agent, Spirochaeta pallida (modernly called treponema) (Fleck 1935/1979, 14). Instead, it is the product of a complex reference system that includes the disease, epidemics, popular knowledge, moral judgment, theoretical scientific knowledge, laboratory practices, treatments, medications, and public health policies, all articulated in specific social and historical circumstances. Though important, the determination of the etiologic agent is only one aspect of this complex of interactions. These interactions not only lead to an understanding of what syphilis is but can modify this understanding over time. Consequently, different thought styles have had different interpretations of syphilis over time and, eventually, simultaneously.

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We thus realize that the institution of a scientific thought style is built by social practice and its different social, technical, scientific, and literary styles in interaction with nature. However, this set is seen by Fleck from the biological matrix point of view. The development of this process takes place in an “organic” and gradual way, most of the time, without abrupt transformations, similar to a living organism. The indeterminacy and the inconstant character of knowledge about life that, until then, hindered or prevented this knowledge from having a scientific rigor, being qualified only as an “art of healing,” began to be seen differently. In other words, the inconstant and indeterminate character that until then had hindered the constitution of biology and the life sciences as sciences then became not only scientific knowledge but also the raw material for understanding epistemology itself. If the difficulty of defining limits between the normal and the pathological or establishing the peculiarity of the dynamics of living organisms had been obstacles for the traditional epistemology that sought rigid and precise certainties, at that point, those singular characteristics of the phenomenon of life became the starting point for understanding the very epistemological foundation of science. The referential of knowledge was no longer a fixed point, an ultimate foundation, but the dynamics of a system that, even with varying elements, formed a “reference system” capable of determining knowledge. Unlike what were supposed to be the “discoveries” of the physics model, syphilis, for example, as a biomedical phenomenon inserted in a social context, is not a static “discovery” but a dynamic “construction” from the conjunction of these multiple factors that, as said, make up the reference system of this thought style. Therefore, what the scientist understands as a scientific fact (what Fleck called a passive connection) is constituted from his perception (Gestaltsehen) (Fleck 1935/1979, 92) – and this is a collective perception – in the interaction with the multiple objects to which his eye turns (active connection). In so doing, Fleck assumes a pragmatic character in his theory of science. Science is not just a distanced model that describes or “represents” nature but is constituted by an interaction of the scientist with it. Science is action. It is a praxis. In that sense, starting from the peculiarity of the logic of life, Fleck inverts the epistemological consideration of the understanding of what science is. Scientific knowledge is not constituted as a static “representation” of nature, as postulated by traditional epistemology, but is formed in “interaction” with nature, which is analogous to evolutionary dynamics. In short, Fleck is impelled to think about what science is when he endeavors to establish the intelligibility of the phenomena of life. Of course, such phenomena are not always shown transparently or with precise limits, but that does not make the task less possible. In other words, when oriented by the complexity of the logic of life – or the fuzzy boundaries between the normal and the pathological – Fleck is forced to reorient his idea of precision, objectivity, and science’s development. From that viewpoint of biology and considering social and historical factors, Fleck constructed a fruitful new epistemology for the understanding of science and its history.

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Conclusion In this chapter, we have seen that Fleck was a pioneer in proposing the conception that science presents social and historical conditioning. Scientific knowledge is the product of the “thought collective,” as the author of Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact called the scientific community. Each thought collective creates its “thought style” from which the science is produced. However, even though each scientific thought style conceives its conceptions, ideas, theories, and practices, there is the possibility of connections between different thought styles, whether past or contemporary. We have also seen that to support his epistemological conceptions, Fleck establishes a fruitful analogy between science and biology. The development of science involves thinking changes similar to mutations or metamorphosis in nature, insofar as part of the knowledge changes, but part remains unchanged. Unfortunately, this important analogy with biology was ignored by essential experts in the historiography of science. Instead, they strictly followed Kuhn’s interpretation of Fleck, emphasizing the social aspects. Understanding Fleck’s work which takes into consideration social and historical factors allied to the biological model gives us a more precise way of viewing his epistemology and history of science.

Cross-References ▶ Lorraine Daston’s Historical Epistemology: Style, Program, and School ▶ Thomas Kuhn’s Legacy for the Historiography of Science

References Bloor D (1983) Wittgenstein: a social theory of knowledge. Macmillan, London Carnap R (1961) Der logische Aufbau der Welt. Felix Meiner, Hamburg. 1928/1961 Ciesielska M, Jarnicki P (2021) Ludwik Fleck – mikrobiolog i filozof. Oficyna Wydawnicza Politechniki Warszawskiej, Warszawa Cohen R, Schnelle T (Eds.) (1986) Cognition and fact: materials on Ludwik Fleck. Reidel Publish Company, Dordrecht Condé ML (2005) Paradigma versus Estilo de Pensamento na História da Ciência. In: Condé ML, Figueiredo B (eds) Ciência, História e Teoria. Belo Horizonte, pp 123–146 Condé ML (2018) Mutações no Estilo de Pensamento: Ludwik Fleck e o Modelo Biológico na Historiografia da Ciência. Revista de Filosofia Moderna e Contemporânea 6(1):155–186. https://doi.org/10.26512/rfmc.v6i1.20236 Condé ML (2022) The epistemological foundations of the Zilsel thesis. In: Romizi D, Wulz M, Nemeth E (eds) Edgar Zilsel: Philosopher, historian, sociologist, Vienna circle institute yearbook, vol 27. Springer, Cham Fleck L (1979) Genesis and development of a scientific fact. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 1935/1979 Fleck L (1980) Entstehung und entwicklung einer wissenschftlichen Tatsache. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. 1935/1980 Fleck L (1986a) Some specific features of the medical way of thinking. In: Cohen R, Schnelle T (eds) Cognition and fact: materials on Ludwik Fleck. Reidel, Boston. 1929/1986

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Fleck L (1986b) On the crisis of ‘reality’. In: Cohen R, Schnelle T (eds) Cognition and fact: materials on Ludwik Fleck. Reidel, Boston. 1929/1986 Graf EO (2009) Habent sua fata libelli – le destin des livres. In: Fehr J, Jas N, Löwy I (eds) Penser avec Fleck: investigating a life studying life sciences. Collegium Helveticum, Zurich Jarnicki P (2016) On the shoulders of Ludwik Fleck? On the bilingual philosophical legacy of Ludwik Fleck and its Polish, German and English translations. The Translator 22(3):271–286. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2015.1126881 Jarnicki P, Greif H (2022) The ‘Aristotle experience’ revisited: Thomas Kuhn meets Ludwik Fleck on the road to structure. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. https://doi.org/10.1515/agph2020-0160 Koyré A (1973) Étude d’histoire de la pensée scientifique. Gallimard, Paris. 1966/1973 Kuhn T (1962/1970) The structure of scientific revolution. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Kuhn T (1979) Foreword. In: Fleck L, Genesis and development of a scientific fact. Chicago: The University of Chicago, Chicago Kuhn T (2000) The road since structure. The University of Chicago, Chicago Latour B (2008) Postface – Transmettre la syphilis. Partager l’objectivité. In: Fleck L (ed) Genese et développement d’un fait scientifique. Edition Flammarion, Paris Latour B, Woolgar S (1979/1996) La vie de laboratoire: la production du fait scientifique. La Découverte, Paris Reichenbach H (1938) Experience and prediction: an analysis of the foundations and the structure of knowledge. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Schäfer L, Schnelle T (1980) Einleitung. In: Fleck L (ed) Entstehung und entwicklung einer wissenschftlichen Tatsache. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, pp vii–xlix. 1935/1980 Schäfer L, Schnelle T (eds) (1983) Ludwik Fleck: Erfahrung und Tatsache. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main Schnelle T (1982) Ludwik Fleck - Leben und denken: Zur Entstehung und Entwicklung des soziologischen Denkstils in der Wissenschaftsphilosophie. Hochschul Verlag, Freiburg Shapin S, Schaffer S (1985) Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the experimental life. Princeton University Press, Princeton Trenn TJ (1979) Preface. In: Fleck L (ed) Genesis and development of a scientific fact. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp xiii–xix. 1935/1979 Werner S, Zittel C (eds) (2011) Ludwik Fleck: Denkstile und Tatsachen. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main

John Desmond Bernal and “Bernalism”

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Daniele Cozzoli

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cambridge “High Science” in the 1920s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The London 1931 Congress and the Development of History of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Social Function of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . War Research and History of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Science in History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History of Science at Cambridge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Bernalism” and the New Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Decline of “Bernalism” and the Birth of STS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on John Desmond Bernal, whose work as a historian highlighted the socioeconomic dimension of science and technology. Bernal, a physicist by training, became interested in the history of science in the late 1930s, when he aimed to understand the role science played in contemporary society. Like other British scientists interested in the history of science, Bernal was struck by Boris Hessen’s historiographical view on the economic roots of modern science. When the most influential historians of science were focusing on the conceptual side of scientific development, Bernal stressed the role of craftsmen in the development of Western science. His work transcended the mere academic world. As early as 1956, Bernal was one of the promoters of a group of scientists who worked with the leadership of the Labour Party to elaborate the program of the future government. D. Cozzoli (*) Department of Humanities, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_15

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Focusing on Bernal’s writings and on Bernal’s and Needham’s papers at the University of Cambridge, this chapter aims to assess Bernal’s historiographical approach in the light of the development of British scientific policy between the 1930s and the 1960s and of the debate on Marxism and history in Britain. Keywords

Marxism · History of science · Craftsmen · Cold War · Planned science · Labour Party

Introduction John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) is an interesting figure in the panorama of twentieth-century historiography of science. Like many historians of science in the first half of the century, he was a professional scientist. His interest in the history of science was not only a matter of intellectual curiosity; rather it was a consequence of his social and political engagement. The development of his historiographical perspective cannot be separated from events such as the two world wars and British politics of the 1950s and 1960s. Bernal’s work in the Combined Operations Headquarters during WWII and his participation in the meetings of the Senior Scientists Group, an advisory board of the Labour Party, were crucial in shaping his view of scientific research and how it was connected to its history. It is worth noting that even the audience of Bernal’s writings differed from that of contemporary historians of science. The Social Function of Science was addressed to scientists, intellectuals, scientific policymakers, and left-wing activists, while Science in History derived from a series of lectures addressed to working-class students in their late twenties, who had either previously taken evening classes in social sciences or served in the armed forces. As Bernal himself pointed out, the book was not intended for experts in the history of science, but for the general public (see letter from Lionel Elvin to Bernal on November 19, 1947, in Bernal Papers, University of Cambridge Library, henceforth JDB, B. 1.9.1; letter from Bernal to Rosenfeld in JDB, B. 1. 9. 6; Bernal 1954, vol. I). This is also the reason why to today’s reader Bernal’s historical analysis may appear too superficial with regard to the work of other contemporary historians of science such as Alexandre Koyré, Alfred R. Hall, or Robert K. Merton, who not only were trained as professional historians, but whose work was loosely connected with contemporary political events and was addressed to scholars. Nevertheless, Bernal’s influence on twentieth-century history of science should not be overlooked. His work transcended the narrow field of the history of science and influenced the public debate on science and on the role of scientists in society. Between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s, Bernal’s ideas were crucial in shaping Harold Wilson’s labor policy (Werskey 1988). In Britain the term “Bernalism” was even coined to refer to the ideas of a group of British socialist scientists. It was an interpretation of Marxism in which science became the crucial factor of the liberation of mankind. Public scientific institutions should coordinate industrial production and

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orient it toward the improvement of the citizens’ living conditions. It is also worth noting that Bernal’s Social Function of Science paved the way to the development of science and technology studies in Britain.

Cambridge “High Science” in the 1920s After attending school in his native Ireland and then in England, Bernal enrolled at Cambridge, where he took initially the Mathematical Tripos and later the Natural Sciences Tripos (physics, chemistry, geology, and mineralogy) (Hodgkin 1980; Brown 2005). In the 1920s, Cambridge was the center of British science. Gary Werskey described the kind of research carried out at Cambridge as “high science”: pure experimental research pursued for its own sake, without any utilitarian motive. In Cambridge the two main research fields were particle physics at the Cavendish Laboratory and Biochemistry at the Dunn Institute. Cambridge was also an elitist living environment. Only the best researchers were selected to pursue their research there (Werskey 1988: 20–26). Bernal was fascinated by the liberal environment at Cambridge, which contrasted with the rigid education he had received until then (see Hodgkin 1980, 23). Cambridge “high science” was also an almost exclusively male environment. Women were very few. Bernal himself seemed to think of science eminently as the work of men. In The Social Function of Science he mentioned Mme du Châtelet but described the world of the contemporary scientist as that of men (Bernal 1939: 88–89). The focus on pure experimental research was likely also a reaction to the postwar anti-scientific climate that, in spite of the growing public investment in science and technology, was spreading across Europe. During WWI, many scientists and above all chemists had been involved in war-related research in all the belligerent countries. Even the Therapeutic Chemistry Laboratory of the Pasteur Institute, an institution devoted to saving lives, had worked on toxic gases (see Ernest Fourneau, typescript in Archives de l’Institut Pasteur, henceforth AIP, LCT 1; Séance de l’Assemblée du 20 Décembre 1916 in AIP/CA/REG 2; see also Morange 1991). By the end of the war, science had fallen into discredit. In Germany and Austria people felt disappointed because they had believed that thanks to the superiority of their science and technology victory would be attained quickly. Paul Forman had described how in Weimar Germany the hostile climate toward science led researchers to promote an acausal interpretation of quantum mechanics, which in a way stressed the limits of science (see Forman 2011). In his unfinished masterpiece Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Robert Musil likely painted the most complete picture of the anti-scientific climate of the interwar period. Britain was not immune from this anti-scientific climate. At the beginning of The Social Function of Science, Bernal recalled that voices had arisen even in the British Association for the Advancement of Science to limit scientific research (Bernal 1939, 2). At Cambridge Bernal also encountered Marxism. In 1919, he attended a lecture by the economist D. H. Dickinson, who praised the Russian revolutionary experiment (see Hodgkin 1980: 23). Bernal gave up his Irish nationalism and embraced

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socialism. In Cambridge he read Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s State and Revolution and shortly after graduation joined the small Communist Party of Great Britain (Werskey 1988: 74). Marxism gave Bernal a framework to analyze the role science played in contemporary society. He started to see the Soviet Union as the country in which scientists could work for the wealth of mankind, the country where a “world scientific state” was coming into being (Hodgkin 1980: 23). At Cambridge Bernal met another Marxist economist and historian, Maurice H. Dobb. Thus, Bernal’s adhesion to Marxism was also part of Cambridge “high science,” of the Cambridge scientific and cultural liberal environment. In 1923, Bernal joined both the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Labour Party (Hodgkin 1980). After graduating, Bernal started working at the Royal Institution in London. His research focused initially on the structure of graphite crystals. In 1927, he returned to Cambridge at the Davy Faraday Laboratory, and 10 years later, in 1937, he took the chair of Physics at Birkbeck College. Bernal became involved in political projects. He attended meetings of the Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group, Solly Zuckerman’s dining club, and the Tots and Quots and joined the British Association of Scientific Workers (Hodgkin 1980). The debates within these networks of socialist scientists would be crucial for the development of Bernal’s views and of science policy in Britain.

The London 1931 Congress and the Development of History of Science In 1931, the International Congress of History of Science took place in London. British professional historians of science and scientists with an interest in history attended the event, as did a delegation from the Soviet Union. The Soviet delegates were given a special session at the end of the congress. Boris Hessen stressed the connections of Newton’s Principia with economics and technology. From the classic Marxist observation that it is not the consciousness of men that determines their social being but vice versa (on Hessen see Freudenthal 2005), Hessen argued that: Despite the abstract mathematical character of exposition adopted in the Principia, not only was Newton by no means a learned scholastic divorced from life, but he firmly stood at the centre of the physical and technical problems and interests of his time. (Hessen and Grossman 2009: 171)

Such a conclusion scared most of the London audience. In the following years the relation between science and economics would be associated with the threat of the spread of communism. Bernal commented that: The Russians came in a phalanx uniformly armed with Marxian dialectic, but they met no ordered opposition, but instead an undisciplined host, unprepared and armed with ill-assorted individual philosophies. There was no defense, but the victory was unreal. (Bernal 1949: 336)

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The impact of the Soviet delegation at the London congress and the interwar antiscientific climate were two crucial factors for the shifting of history of science toward cultural history. A majority of historians of science carefully avoided meeting the challenge of Marxism and rejected any connection between history of science, economic history, sociology, and the history of technology. George Sarton reaffirmed the humanist character of scientific activity. For Sarton, history of science had to be a bridge between the two cultures. In The History of Science and the New Humanism, he remarked that: “Without history scientific knowledge may be culturally dangerous; combined with history, tempered with reverence, it will nourish the highest culture” (Sarton 1988: 19). Sarton remarked that science is the highest product of mankind, and therefore, the study of men of genius (women were apparently not considered) is the main task of the historian of science. Technology is rather a matter of ingenuity. Alexandre Koyré too regarded the history of science as part of the history of ideas, the reconstruction of how scientific and philosophical concepts had evolved through an intellectual dialogue. His history of science was detached from the social and the economic dimension. Koyré was opposed to establishing any connection between Galileo’s science and his work as an engineer, a connection that was advanced by Marxist scholars such as Edgar Zilsel, Antonio Banfi, and Bernal himself (see Bernal 1939: 168–169; Kuhn 1983; Banfi 1962; Zilsel 2003; on Zilsel see Raven 2003; Krohn and Raven 2000; Nemeth 2000, 2011). Koyré was also a fierce anti-Marxist scholar (see Turner 2005; Nye 2011: 241).

The Social Function of Science In 1939, Bernal published The Social Function of Science. The book was the result of an extensive investigation on the role of science in Britain that he had carried out throughout the previous year. Several documents testifying how Bernal carefully collected data from various institutions and individuals are conserved in the Bernal archive at the University of Cambridge Library. At the beginning of the book, Bernal stressed his worries that science had fallen into discredit after WWI and the 1929 Great Crash: The events of the past few years have led to a critical examination of the function of science in society. It used to be believed that the results of scientific investigation would lead to continuous progressive improvements in conditions of life; but first the War and then the economic crisis have shown that science can be used as easily for destructive and wasteful purposes, and voices have been raised demanding the cessation of scientific research as the only means of preserving a tolerable civilization. (Bernal 1939: xiii)

Bernal echoed the worries of scientists and intellectuals in interwar Europe and stated that, for the first time since the Renaissance, science itself seemed in danger. Bernal was struck by the militarization of science during WWI. He pointed out how science had changed with the First World War:

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Science has ceased to be the occupation of curious gentlemen or of ingenious minds supported by wealthy patrons, and has become an industry supported by large industrial monopolies and by the State. Imperceptibly, this has altered the character of science from an individual to a collective basis, and has enhanced the importance of apparatus and administration. (Bernal 1939: xiii)

Bernal recalled that Bertrand Russell suggested continuing to develop science without developing industry. Russell’s view mirrored Cambridge “high science” worries about the militarization of science and its integration with industry. But – Bernal observed – if we followed Russell’s suggestion, science would return to the level it occupied in the Middle Ages (Bernal 1939: 10). The integration between science and industry also had important consequences. Science was no longer the disinterested activity of gentlemen; Cambridge “high science” was already in a way a remnant of the past. If science was part of industrial production, it had to deal with “reducing costs, factory organization, speeding up of workers or lowering of wages” (Bernal 1939: 10). “Technological unemployment and scientific warfare” were Bernal’s main concerns (Bernal 1939: 88). The Social Function of Science was divided into three parts. The first one was devoted to a short reconstruction of the history of science, which was instrumental for explaining the contemporary role of science in society: Existing histories of science are little more than pious records of great men and their works, suitable perhaps for the inspiration of young workers, but not for understanding the rise and growth of science as an institution. Some attempt at such a history must, however, be made if we are to understand the significance of the institution of science as it now is and its complex relationships with other institutions and with the general activity of society. (Bernal 1939: 11)

Bernal contrasted with Sarton’s view of science and of the role of history of science. According to Bernal, the approach of the author of The History of Science and the New Humanism was contradictory, because scientific discoveries could not be separated from the material needs and the material instruments that made them possible. Bernal’s history of science tended to connect science and technology with the social and economic dimension. For Bernal the origin of science was rooted both in techniques and in the intellectual mind. Modern science has a twofold origin. It derives both from the ordered speculation of the magician, priest, or philosopher and from the practical operation and traditional lore of the craftsman (The relations between science, magic, and religion had been stressed by Lynn Thorndike, who in 1923 published the first volume of his A History of Magic and Experimental Science (see Thorndike 1923–58; on Thorndike, see Clagett 1966; Hanegraaff 2012: 317–322).). Until then, however, scholars had focused on the first aspect. Detaching the historical reconstruction of science from the work of craftsmen made of the whole progress of science a sort of miracle (Bernal 1939: 12). Early scientific instrument makers were often craftsmen, such as clock makers. Bernal remarked that the character of English science was experimental and related to common sense.

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In England, more than in any other country, science is felt rather than thought. Imagination is concrete and visual. Faraday thinks in terms of tubes of force which are imagined to behave very much as if they were made of rubber. Rutherford explores the atom as if it were a kind of coconut shy at a village fair, throws particles at it and looks to see what bits fall out (Bernal 1939: 197).

Sarton and Koyré considered the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the moment when modern science was born, while Bernal focused on the Industrial Revolution. It was in Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Philadelphia, rather than Oxford, Cambridge and London, that the science of the industrial revolution took root. Its practitioners were no longer small country gentlemen and churchmen, but dissenting ministers and quakers, and their patrons were no longer aristocrats and merchant bankers, but manufacturers. (Bernal 1939: 25)

It was during the Industrial Revolution that the modern idea of pure science arose, the idea that scientists are not socially responsible. When Davy built a lamp that would not cause an explosion if it was put in firedamp, he benefited the industrialists, but the invention caused more victims among the miners, because it allowed the exploitation of deeper mines. According to Bernal, the turning point in the development of science was the First World War. In Britain, not only did scientists become involved in the military effort, but the war radically changed the organization and the scale of research. Before the war, research was mainly carried out by professors and teachers, while warfare required more scientists. Postgraduate students and subsidized full-time senior research workers were hired. The Royal Society changed its role slightly and became also an informal advisory body to the government. However, in every country science was neither fully independent nor integrated into industry. The First World War also proved that scientists are ineffective in opposing war; because of their isolation, they can be easily influenced by the social context. But also because they hardly understand their social role. Bernal focused on the organization of science in contemporary Britain. He remarked that scientific research in Britain relied on personal connections between a few scientists and the political and economic establishment. He also stressed that popular science and the popular understanding of scientists’ work was crucial to avoid scientists’ dangerous natural tendency to mental isolation. It is important that citizens understand science in peace and war to separate its constructive from its destructive role. At that time Bernal was participating in the meetings of the Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group on air raid defense. In The Social Function of Science, he confessed that it is impossible to determine what exactly war research is. War research can also boost pure research. For instance, research into properties of metals was stimulated by the need for heavy weapons. To the process of militarization of science after WWI, George Sarton opposed “a new humanism,” whereas Bernal opposed the mobilization of scientists for the

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improvement of living conditions, a policy that Bernal saw in the 1927 Soviet economic plan. In the USSR scientists coordinated their work with the industry. The whole system was rationally organized. The Academy of Science of the Soviet Union coordinated research. Industry presented problems to scientists and in turn scientific breakthroughs were immediately transmitted to the industry. Furthermore, access to careers in science was democratic and not elitist like in Britain. Any talented young person could aspire to a scientific career. Bernal’s enthusiasm for the USSR may seem naïve. It is, however, worth recalling that the Soviet Union, because of its relative isolation from the world economy, seemed to be unaffected by the global economic crisis following the 1929 Great Crash; therefore, many Western observers became sympathetic with planned economies. The Social Function of Science had a vast echo in the press. Left-wing newspapers highlighted that Bernal had pointed out that the British government was investing much more money in toxic gas research than in the Medical Research Council (The Manchester Guardian, 9 January 1939). Solly Zuckerman in The New Statesman and Nation recalled that Bernal was echoing Sir Richard Gregory’s call to scientists for social responsibility (Zuckerman 1939. On Zuckerman see Krohn 1995). Others pointed to Bernal’s criticism of the organization of science in Britain (Anonymous 1938). Another sympathetic reviewer, Charles P. Snow, observed that Bernal’s faith in the organization of science was likely excessive, as he was “probably unduly fascinated by the administrative machinery of Russian science.” Nonetheless, Snow’s review was positive in hindsight (Snow 1939). Other reactions were very critical. An article in The Economist stressed that investing in science was not enough. Scientific breakthroughs had to be converted into innovations: they had to be incorporated into the productive process. The growth of investment in science would not automatically generate innovations and, therefore, the kind of benefits for mankind that Bernal wanted, unless capitalists were inclined to accept the risk and invest their money (see The Economist, 11 February; Bernal 1939). The historian Ceruti has argued that “Bernalism” failed in its goal, as the influence of his ideas in Britain was marginal (Ceruti 1981: 504). This thesis must be qualified. The mainstream historiography of science was hostile to Marxism and it was rather inclined toward a form of conceptual or cultural history. Reviewing Bernal’s book for Isis, Leslie Pearce Williams, a historian of science at Cornell who had been trained as a chemical engineer, served in the Navy, and endorsed Sarton’s view of the history of science as a bridge between science and humanities, commented that the book posed a challenge to historians of science. Nonetheless, he quickly dismissed Bernal’s Marxist approach (Williams 1957, 1980). Professional historians of science did not engage with Bernal’s work. As we shall see in the next sections, however, Bernal’s ideas had a tremendous influence on the making of Harold Wilson’s Labour Party policy. Michael Polanyi, to whom Bernal had sent a copy of the book, also criticized Bernal’s proposal for the organization of science in Britain. According to Polanyi, Bernal was making a distinction between pure and applied research, which was simply wrong. Researchers must be free to pursue their research. Even medical

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research would benefit much more if researchers were free to do research in cytology, biochemistry, and physiology (Polanyi 1939; Andreucci 1979). At that time Polanyi was worried about the spreading of Marxist ideas in Britain: In the years since the World Crisis of 1929/33 a movement has grown up in England and to some extent in the United States and in France, putting forward a claim for the reconsideration of the position of science in the light of Marxist philosophy. More recently, it seems to me, this movement while further gathering in breadth, is adopting a less orthodox attitude. It is trying to win the support also of non-Socialists, mainly by emphasising that no restriction of the freedom of science is intended. The able and powerful treatise of Professor Bernal represents this attitude. (Polanyi 1939: 175)

The year after, in 1940, during WWII, Polanyi joined the Society for Freedom in Science, a group of scientists who aimed to combat the spreading of totalitarianism by reaffirming “Whig” values (see Reinisch 2000 and Nye 2011). Their aims were summarized in an article in Nature: The Society has recently issued a statement of its purposes and aims, which are summed up in five propositions; put briefly, these are: (1) increase of knowledge by scientific research and its diffusion have a primary human value; (2) science can only flourish in an atmosphere of freedom; (3) scientific life should be autonomous; (4) conditions of research appointments should give workers freedom to choose their own problems; (5) scientific men in countries not under dictatorial rule should cooperate to maintain freedom of research. (Anonymous 1944)

The Society for Freedom in Science represented in a way the perspective of liberal scientists, historians of science, and philosophers of science, who were concerned with the increasing militarization of science after WWI (see Nye 2011). Bernal and other socialist scientists, on the contrary, had formed the Association of Scientific Workers and the Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group. These groups accepted that their involvement in war research was unavoidable. After the war, the personal contrast between Polanyi and Bernal became less harsh. In 1946, Polanyi wrote to Bernal: I just read in “NATURE” an extract of your speech at the B.A. I quite agree that the divergent views which you and I have represented in the past few years on the subject of freedom in science have now been sufficiently clarified to allow for active co-operation between the two parties in holding them. A union of efforts is also urgently needed in view of the great problems confronting us throughout the world. (Letter from Polanyi to Bernal of 8 January 1946 in JDB, J 188 Polanyi, M.)

Nonetheless, Polanyi, who had fled to Britain at the advent of Nazism and was a fierce opponent of any form of totalitarianism, continued to criticize Marxism. In 1958, he published Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, in which he attacked the abstract ideal of impersonal knowledge, which aimed to achieve complete scientific knowledge of the universe and give mankind unlimited power over nature (Polanyi 1958, 139–140). Polanyi criticized the idea that material

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welfare could be achieved by means of science and technology, which was the view of Bernal and of socialist scientists who at that time were working within the Labour Party to elaborate a political program (Polanyi 1958: 142).

War Research and History of Science By the mid-1930s, the Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group started working on air raid precautions, foreseeing a new war against Germany. They decided to meet regularly. On the outbreak of the war Bernal worked in the Experimental Department of the Ministry of Home Security at Princes Risborough (Hodgkin 1980: 53). As early as 1942, Bernal and Solly Zuckerman joined the Combined Operations Headquarters as scientific assistants (Bernal 1955; Zuckerman 1978; Brown 2005). Winston Churchill had charged Lord Louis Mountbatten to form a special unit, the Combined Operations Headquarters, to study scientific and technical aspects of war operations. Bernal realized that the relation between science and war had changed rapidly, even with regard to WWI: now science must be applied to the whole field of military activity and not only to particular issues like in WWI (Anonymous 1942). Science had to be applied to strategy and tactics too (Bernal, War Science in Britain in JDB, B. 3.76). Bernal complained that academic researchers were not fully involved in war science. In 1942, he published an article in Nature summarizing the discussion at the meeting of the Cambridge University Branch of the Association of Scientific Workers. The meeting denounced the lack of coordination by the government between academic researchers and those working in the government and industry. Furthermore, the military secrecy regulations had a hampering effect on research. Participants in the meetings emphasized that most of the research in organic chemistry was devoted to postwar perspectives. There was a lack of work in some laboratories on really urgent war research. Most laboratories carried on working on previous research or more frequently with “pseudo-war research.” While in previous years Bernal had found it difficult to distinguish between military and nonmilitary research, now he made a clear-cut distinction between what was war research and what was not: Scientific work can only be considered as war work when it is very probable (italics in the original) that it will give results which can be applied to this war. Any other form of research is either ‘pseudo’ war work, or not war work at all. (Bernal 1942: 186)

Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters had to prepare equipment and techniques for the invasion across the Channel (Hodgkin 1980). Bernal’s main “war work” consisted in the study of the Normandy sand to organize the invasion (see Bernal 1955). At the beginning, the relations with the military officers proved to be somewhat complicated. Mountbatten had ordered that the scientists had to be fully

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informed and not only to be asked questions, but the officers tended to resist. After the war, Mountbatten recalled the following anecdote: A young naval officer went to Bernal and asked him what he thought the chances were of making a very small light portable echo-sounder to measure very small depths accurately. Bernal asked ‘Why?’. The officer replied that the matter was too secret to explain, and it was up to Bernal to answer the question. To this Bernal replied ‘No’ and that I had given an instruction that the scientists were to participate in the formulation of the problems to be investigated. He therefore wished to know more. Rather reluctantly the young officer then told him that what was wanted was a way of finding out, without the Germans knowing what we were doing, how to measure beach gradients, the runnels, as well as the consistency of the kind of beaches which we might assault. His own idea was to put a light echo sounder on a board and push it in at night from a submarine with a swimmer who would try to obtain this information. Bernal’s reply was ‘You’ve asked the wrong question, you should have said “How do we measure the beach gradients, and runnels without the Germans knowing?”‘His own answer was that P. R. Photography should be used, taking vertical photographs of the desired beaches at various stages of the tide and directions of the wind, and that the coverage should extend beyond the desired beaches so as to disguise from the Germans what we were up to. (Hodgkin 1980: 55–56)

In a postwar reconstruction, Bernal explicitly connected his work on the military landings with nonmilitary research and with his historical research. Knowledge of the beach was deemed crucial, as troops and heavy military vehicles not only had to land, but to go through a marshlike strip to reach firm land. Bernal remembered that he started studying the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of Caen (He might mean either the Mémoires de la société linnéenne de Normandie or the Bulletin de la société linnéenne de Normandie.) to reconstruct the geology and hydrology of the bay. He was particularly interested in summer excursions. His work on charts led him to think about the knowledge production of sailors, chart makers, and military actors and about the different functions knowledge had for such different actors: Now the first charts were admirable, but unfortunately in copying a number of errors had been introduced of which perhaps the most serious was that a number of rocks had been omitted, possibly because the copyists were paid by the chart and not by the number of rocks. These defects had not mattered in the past because, as every sailor knows, the main value of a chart of a rocky coast is the indication it gives to keep away from it. The kind of people who actually frequent the coasts, the fishermen, never use charts, they know. And it was this fisherman knowledge that proved in the end to be the most valuable. (Bernal 1955: 4)

In the Proceedings Bernal came across the articles of the Abbé Huc, who drew up a chart thanks to the help of fishermen and used the names they gave to the rocks. Thanks to aerial surveys and the historical study of the charts, Bernal was able to establish with a high degree of precision the gradient and the consistency of the beach. The military, however, were not persuaded and sent sappers to collect samples of the sand (Bernal 1955: 3). Curiously enough, the episode confirmed

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Bernal’s remark in The Social Function of Science on the common-sense character of British science.

Science in History After the war, Bernal returned to his work at Birkbeck College. In November 1947 he was requested by Ruskin College to deliver a series of lectures either in history of science or in philosophy of science. Ruskin College was devoted to the education of working-class adults. The students’ average age was 29 years old, they were from industry, they had a good education in evening classes or in the Armed Forces, and they mainly studied economic and social sciences. The lectures were published in 1954 in a book series devoted to adult education (see letter from Lionel Elvin to Bernal on November 19, 1947, and letter from Lionel Elvin to Bernal on February 20, 1948, in JDB. B. 1.9.1; Bernal 1954, vol. I). The book was widely translated and read, mostly by scientists and particularly in the Soviet Union (see the letters in JDB, B 1.9.4). Science in History was a synthesis of the history of science from antiquity to the present. The book unfolded Bernal’s view on the development of science throughout the centuries in its relationships with society, technology, economics, the military sector, and political power. The approach was encyclopedic, partly because of Bernal’s encyclopedic tendency. Gary Werskey reported that Bernal Was credited with an encyclopedic culture (see Werskey 1988: 74). For his multiple interests Bernal was given the nickname “Sage.” It is also worth noting that the book was not addressed to professional historians, as Bernal himself explained in a letter to Rosenfeld, who had written a very critical review of the book (see letter from Bernal to Rosenfeld in JDB, B. 1. 9. 6).” In most cases Bernal pointed to the complex relationship between science, technology, and economics, without explaining it in detail. Nonetheless, the book contained a myriad of remarks on topics that historians of science were at that time largely overlooking, such as the relationship between navigation techniques and astronomy in the Renaissance and the increasing militarization of science in WWI. Bernal regarded the Scientific Revolution as the historical product of the development of capitalism. He argued that since the Renaissance craftsmen and artists have got closer to scholars. Dealing with science in the eighteenth century, he remarked that: Although there is ample material and even adequate analysis of the political, the economic, the technical, and the scientific transformations of the eighteenth century, these studies have remained largely separate and the combined analysis of them has yet to be written. It would be impossible to embark on it here; the best that can be done is to attempt to put the scientific development in its place against the economic and political background and to trace how far it was affected by, and itself in turn affected, the other aspects of contemporary society. (Bernal 1965, vol. 3: 520)

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Bernal did not analyze the nature of the social relationships between scientists and technicians. It is worth noting that between the 1950s and the 1970s, a number of British radical historians focused on the low strata of early modern and modern British society. In 1959, Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels came out, (see Hobsbawm 1959) and four years later, in 1963, E. P. Thompson published his seminal The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson invited historians to study workers, including criminals, soldiers, and sailors and ballad -singers, “with an eye for Brechtian values – the fatalism, the irony in the face of Establishment homilies” (Thompson 1966: 59). In the following years, British radical historians focused on the role of the “marginals” or the “subalterns,” as Gramsci had called them. Bernal, however, did not investigate in depth the culture and the agency of technicians. For their part most British Marxist professional historians failed to engage with Bernal’s suggestion. Hobsbawm devoted chapters to science in the three books on the history of the long nineteenth century and in his The Age of Extremes (see Hobsbawm 1962, 1975, 1987, 1994). In The Age of Revolution Hobsbawm echoed Bernal’s remark on the decline of the cosmopolitan community of scientists in the eighteenth century and the rise of a national tradition (see Hobsbawm 1962: 741). But in hindsight the intellectual exchange between radical British historians and Bernal’s work was poor.

History of Science at Cambridge Bernal did not enjoy much fortune among historians of science either. In Britain too, history of science evolved toward cultural history and departed from the socioeconomic dimension that Bernal and other socialist scientists were stressing. In the 1930s a committee on history of science was established at Cambridge. At the beginning it was decided that “lectures should be given by scientific men who took a decisive part themselves in the development of the various branches of science” (see letter from Needham to Rutherford on October 3, 1936, in Joseph Needham Papers, henceforth JN, Cambridge University Library, B. 307;The speakers on the list were Lord Rutherford (two lectures on physics), Sir A. S. Eddington (one on astronomy), Sir F. G. Hopkins (one on biochemistry and nutrition), Prof. G. H. F. Nuttall (one on tropical medicine and parasitology), Dr. F. F. Blackman (one on plant physiology), Prof. J. B. S. Haldane (one on biology), and Sir W. Bragg (one on crystal physics).). The project mirrored the Cambridge “high science” perspective, including the fact that women were marginalized. After WWII the teaching of history of science was restructured. A memorandum by J. A. Ratcliffe proposed to add to the teaching of history of science that of economics of science and of philosophy of science. The goal was “to introduce the student of science to the more important of those non-technical matters about which he should be thinking because he is a scientist” (see J. A. Ratcliffe, Second memorandum on the revision of

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natural sciences tripos in JN, B 307). In Ratcliffe’s memorandum this was the definition of “economics of science”: The Economics of Science would deal with the way in which scientific matters fitted into the everyday life of the community and particularly into the industries of the country. It would deal with the relation between scientific advances and real wealth, the steps that have to be taken to absorb a technical advance into an industrial process, and the effects of such introduction on price levels. In order to deal with those matters fully there would have to be several lectures on the rudiments of economics. (J. A. Ratcliffe, Second memorandum on the revision of natural sciences tripos in JN, B 307)

This approach mirrored Bernal’s ideas, although Bernal himself was not directly involved. Both the idea that history of science should explain contemporary science and the connection between science, technology, and industry could be found in The Social Function of Science. In the following years, however, it was decided to skip the economics of science part and the teaching of history of science at Cambridge tended to merge with that of philosophy of science (see Draft Report to University in JN, B. 312, and Report of the Committee appointed to submit to the university a scheme for the inclusion in part I of the Natural Sciences Tripos of a subject or half-subject embracing the historical, philosophical, and economic aspects of science, June 21, 1950, in JN, B. 313). It was also decided that history of science was to be carried out by professional historians, rather than by scientists (see letter from Needham to Charles Singer on June 7, 1948, in JN, B. 309; letter from C. Singer to Needham on June 20, 1948, in JN, B. 309). In his memorandum, Ratcliffe proposed to hire Benjamin Farrington, a Marxist scholar who had already published on ancient science, stressing the role of techniques in Greek and Roman culture and would later publish Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science (1949) and Francis Bacon: Pioneer of Planned Science (1963). Instead, it was decided to rely on “three Cambridge men”: Alfred R. Hall, Sam Lilley, and Alistair Crombie, although there was some perplexity regarding Lilley because he was a “well-known Marxist” and regarding Crombie because of his Roman faith (see letter from Needham to Charles Singer on June 7, 1948, in JN, B. 309). Hall was also appointed curator of the Whipple Museum. Joseph Needham complained that people from outside Cambridge were not considered. Although the Report of the committee appointed to prepare a teaching scheme stated that “it was thought that relations between scientific discovery and economic or social life would naturally fall within the scope of the teaching in the History section” (Report of the Committee appointed to submit to the university a scheme for the inclusion in part I of the Natural Sciences Tripos of a subject or half-subject embracing the historical, philosophical, and economic aspects of science, June 21, 1950, in JN, B. 313), the choice of the teachers entailed that history of science at Cambridge was going to focus on its intellectual, rather than on its social and economic, dimension. Women were marginalized and a prominent role was given to Western science between 1400 and 1800, making the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the crucial moment of modern science (see letter from Butterfield to Needham of May 27, 1948 in JN, B. 309; History of Science Committee, Minutes of a meeting held on June 3, 1948, in JN, B. 309).

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“Bernalism” and the New Britain In the 1950s and 1960s, Bernal’s views on science played a part in the making of the policy of the Labour Party. In 1956 Bernal joined a committee of scientists who had to produce a set of Cabinet papers for the Labour Party upon the request of its leader, Hugh Gaitskell. The papers were intended to help Labour Ministers in their decisions (see Minutes of the VIP Scientists Meeting 17.10.1962 at 37 Park Street at 6 p.m. in JDB F 9, Correspondence with Mr. Brunwell; Minutes of the seventh Meeting of “Senior Scientists Group,” Monday July 20, 1959, in JDB F 5, Correspondence and Papers 1959; Science and the Labour Government in JDB F 7, Papers for H. Gaitskell A Labour Government Science 31.7.1959) (Other members were F.M.S. Blackett, J.M.R. Brumwell (chair), George Dickson, R.G. Forrester, Sir Ben Lockspeiser, D.M. Newitt, and B.R. Williams.). The relations between the scientists and the party were somewhat complicated, as the structure, the timing, and the organization of political life appeared to the scientists as rather chaotic (see Science and the Labour Party in JDB F 9, Correspondence with Mr. Brunwell). It is worth noting that during the war Bernal had already experienced how different the approach of scientists was from that of the military. However, when Harold Wilson became leader of the party, the work of the group became central in the political elaboration of the Labour Party. Wilson himself participated in meetings of the group, which were not public and whose minutes were labelled as “confidential.” In his memoirs, Wilson wrote that economic security and science and technology were his main concerns. However, he tended to minimize the work of the group and claimed that he just attended some dinners organized by Patrick Blackett (see Wilson 1986: 193–194). The documents written by the group were the result of the discussion with Wilson and other Labour Party leaders. In one of the meetings Wilson remembered that in the USSR there was a state committee for the application of science to industry (see VIP Scientists Dinner, June 24, 1963, Held at the Reform Club, Pall Mall in JDB F 9, Correspondence with Mr. Brunwell; see also Jones 1981; Wilson travelled several times to the USSR. See Wilson 1986: 195). After the launch of Sputnik special attention was paid in the West to the organization of Soviet science and its application to industry (see McDougall 1985). A majority of American economists were convinced that the faster growth rate of the Soviet economy would lead sooner or later to it overtaking that of the United States (see Levy and Peart 2011). In his speech in Scarborough, Labour’s plan for science, better known as the “white heat” speech, in which he presented the document Labour and the Scientific Revolution, Wilson stressed that labor had to face the challenge that automation in industry posed to employment. Labor had to train more scientists and follow the USSR: Russia – Wilson remembered – is at the present time training 10 to 11 times as many scientists and technologists. And the sooner we face up to that challenge, the sooner we shall realize what kind of a world we are living in. (Wilson 1963: 3)

Facing up to the danger of technological unemployment by means of training more scientists, by a more egalitarian access to knowledge and by a rational and

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coordinated integration of science and industry, were what Bernal had envisioned in The Social Function of Science (see the files concerning the Senior Scientists Group in JDB F 5–14; see also Werskey 1988: xiv). The manifesto for the 1964 elections, The New Britain, stated that the Tories were losing the opportunity offered by the current “scientific revolution” in connection with planned economies to build up a wealthier and more egalitarian country (The New Britain: The Labour Party’s Manifesto for the 1964 General Election; see also Labour and the Scientific Revolution. A Statement of Policy Approved by the Annual Conference of the Labour Party, Scarborough 1963 in JDB F 9, Correspondence with Mr. Brunwell; see also Sandbrook 2006). The “scientific revolution” of The New Britain was grounded in Bernal’s ideas on science he had been developing since The Social Function of Science. It was not the conceptual changes envisioned by professional historians of science such as Rupert A. Hall and Alexandre Koyré, when they described “the Scientific Revolution” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Decline of “Bernalism” and the Birth of STS The fate of Bernal’s views was intertwined with the events of the 1970s and 1980s. Bernal’s approach to the history of science was an attempt to integrate the social and economic dimension of science and technology following Boris Hessen’s lesson as well as the debates between socialist scientists. As we have seen, however, most historians of science did not engage with economic history. The crisis of the Soviet Union, the rise of Neoliberalism, and the retreat of the Labour Party in Britain, as well as the crisis of Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s and its increasing failure in explaining historical phenomena, accelerated the departure of scholars and intellectuals from Marxism and the creation of alternative philosophical approaches to history. Lenin’s theses on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism were dead by Christmas night of 1979, when the Red Army crossed the border with Afghanistan. To a new generation of postcolonial and postmodern authors, both Marxism and neo-liberalism focusing on the economic dimension of culture appeared to be complicit with the Western structures of dominance. “Bernalism” and The New Britain appeared antiquated. Mary Jo Nye has described the debate on the political dimension of science in Europe between the 1930s and the 1960s as an attempt to defend the universal status of science from the threat of totalitarianism, which over the course of three generations was transformed into a mature discipline, the social studies of science (Nye 2011). Nye herself is part of the story outlined above: she belongs to the generation of US intellectuals of the 1960s who assisted the disappearance of the challenge of Marxism and, therefore, were entitled to criticize the social role of scientists without being accused of communism. Authors who endorsed a sociological approach to scientific research eliminated the economic element from the social analysis of science, which

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was inseparable in the analysis of J. D. Bernal and the other Marxist scholars, and praised the birth of a mature nonideological discipline (Schaffer 1983; Nye 2011). Bernal was among the first scholars to stress the role of technicians and craftsmen in the historical development of science. As we have seen, Bernal’s interest in technicians and workers was not a matter of mere intellectual curiosity or a consequence of an ideological position. It was rooted in his scientific approach. When he was studying the consistency of Normandy sand to prepare the invasion, he connected the knowledge of the fishermen with scientific experimental work. His historical work was not, however, as accurate as that of contemporary professional historians of science and he did not engage with radical British historians who were studying the world of the subaltern. History of science had tended to develop as cultural history and overlook the socioeconomic dimension of science. It was only with the end of the Cold War that historians of science started focusing again on the role of technicians in the history of science. In 1989 Steven Shapin wrote a short paper, The Invisible Technician, in which he highlighted the role of technicians in the production of Robert Boyle’s experimental knowledge. Boyle relied heavily on his assistants’ observational skills and on their judgment to establish the results of his experiments, questioning their work only when the apparatus did not produce the expected results. Nonetheless, the technicians’ work was not publicly acknowledged. Shapin argued that both sociologists and historians of science ought to focus on technicians in order to shed light on the role played by traditional practices and know-how in scientific research (Shapin 1989).

Conclusion Between the 1930s and the 1960s, John Desmond Bernal developed a historiographical approach to science centered on the socioeconomic dimension of science and technology. In The Social Function of Science first and in Science in History later, Bernal developed Boris Hessen’s and Edgar Zilsel’s perspective, which stressed the importance of craftsmen and technicians in the development of science. His historical methodology was intertwined with his scientific work, such as in the case of his study of Normandy sand. In the interwar period, Bernal had developed an original analysis of the current role of science and technology in society. Such analysis led him to focus on the role of technicians, of instrument makers, in the history of science. Through his own participation, he realized that WWII had also modified war research: science had to be applied to the whole field of military activity and not only to certain issues. Although his approach was encyclopedic, his writings contained a myriad of observations on topics that historians of science were at that time largely overlooking, such as the relationship between navigation techniques and astronomy in the Renaissance. His reflection on the role of the scientist as a historian and as an observer of the know-how of “natives” paved the way for further approaches such as STS and Latour’s methodology in Laboratory Life.

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Cross-References ▶ The Historiography of Scientific Revolutions: A Philosophical Reflection ▶ The Origins of Alexandre Koyré’s History of Scientific Thought Acknowledgments I wish to thank the personnel of the Manuscripts and Rare Books division of the Cambridge University Library for their kindness and their help during my research on Bernal’s and Needham’s papers stored in their archives. The research of this chapter was funded by a Mineco research project, with reference PID2019-107234GB-I00, 2020–23.

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Thomas Kuhn’s Legacy for the Historiography of Science Mauro L. Conde´

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paradigms, Scientific Revolutions, and Incommensurability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History Versus Philosophy: The Debate Between Kuhn and Popper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History Versus Sociology: Kuhn and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Kuhnian Legacy: Historical and Social Aspects, Evolution and Language in the Construction of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Thomas Kuhn was undoubtedly one of the essential authors of the history and philosophy of science in the twentieth century. This chapter analyzes his work and discusses his important contribution to the historiography of science. The first part analyzes his masterpiece, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Next, Kuhn’s debate with Karl Popper’s philosophy of science in the 1960s is interpreted as a crucial confrontation between two traditions of research on science established around the “role of history” for understanding the scientific activity. The third section, continuing the analysis of the impact of the Kuhnian work, addresses the North American thinker’s criticism of the Strong Program’s sociology of scientific knowledge, particularly concerning the issue of scientific relativism. Finally, it is pointed out that, besides all the influential historiographical reflections Kuhn left us, perhaps, his main legacy is still to be achieved. In other words, Kuhn’s influence will be complete when the historiography of science deepens his guidelines for effective writing of the history of science, M. L. Condé (*) Department of History, Federal University of Minas Gerais – UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_6

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namely, a theory of the history of science that articulates (1) the historical and social aspects, (2) the idea of evolution, and (3) the role of language in the understanding of scientific activity. Kuhn was one of the few, if not the only one, to show the need to thoroughly articulate these three guidelines and thus realize a more effective and robust history of science. Since this Kuhn-inspired task is still on the horizon, we will most likely continue to be Kuhnians in the future. We are and perhaps still will be in a Kuhnian paradigm for a long time. Keywords

Thomas Kuhn · Historiography of science · Social perspective · Evolution · Language

Introduction The importance of Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) in the historiography of science has been so remarkable, decisive, and comprehensive that it is mandatory to include him in any collection that aims to reflect on this field of knowledge. The high number of Kuhn’s contributions to the history and philosophy of science is paralleled by the high number of analyses and criticisms of his historiography. The book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has had the most significant impact on the historiography of science of all time. Consequently, it has also been the most thoroughly analyzed. So then, what else is there to write about Thomas Kuhn? Perhaps, it would take a new generation of scholars of Kuhnian work to reassess his complex place in the historiography of science with the necessary detachment. That future task will enlighten us more clearly not only as to why Kuhn has been placed in the pantheon of authors who shaped twentieth-century thought but also why, paradoxically, we continue to be Kuhnians beyond Kuhn’s work. Thus, the Kuhnian roots of our historiographical culture make it difficult for us to analyze Kuhn with the necessary impartiality. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Cupani inquired: would Kuhn’s book be a “classic”? (Cupani 2013, 13). Unquestionably, Kuhn has become a classic author, but it seems that we still do not know what kind of classic he is. Is he a classic author because he still contains, in his vein of thought, ideas and possibilities to be explored and deepened, or just because we cannot historically get around his work? In other words, could it be that we still have a lot to learn from him or, no matter how far his philosophy has reached, in a more historical tone, has it already been circumscribed to the “paradigm” of the twentieth century? Admittedly, some notable books of post-Kuhnian historiography of science (Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Daston and Galison 2007) have avoided direct references to Kuhn’s thought, thereby committing a kind of parricide. However, that absence, deliberate or otherwise, of Kuhnian historiography among the candidates for new classics does not seem to have made our culture any less Kuhnian. On the contrary, beyond Kuhn’s work, the scientific imagination still has strong Kuhnian

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references. We are unlikely to stop seeing science this way completely, even if we express that desire by abandoning concepts like paradigm or scientific revolution. This central feature of the Kuhnian influence meshes with the idea of a social history of science intensely practiced since the 1960s, namely, Kuhn’s work firmly imprinted a social aspect on the history of science. Indeed, this emphasis on the social aspect had already appeared in the work of several earlier historians of science (Zilsel, Fleck, Hessen, Merton, etc.). However, Kuhn became perhaps the most outstanding spokesman for this current to the point that he had difficulty differentiating himself from the social image of science he helped to create. Thus, ironically, he claimed he was an internalist (Kuhn 2000, 287), which is to say that his main concerns were with the history of scientific ideas and not with their social impacts. In this chapter, we seek to delineate the Kuhnian atmosphere that has marked the historiography of science in the last six decades. The aim is to outline the ideas, concepts, and conceptions that shaped Kuhn’s work and, above all, to provide an overview of his thought in the context of the twentieth-century historiography of science. We endeavor to highlight Kuhn’s tremendous impact on the history of science, but, at the same time, try to show that his strong influence ended up being fragmented. This emphasis on the historical and social conception in scientific knowledge present in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was the aspect of his work that had the most significant impact and is still taken today as synonymous with a Kuhnian approach to science. However, beyond his social and historical defense of scientific activity, Kuhn was a pioneer on many fronts. Perhaps, he was one of the few, or even the only one, who connected central elements of the historiography of science, such as the importance of the “social” aspects, the “evolutionary” conception of knowledge, and the decisive role of “language” in the construction of scientific knowledge. Although these elements appeared separately in the work of different authors throughout the twentieth century, in the development of his thought, Kuhn articulated them for a broader and more systematic understanding of the history of science. The author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions gradually realized that the history of science should value the social aspects and incorporate an evolutionist perspective of the production processes of scientific knowledge, besides valuing language, for an adequate historical understanding of the construction of science. The social perspective present in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions characterized Kuhn’s significant influence on the historiography of science, and the reception of his biological and linguistic turns, presented in works with a less didactic tone than Kuhn’s classic book, were eclipsed or, at least, were read in a fragmented way. As a result, historians of science have only partially adopted the three critical aspects (social, biological, and linguistics) that Kuhn addressed throughout his work. By preparing a new book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development (Kuhn 2000, 92, 94, 97, 106), Kuhn promised to articulate those aspects better. After many years of waiting, when writing this chapter in November 2022, Kuhn’s book was launched. We eagerly look forward to analyzing the book in detail, hoping it can clarify important points in Kuhn’s historiography. However, the book published is not exactly the promised one but part of it with other

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essays and now with the title The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn (Kuhn 2022). A first analysis suggests that Kuhn only partially articulated the social, biological, and linguistic tenets of his theory of science in his last writings, although he did go a step further. Perhaps he needed more time to adjust these tenets; unfortunately, his death intervened. Kuhn’s later writings need time to find their critical reception. As time counts in philosophy, detailed analysis at this moment is impossible. With his last published writings, we will undoubtedly have a better critical vision of Kuhn’s work in a few years. This character of a work in progress until the last days of his life has also led historians of science to assimilate Kuhn in a fragmented way. They have emphasized the social aspects in sciences but only considered, to a far lesser extent, the linguistic elements and the evolutionary perspective presented in Kuhn’s late work. Thus, in a way, Kuhn has socially guided our reading of the historiography of science. An example of that is when Kuhn highlighted the social aspects of Fleck’s work but did not embrace the idea of evolution, fundamental in the Polish thinker’s work (Kuhn 1962 [1970b], vii). Thus, readers of Fleck’s work, conditioned by the Kuhnian sociological interpretation, have also ignored this important aspect of biology and medicine both in Fleck’s work and in the historiography of science, later assumed as a central point by Kuhn himself. We can see this Kuhnian social diapason in essential readers of Fleck’s book. To name a few, Latour (1996 [1979], 16–17), Bloor (1983, 34–46), and Shapin and Schaffer (1985, 16) made explicit references to Fleck as a pioneer of the historical and social understanding of science, as pointed out by Kuhn, but made no remarks about the importance of the biological matrix used by the Polish thinker. Instead, they perform a Kuhnian interpretation of the historiography of science. Finally, no matter how much impact it has caused, unfortunately, Kuhn’s work has not found a systematicity that could provide us with a more holistic reading of the production of scientific knowledge as a whole. Perhaps, for not having completed his new book with the final design he intended for his work, the American historian and philosopher of science was not able to organically and systematically articulate the three perspectives (social, evolution, language) in his understanding of the history of science. Nevertheless, in Kuhn’s influence on the history of science, his perception of these three perspectives is one of his great legacies. So, perhaps before we stop being Kuhnian, we should become more Kuhnian by exploring those aspects of his thought that remained indicative of his final work. To gain an understanding of Kuhn’s work, we will divide this chapter into three sections. In the first, the objective is to address the main concepts in Kuhn’s masterpiece, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Then, in the next section, we will discuss the celebrated debate between Kuhn and Popper. We argue that this debate was, more than the opposition between two authors, the opposition between two different ways of seeing science, characterized, on the one hand, by Popper’s philosophy of science as the most expressive model in the context of the 1960s and, on the other hand, Kuhn’s new historical proposal. In the third section, we will confront Kuhn with the sociological thinking on science characterized by the so-called Strong Program. Whereas in the first three sections, we will be addressing

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the path opened by Kuhn in his critical dialogue with philosophy and sociology, the final section will address some central aspects of the Kuhnian legacy. We will base it on the Kuhnian idea that for an adequate understanding of science and its history, we need to see science as a social product, in an analogy (not identity) with the idea of evolution and also realize that language is a vital tool for the codification of scientific practices. Even though Kuhn did not fully establish the articulation of these three guidelines, it has become an essential Kuhnian heritage to be followed by the historiography of science.

Paradigms, Scientific Revolutions, and Incommensurability Initially published in 1962, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most unique and impactful books of the twentieth century. With it, Kuhn made an extraordinary contribution to understanding how science works. Nevertheless, unlike other great epistemologists and historians of science, Kuhn’s importance for contemporary thought went far beyond philosophy and the history of science. He had significant influence in almost all areas of knowledge and even in people’s everyday lives when they go around making their “paradigm shifts” without even knowing that paradigm is a concept forged by the North American thinker. As a result, Kuhn’s book became the most fantastic academic best seller of all time. By the end of the twentieth century, it had sold more than a million copies and been translated into more than 20 languages. At the turn of the century, it also ranked absolute in lists of the most influential books in the formation of the twentieth century. Besides his great importance for epistemology, Kuhn was relevant not only in the theoretical and methodological development of the discipline history of science but also in structuring this field of research. He acted in and led groups to form programs, research centers, and associations to develop that plural and diverse field of knowledge called the history of science. Kuhn’s effective contribution of the perception that science must be understood in its historical and sociological aspects, in addition to its philosophical ones, had repercussions in different places around the world. For the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the development of science is not like a continuous “evolution,” but, on the contrary, presents moments of “revolutions” in which the old knowledge is questioned and a new one emerges. In these moments, the way of understanding nature and the consequent actions of scientists are entirely changed. In Kuhnian vocabulary, “scientific revolutions” constitute “paradigm shifts.” A paradigm is thus a set of values and practices that govern the scientific community’s behavior (although as many have noted, that is a circular definition: the scientific community generates its paradigm, which in turn governs its behavior). To emphasize the paradigm is to affirm knowledge’s social or collective features. Even a scientific practice, apparently isolated, only makes sense if it harmonizes with the practices of the scientific community as a whole, in which it is inserted. The scientific community faces all its problems from the viewpoint of its paradigm. In the

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training process, scientists are instructed in the tradition of a paradigm. Considering this point, Kuhn emphasizes the importance of scientific textbooks (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 136–137) in forming and training scientists to belong to a paradigm. However, every so often, problems arise whose solution escapes the scope of the current paradigm. Even if “numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications” (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 78) are sought, this constitutes a moment of crisis in science until a new paradigm emerges, bringing not only the solution to the problem faced but a new perspective for dealing with future problems. In other words, the new paradigm completely changes the scientist’s worldview. Also, according to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the new theories and practices in the new understanding of nature become “incommensurable” (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 4, 112, 200) with the previous paradigm. As the episode of the rise of modern science exemplifies, the new heliocentric theory is incommensurable with the geocentric one. Likewise, the understanding of the world after Copernicus is incommensurable with the understanding of the pre-Copernican world (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 69, 200). They are totally different paradigms. When published in 1962, Kuhn’s book managed, in a sense, to “appease” the conflict over the understanding of the functioning of science that existed until then between two antagonistic groups, the “externalists” and the “internalists.” On the one hand, the externalist group was formed by sociologists and historians of science with a social perspective who affirmed the determination of the social in the construction of scientific knowledge, and, on the other hand, the internalists were made up of philosophers and scientists who regarded the social as something secondary in the production of scientific knowledge. Those groups can be further divided by the dichotomy formulated by the logical empiricist philosopher Hans Reichenbach (1938), who separated “the context of discovery” from “the context of justification” of knowledge. Thus, for the sociology of knowledge (of authors such as Mannheim and Durkheim), knowledge would essentially be a product of the social. However, for the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle, even if social aspects could influence the “discoveries” of new scientific facts and theories, ultimately, they would only be legitimized by the “justifications” of science itself, independent of social contexts. In a sense, Reichenbach’s dichotomy silenced the sociology of knowledge as a possible approach to sciences. Thus, it seemed that if religion, art, politics, and culture are shaped by the social context, science, as a discourse on nature, would never surrender to the social. Instead, the objectivity of natural laws would sovereignly impose itself on the social. Even though he could not exactly solve that impasse, Kuhn changed the course of the debate by showing that what the scientist perceives (gestalt) of nature, his worldview, is entirely conditioned by the scientific community. This is because the scientist only sees the world within the paradigm forged by the scientific community. No matter how “objectively” science criteria are established, they will always be created from the scientific community and, thus, socially conditioned. In a sense, Kuhn always sought a balance between nature and the social. However, this was not the understanding of many of his followers. Some radicalized these social aspects in understanding science, leading scientific knowledge to relativism. Defending

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himself from that position, if it were true, Kuhn pronounced, “I am not a Kuhnian” (Dyson 1999, 16) (I owe this reference to my friend Eduardo Barra (Barra 2013, 71).). In the 30 years that followed the publication of his seminal book, Kuhn reevaluated the problems, limits, and impasses of his theory of science, and, although he never completed a second definitive version, he left numerous hints as to what this new theory would be, built on an evolutionist perspective, in which nature and culture balance each other. However, judging by the erudition and refinement of the writings that Kuhn left on the road to his new understanding of science, even if he had finished his new theory, it would hardly have achieved the impact of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Thus, one cannot forget that it was the didactic and pedagogical character of his famous book that brought the understanding of science to thousands of people. Indeed, with its achievements and mistakes, as Kuhn himself acknowledged, this 1962 book is still a must-read for all those interested in science, technology, and their tremendous impact on society. Furthermore, we do not need to be reminded that we live in an eminently scientific and technological society. Consequently, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has undoubtedly become a book that is part of the library of Western culture. Coming from a background in physics, when Kuhn started his career in the history of science, the debate between internalism and externalism aforementioned was the central problem in the historiography of science. In his 1968 article “The History of Science” for the International Encyclopedia of Social Science, reprinted in (Kuhn 1977, 105–126), he devoted many of his reflections to addressing this question. In a way, the internalism versus externalism debate had already paved the way for Kuhn, who believed in the complementarity of the two positions. Some years before that article, he had sought to reconcile those two approaches in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Moreover, his approach had somehow managed to respond to the interests of both sides of the debate. Although, on the one hand, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a significant reference for the development of social approaches to science, on the other hand, it also pleased scientists, historians of science with an internalist orientation, and even logical empiricist philosophers. According to Kuhn, Koyré was a reader of his 1962 book shortly before he died. The Russian-French historian of science sent him a letter praising the book and saying that he had succeeded in bringing together the internal and external history of science that had been separated (Kuhn 2000, 286). Carnap, perhaps the primary reference of logical empiricism, was enthusiastic about Kuhn’s book, of which he was the referee, precisely for a publication organized by the logical empiricism movement on North American soil. The ironic thing is that Kuhn’s book, with conceptions contrary to the Vienna Circle ideal, was the second volume of the logical empiricist project of the encyclopedia of unified science. Although Kuhn’s masterpiece was not the first to attempt more than a mere methodological junction, but an epistemological connection between these two understandings of the functioning of science, the impact of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was extraordinary and, consequently, it became the book that most

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spread the idea that science has a history. Certainly, Kuhn’s task was not easy in a scenario where internalist and externalist approaches did not intersect. If, on the one hand, knowledge was understood as a social product that allowed us to make “discoveries” of new scientific facts, on the other hand, these discoveries were ultimately legitimized only by the scientific “justifications,” that is, by scientific theories, experiments, and methodologies, and entirely independently of social contexts. Thus, “the context of discovery” versus “the context of justification” of knowledge seemed to impose a strict epistemological division between the two historiographical traditions of science. As mentioned above, while religion, art, politics, and culture could be shaped by the social context, it seemed that science, as a discourse on nature, would never surrender to the social. The objectivity of natural laws would sovereignly impose itself on the social, and the historian of science could never escape that reality. However, Kuhn was to demonstrate that this distinction is not so clear-cut when we seek a more detailed picture of how science works. A detailed explanation of how the production of scientific knowledge works seemed to him to be obliged to consider the strong connection between the two sides of that division, even if the difficulty of the task of moving between these two poles left a certain air of confusion. Kuhn states at the beginning of his book, many of my generalizations are about the sociology or social psychology of scientists; yet at least a few of my conclusions belong traditionally to logic or epistemology. (. . .) I may even seem to have violated the very influential contemporary distinction between “the context of discovery” and “the context of justification”. Can anything more than profound confusion be indicated by this admixture of diverse fields and concerns? (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 8–9)

Some saw Kuhn’s position as an inaccuracy or even as a lack of strict demarcation between the scientific and the unscientific. Establishing “demarcation criteria” was an essential point for the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle and later for Popper. If, on the one hand, Kuhn’s book was a strong impetus for the growth of externalist or social approaches to science, on the other hand, Kuhn was to declare that he never really produced an external history – even though he was concerned with this internalism versus externalism discussion (Kuhn 2000, 288). Rather than showing ambiguity, Kuhn’s effort was to demonstrate the shifting nature of the boundary between internalism and externalism and the need to consider both sides. Although the “conciliation” proposed by Kuhn has not exactly managed to solve this impasse as a whole, he changed the course of the debate when he demonstrated that the scientist’s perception (gestalt) of nature, that is, his worldview, is conditioned by the scientific community. In effect, no matter how “objectively” scientific criteria are established, they will always be created from the scientific community and, thus, socially conditioned since this community is a social group inserted in society. Moreover, for Kuhn, the exact limit of this separation between what is social and what is scientific is uncertain. Even without solving the internalism versus externalism debate in all its dimensions, Kuhn found fertile ground for affirming the historical dimension of science in this problem. If, until then, these two traditions had not been connected, from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on, the possibility of bringing them closer together emerged. Kuhn thus stressed the aim

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of his book “a sketch of the quite different concept of science that can emerge from the historical record of the research activity itself” (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 1). With that, he emblematically presented “a role for history” in understanding science, thus imposing the idea that science is necessarily a historical and social activity. In other words, with the tremendous impact that Kuhn’s book achieved, not only would science be seen as a historical activity, but that history would be considered fundamental in understanding science itself. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a book consisting of a preface, 13 chapters, and the critical postscript signed in 1969 for the second edition of 1970. In the way pointed out by Fleck on the “sociology of the scientific community” (Kuhn 1970b [1962], viii–ix), Kuhn starts from the idea that science is an enterprise produced not by a solitary scientist but essentially by a “scientific community.” This community’s scientific ideas and practices characterize what he called a paradigm. Paradigms are “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners” (Kuhn 1970b [1962], viii). This is one paradigm definition, but Kuhn recognized that, throughout his book, several others were presented, making the concept polysemic. (For a critique of this polysemy, see Masterman (1970)). In his postscript, Kuhn was to rework the concept of paradigm by reducing it to two main categories : (1) sociological and (2) exemplary realizations (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 175). However, Kuhn came to be dissatisfied with his notion of paradigm, even when reconsidered, and later replaced it with the notion of the lexicon. Qualitative changes and scientific developments occur when scientists can no longer accommodate new phenomena to the current paradigm; they can no longer explain them, predict them, quantify them, or relate them to previously known phenomena. In a complex process, old scientific ideas, practices, and theories are replaced by others that are adequate and effective in solving the newly presented problem (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 92). When only new proposals outside the current paradigm can solve the new problems in science, then that is what Kuhn characterizes as a “scientific revolution” or “paradigm shift.” He exemplifies it using the history of physics but extends it to the other sciences too. “These transformations of the paradigms of physical optics are scientific revolutions, and the successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science” (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 12). After the paradigm shift, the scientist has an entirely new perspective from which to view the scientific problem: “after a revolution, scientists are responding to a different world” (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 111). Already within the new paradigm, all scientific problems are analyzed and solved by this new paradigm or the scientist’s new gestalt. Once the revolution has been consolidated, from the perception (gestalt) made possible by the installed paradigm, there follows what Kuhn calls “normal science,” in which all problems are treated thoroughly as the resolution of puzzles. Thus, the paradigmatic rules and principles preestablished by the paradigm are used to solve the problems presented by nature. In the same way that we cannot cut a piece of a puzzle to force it to fit together, we cannot subvert the paradigm rule to solve the puzzle imposed by nature. This process continues until new problems,

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puzzles not solved by the current paradigm, rechallenge this paradigm, and there is another scientific revolution or paradigm shift. Therefore, for Kuhn, the roadmap for the development of science is as follows: science always operates within a paradigm; once the possibilities of this paradigm to solve new problems are exhausted by the work of normal science, there is a moment of crisis that leads to the rise of new ideas contrary to the current paradigm; there is competition among divergent theories, and finally, one proves to be more effective, leading to a revolution and the consequent abandonment of the old theory. The consummation of this revolution characterizes a paradigm shift or scientific revolution. Thus, a new paradigm emerges. More than that, the scientific revolution shows how paradigms operate in “different worlds,” leading Kuhn to point out the “incommensurability” between different paradigms (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 112). This last concept was to bring many problems for Kuhn since, for many, incommensurability would come to be understood as synonymous with relativism since each community perceives the world in its own way, through the specific lens of its own paradigm (The notion of incommensurability also embraced other aspects, such as methodological and semantic incommensurability. Kuhn never entirely abandoned this notion and began to focus his position on the semantic dimension. Years after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he was to qualify it as local incommensurability, stating that “the claim that two theories are incommensurable is more modest than many of its critics have supposed” (Kuhn 2000, 36).). In the 30 years that followed the publication of his seminal book, Kuhn not only responded to the criticism of being a relativist but reevaluated the limits and impasses faced by his theory of science and sought to create a new theory that would satisfactorily answer all the problems that arose with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Although he never completed a definitive second version, he left numerous hints as to what this new theory would be, namely, built from an “evolutionist” perspective, in which nature and culture balance each other. However, considering the erudition and refinement of his later writings, even if Kuhn had finalized his new theory, it would hardly have achieved the impact of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That is because his masterpiece has a didactic and pedagogical character that presents an understanding of the behavior of science readily accessible to thousands of people, thus making the idea of “a role for history” effective in understanding science.

History Versus Philosophy: The Debate Between Kuhn and Popper By addressing a central theme such as science with good ideas, didactic clarity, and much argumentative force, among other factors, Kuhn’s book had an extraordinary impact. In highlighting the importance of history for the adequate understanding of science, Kuhn not only leveraged the development of social approaches to science but drew the attention of epistemologies opposed to his historical conception of science. As a result, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions soon became polarized

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with the central epistemological perspective of that context of the 1960s. The latter was represented not exactly by an internalist conception of the history of science but rather by a philosophy of science uncommitted to the idea that social and historical assumptions were determinant in the understanding of science: the epistemology of Sir Karl Popper. In 1959, three years before Kuhn’s book appeared, the translation into English of the monumental work The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Logik der Forschung), published in 1935 by the eminent Austrian thinker Karl Popper, then living in England, was made public. Coming from the Vienna Circle movement, Popper became a dissident, proposing “critical rationalism” as an alternative epistemology to logical empiricism. However, from that empiricist tradition, Popper inherited the problem of the demarcation between science and non-science as advocated in the general orientation of the logical empiricism movement and stipulated by Reichenbach’s separation between “the context of discovery” and “the context of justification.” Opposed to Kuhn’s historical approach, the author of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, albeit a dissident, was still much closer to the empiricist and rationalist traditions for which historical aspects would be secondary in understanding science. Thus, the debate that took place between Kuhn’s history of science and Popper’s philosophy of science was, to some extent, a continuation of the internalism versus externalism debate in science. In that sense, the opposition between Kuhn and Popper should be understood much more as the confrontation between two research traditions than between the philosophies of two singular authors. For Popper’s critical rationalism, the main goal of science should be to solve genuine problems and not “solve puzzles,” as proposed by Kuhn. For the Austrian philosopher, scientific knowledge advances through the problems presented and the attempts to solve them. Unlike the Vienna Circle viewpoint, which affirmed the positivity of facts as a parameter in the construction of knowledge, Popper is against the primacy of pure observation. According to his philosophy, science is not built directly from the raw data of observation, and the very theories from which we observe the facts, the primacy of theory, are selective. However, despite being a dissident of the Vienna Circle, the understanding of the hegemony of theory over facts never led Popper to a strong appreciation of social practices in constructing knowledge. For Popperian critical rationalism, historical and social aspects are important for understanding science, but a good epistemology should avoid both the relativism of the institutionalization of knowledge and the dogmatism of traditional epistemologies that postulate an ultimate foundation in experience. In effect, for Popper, a requalification of what we mean by experience becomes necessary since we cannot naively affirm the basis of knowledge from empirical data. To that end, the Austrian philosopher analyzes the experimental method and its inductive logic. He accepts David Hume’s criticism of induction, but instead of being skeptical about the real possibilities of induction, he replaces induction with the idea of “falsifiability.” As Popper puts it, “in my view, there is no such thing as induction. Thus, inferences to theories, from singular statements which are ‘verified by experience’ (whatever that may mean) is logically inadmissible. Theories are,

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therefore, never empirically verifiable” (Popper 1992 [1935], 18). Abandoning the criterion of empirical verification adopted by the Vienna Circle as a fundamental parameter, Popper proposes that a theory should be considered scientific only if it is refutable by certain events. Therefore, the primary procedure in science would not be the empirical verification of a theory. Effectively, we test a scientific theory only when we try to disprove or falsify it. A counterexample falsifies a theory. If a theory never allows itself to be falsified, then it is not scientific (examples: psychoanalysis, Marxism). The Austrian thinker concludes that to know what is science and what is not, then not “the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation” (Popper 1992 [1935], 18). Kuhn observes the Popperian restriction on the idea of verification and criticizes the concept of falsifiability proposed by the author of The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The American thinker contrasts Popperian thought with the proposal presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: A very different approach to this whole network of problems has been developed by Karl R. Popper who denies the existence of any verification procedures at all (Popper 1959, esp. chaps., i–iv). Instead, he emphasizes the importance of falsification, i.e., of the test that, because its outcome is negative, necessitates the rejection of an established theory. Clearly, the role thus attributed to falsification is much like the one this essay assigns to anomalous experiences, i.e., to experiences that, by evoking crisis, prepare the way for a new theory. Nevertheless, anomalous experiences may not be identified with falsifying ones. Indeed, I doubt that the latter exist. (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 146)

However, the opposition between Kuhn’s and Popper’s ideas was due much more to what each represented in their respective traditions than to this very pointed criticism of Popperian philosophy. To contrast these two traditions, Popper’s collaborators organized a symposium with the presence of both eminent thinkers. At the time, Popper, at 63, in full intellectual maturity, was the leading philosopher of science of the twentieth century. Kuhn, at 43, had recently been launched to notoriety with the grand scope of his book. After many negotiations, the symposium took place, in 1965, in London. A few years later, the symposium was published as a book entitled Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. The book contained the different contributions of those present at the symposium and of guests who could not attend the event, as well as Kuhn’s responses to his critics (Feyerabend, Musgrave 1970) (Besides this book, there are different theoretical reconstructions of this debate, for example: (Bloor 1976), (Hacking 1983), (Fuller 2004), and (Gattei 2008).). The purpose here is not to conduct a detailed approach to each argument of the two sides of the debate but to show the general lines of those antagonistic traditions: the Kuhnian perspective that affirms the historicity of science, on the one hand, and the Popperian perspective that opposes the acceptance of historical factors as determinants in the construction of science, on the other hand. Even if we were to try to counter each argument of the two traditions or the two paradigms, to use a Kuhnian expression, we might not be very successful because, as Kuhn stated when referring to Popper’s work, “our intentions are often quite different when we say the

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same thing. (. . .) I call what separates us a gestalt switch rather than a disagreement” (Kuhn 1970a, 3). Like Popper’s philosophy, Kuhn’s history of science was opposed to empiricism. However, more than correcting empiricism, for many, the perspective brought by Kuhn represented a historical “revolt” against the empiricism of the philosophy of science of the first decades of the twentieth century, especially the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle in which the preponderant affirmation of empirical and rational criteria in the understanding of science occupied a central place. In the opposite direction to empiricism, the epistemology underlying Kuhn’s book showed, among other things, that empirical data could no longer constitute the ultimate foundation of scientific knowledge. Our gaze on the object is contaminated with subjectivity (gestalt). There is no way to apprehend this object purely, free from extrascientific values. Consequently, going far beyond what Popper was willing to assume, for Kuhn, different scientific communities (subjectivities) or historical periods would apprehend different “objectivities” when looking at the same object thereby characterizing the historicity of science. The theory built within the scientific community would speak louder than the facts since the facts are only read by the community. The “truth” would be tributary to historicity; empirical data could no longer be understood as absolute regulators of scientific knowledge. By radicalizing his positions, according to Popper, Kuhn practiced a historical relativism that, after all, was the traditional thesis of relativism. For the Austrian thinker, using the paradigm’s lens to see the world meant accepting the myth of the framework. Insisting on the incommensurability between paradigms, for Popper, “simply exaggerates a difficulty into an impossibility” (Popper 1970, 56) since “a comparison of the competing theories, of the competing frameworks, is always possible” (Popper 1970, 57). Kuhn responded to Popper’s criticism of relativism by bringing in the idea of the tree of evolution, with which he made an analogy of knowledge to biology. Kuhn observes: scientific development is, like biological, a unidirectional and irreversible process. Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist’s position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress. (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 206)

However much he attributed value to social and historical aspects, Popper never accepted them as determinants in the construction of scientific knowledge. In turn, Kuhn’s theoretical framework was to lose much of its explanatory power without the affirmation of the role of history in the construction of scientific knowledge. That theoretical place from which each author spoke seemed, thus, to corroborate the Kuhnian idea of different paradigms, or, as Kuhn himself pointed out when referring to Popper’s work, a distancing due to the existence of different perceptions (gestalt). Moreover, it would be difficult for one side to convince the other, even if many analyses and persuasive arguments were accumulated. Finally, it seems that Kuhn’s idea that “the competition between paradigms is

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not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs” prevailed in this debate (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 148).

History Versus Sociology: Kuhn and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge To what extent could science be a social construction since nature plays a central role in our knowledge about what nature is? In other words, unlike other social constructions such as art, politics, and religion, would not nature have the function of imposing limits on the false representations (hypotheses and theories) we make of it? If this is true, our representations of nature would depend much more on nature than the social arrangements, ideas, and expectations we have of it as social beings. By demarcating the historical and social aspects, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ended up being the turning point of an entire generation that sought to emphasize the social issues present in the understanding of science. It would seem that the strong influence of the notion of paradigm as a model guiding the scientific practices of a scientific community enabled the significant development of the social constructivist approaches to science. More than that, the consideration that different scientific paradigms are incommensurable led these socio-constructivist readings to scientific relativism. From the socio-constructivist perspective, the critical thing came to be to focus not on the aspects of nature but precisely on the social practices of scientific knowledge production, which, ultimately, would be equivalent to other social practices (politics, religion, and art) and, therefore, subject to the same social agreements or “negotiations.” Understanding theories and experiments would take a back seat to the centrality of the social and political weave involved in producing scientific knowledge. Not that nature itself would no longer be essential for science, but since these social aspects could drive the directions of science, despite the importance of nature, they would be central to science. Although Kuhn inspired these currents, he did not agree with many of their aspects. Indeed, he recognized the importance of this social dimension in the “negotiation” of science but never accepted affirming it to the detriment of essential aspects such as theories, experiments, and the role of nature. Thus, he criticized these approaches, based on the understanding that they radicalized the positions defended in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, often did not give due consideration to the role of nature and, consequently, led to relativism. In a lengthy interview and in three other texts, later republished, in 2000, in the book The Road since Structure, Kuhn reassessed these socio-constructivist positions. While, in the 1960s, Kuhn’s ideas must have caused some discomfort for the Popperian approach by bringing in a historical view of science that was interpreted as relativist, in the 1990s, it was Kuhn who tried to curb his ideas towards relativism. However, for him, if his work generated extreme socio-constructivist interpretations, then it was necessary to reevaluate his course to correct such excesses. Just as there were common elements between Popper and Kuhn (Kuhn 1970a, 1–2), there was also something in common between Kuhn and the socio-

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constructivist interpretation. However, it was necessary, according to the American thinker, to reassess the differences that remained in the way of understanding this “social construction of science.” Instead of trying, for example, to redo experiments and reevaluate conceptual analyses and the logic of arguments, according to Kuhn, historians and sociologists of science focused too much on their analyses of negotiation practices, the social construction of scientific consensus, and the diffusion of interpretations of science. In Kuhn’s view, this great valorization of negotiations seems to have been a peculiar phenomenon of the generation that succeeded him, when the reflection on social aspects, the criticism of authorities, and the perception of negotiation processes in all social spheres and also in the sciences were extreme. Our author reports that, those are the questions central to the work of the generation that followed mine, and the principal contribution to them have come not from philosophy but from a new kind of historical and, more specially, of sociological studies to which the work of mine generation helped give rise. These studies have dealt, in microscope detail, with the processes within a scientific community or group from which an authoritative consensus finally emerges, a process this literature often refers to as “negotiation.” (Kuhn 2000, 109)

For Kuhn, assigning a role to issues of interest and power should not be the priority or exclusivity of the history of science. Even if negotiations, authority, and power could play essential roles in the production of science, these factors cannot obscure our understanding of the fundamental behavior of nature. This criticism of Kuhn could apply to many contemporary authors who have dealt with science adopting this social approach, but he specifically turned against the “Strong Program of the sociology of scientific knowledge” and its conception of “negotiation” in science. David Bloor elaborated on the so-called Strong Program in his 1976 book Social Imaginary and Knowledge (Bloor outlined his program a few years earlier in the 1973 article, “Wittgenstein and Mannheim on the Sociology of Mathematics.”). In the scenario opened by the ideas present in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the Strong Program, with its principles (causal; impartial; symmetrical; and reflexive), sought a new approach to the sociology of scientific knowledge that would move beyond the “sociology of knowledge” of authors such as Mannheim and Durkheim (Bloor 2008 [1976], 21). For Mannheim, our knowledge of the world is socially structured. We know what our social insertion allows us to know. If knowledge is something collective and social, we see the world through the eyes of the social institutions of religion, art, and politics. However, in the face of the natural sciences and mathematics, Mannheim eventually curbed the use of the sociology of knowledge. Bloor’s Strong Program aims to extend the sociology of knowledge to science, that is, to realize a “sociology of scientific knowledge.” It was necessary to go beyond Mannheim, who could not incorporate mathematics and the natural sciences as a legitimate object of the sociology of knowledge. Nature and its laws imposed themselves on the sociology of knowledge that interdicted their use for understanding scientific knowledge.

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Bloor understands that the later work of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), in particular his philosophy of mathematics that proposes a social understanding of how mathematics works, brought the understanding that the sociology of knowledge lacked to make science an object of sociological considerations. Wittgenstein has (. . .) taken the basic arithmetical process of using a formula and shown a necessity of embedding it in standardized social practice. The crucial terms are sociological: “the way we always use it”, “the way we are taught to use it”. This means that, from this perspective, every instance of the use of a formula is the culmination of a process of socialization. Every communication involving a formula stands witness to the existence of a custom, a particular social practice. (Bloor 1973, 184)

In effect, for Bloor, starting from Wittgenstein, we can find elements to perform sociology of scientific knowledge, besides artistic, political, and religious knowledge. Thus, all these forms of knowledge would be on the same level since “knowledge for the sociologist is whatever people take to be knowledge” (Bloor 1991 [1976], 5). Here we see the social and collective character of the Strong Program’s idea of knowledge. Just as for Kuhn, knowledge, for Bloor, is not something abstract in an individual’s head but is shared institutionally by a group of people with their ideas, beliefs, and practices. With the valorization of these social aspects in the construction of scientific knowledge, Bloor, like Popper and Kuhn, also performs a criticism of empiricism. For example, a theory of knowledge based on empiricism, as logical empiricism intended, would be impossible for Bloor. Admittedly, an empiricist theory “provides some of the bricks but is silent on the designs of the varying edifices that we build with them” (Bloor 1991 [1976], 16). In assessing the processes of knowledge production as a whole, we conclude that it “is better equated with Culture than Experience” (Bloor 1991 [1976], 16). Therefore, for Bloor, just as Kuhn taught, we cannot deny that there is a social component to knowledge, but unlike Kuhn, for the Strong Program, even though the social is not everything in the production of knowledge since one must rely on the “bricks” provided by nature, the social will direct this process of knowledge construction. Bloor asks us, “does the acceptance of a theory by a social group make it true? The only answer that can be given is that it does not” (Bloor 1991 [1976], 43). There is no necessary connection between a group’s belief and the truth of that belief. We can believe false premises. However, regardless of the truth of this knowledge, once it becomes a belief, for Bloor, it guides the group’s worldview. Bloor continues, “does the acceptance of a theory make it the knowledge of a group, or does it make it the basis for their understanding and their adaptation to the world? – the answer can only be positive” (Bloor 1991 [1976], 43). In short, for the Strong Program, we see the world radically through the social lens, making any negotiation extremely important in determining our knowledge about the world. Since the knowledge of a group, or Kuhnian paradigms, is circumscribed by its own institutional rules, and for the Strong Program, such rules are determinative in the constitution of knowledge, this ultimately characterizes a relativistic perspective.

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The work written with a Strong Program orientation that attracted Kuhn’s criticism was the book, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life by Shapin and Schaffer. This book is very significant, not only because it was the target of Kuhn’s criticism but because of its extraordinary scope, becoming, as it did, one of the classics of the historiography of science. In it, the authors address the quarrel between philosopher Thomas Hobbes and chemist Robert Boyle over whether or not a vacuum exists. In his criticism of the Strong Program, Kuhn claims that to demonstrate the theory of negotiation in science, its authors do not adequately explore those methodological and experimental aspects possible in the seventeenthcentury context and that would have been very important in guiding the discussions between Hobbes and Boyle about the existence or nonexistence of the vacuum (Kuhn 2000, 316–317). Here is the core of Kuhn’s criticism of the Strong Program. Nature itself, whatever that may be, has seemed to have no part in development of beliefs about it. Talk of evidence, of the rationality of claims drawn from it, and of the truth or probability of those claims has been seen as simply the rhetoric behind which the victorious party cloaks its power. What passes for scientific knowledge becomes, then, simply the belief of the winner. I am among those who have found the claims of the Strong Program absurd: an example of deconstruction gone mad. And the more qualified sociological and historical formulations that currently strive to replace it are, in my view, scarcely more satisfactory. These newer formulations freely acknowledge that observation of nature does play a role in scientific development. But they remain almost totally uninformative about that role – about the way, that is, in which nature enters the negotiation that produces beliefs about it. (Kuhn 2000, 110)

While Kuhn acknowledged the significant contributions of this book, he particularly criticized Shapin and Schaffer’s ignorance or lack of interest in certain scientific aspects of Boyle’s understanding of air pressure. After observing that Boyle refers to pressure, sometimes as pressure and sometimes as air spring, and seeing inconsistency in this alternation, Shapin and Schaffer make this alternation an example of how the debate with Hobbes was somehow empty, namely, much more rhetorical than properly scientific. For Kuhn, the authors did not consider that, when dealing with air, Boyle used the hydrostatic model; if they had made this observation, according to Kuhn, they would have seen that this alternation in the treatment of the question had nothing incompatible or inconsistent about it from a scientific point of view. In effect, Kuhn reassesses the need for an adequate understanding of scientific aspects by socio-constructivist approaches such as the one proposed by the Strong Program and, in a sense, Kuhn shows the importance of an internalist approach attentive to the technical details of theories and experiments. The American thinker thus seeks to show that, rather than good rhetoric, Boyle had many “rational” reasons to defend his perspective against Hobbes. This kind of inconsistency, for Kuhn, discredits several of the analyses of the new historiography of science (Kuhn 2000, 316). Granted, for Kuhn, there is “negotiation” in science in some cases, but in others, it is just a metaphor, and we should never disregard the role of nature when we make the history of science, even though we have the

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understanding that historical aspects are essential. From his critique, Kuhn does not intend only to point out the errors of these social-constructivist perspectives or to discard them but seeks to understand the difficulties they posed to overcoming such problems. The Strong Program and its descendants have repeatedly been dismissed as uncontrolled expressions of hostility to authority in general and science in particular. For some years I reacted somewhat that way myself. But I now think easy evaluation ignores a real philosophical challenge. There’s a continuous line (or continuous slippery slope) from the inescapable initial observation that underlie microsociological studies to their still entirely unacceptable conclusion. (Kuhn 2000, 111)

In short, what Kuhn is criticizing is not the attribution of the importance of the social, but the radical role of negotiation in science attributed by this school. However, Kuhn recognizes that the difficulty is always the fine line between culture and nature. Faced with the Strong Program, to what extent is Kuhn distinct from Popper in his epistemological concerns? Not necessarily in the results achieved by their different philosophies of science, but in the positioning concerning the role that nature plays in the understanding we have of it from social and historical instances. The notion of nature, for example, plays a more critical role in the development of science than in other social practices, according to Kuhn. Although he does not disregard the role of negotiations, interests, and power in scientific development, Kuhn does not believe that these can entirely replace the notions of evidence, reason, truth, and objectivity. In other terms, the perspective that facts are not discovered but constructed does not mean that they are entirely constructed as a function of the negotiations, interests, and social forces that interact in the scientific enterprise, for there are natural resistances external to such negotiations (nature). In the development of his thought, mainly present in The Road since Structure book that compiles his articles and chapters produced over the 30 years after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn believed that to solve these problems brought about by the Strong Program, he needed to reevaluate his positions and build a new theory of science that would consider some crucial points. For example, besides the affirmation of the (1) historical and social aspects of science, it would be necessary (2) to include biology as a matrix for understanding scientific knowledge because the progress of knowledge is something that takes place in evolutionary terms, (3) and that the role of language is a fundamental factor in understanding the mechanisms of knowledge production.

The Kuhnian Legacy: Historical and Social Aspects, Evolution and Language in the Construction of Science Despite the singular success of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn never denied the problems that his book could not solve. He never accommodated himself to the criticism and difficulties faced by his masterpiece. Kuhn modified some

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concepts (incommensurability, scientific revolution), abandoned others (paradigm, gestalt switch of the scientific community as a whole), and created new ones (lexicon, speciation of knowledge). He did all this to remodel his theory of science in the face of these new criticisms and difficulties. However, these modifications did not seem satisfactory to him, and he sought to create a second theory of science in a book he thought he would be writing (Kuhn 2000, 92, 94, 97, 106), The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Discovery. Unfortunately, his book never came to light during his lifetime. However, as mentioned, it was published in November 2022. Although Kuhn did not finish his book, he indicated what it would be like through the articles, conferences, and book chapters he wrote. So perhaps we could identify clues to this planned book in his last writings. Besides the affirmation of the historical and social approach to science, he emphasizes two essential aspects of his new theory of science: the ideas of evolution and language. For example, we understand the importance of this biological perspective in the evolutionary epistemology he described in his article “The road since Structure.” Regarding language, we realize it occupied his interest progressively until he died in 1996. Kuhn stated in his lengthy 1995 interview, “much of my thoughts these days goes to language” (Kuhn 2000, 259). He expected that his new theory, based on the social dimension, from an evolutionary perspective, and with a refined theory of language, could deal more satisfactorily with the difficulties presented, for example, by the Strong Program. More than his marked influence as a historiographical model in writing the history of science, perhaps the most significant legacy Kuhn has left was his pointing out the guidelines for a new historiographical model to be built. As mentioned above, this model would be based on three pillars: (1) affirming a historical and social approach, (2) incorporating the idea of evolution, and (3) deepening the role of language parameters for finding possible solutions to the new problems raised by the historiography of science. As far as the influence of biology is concerned, this was perhaps the point that Kuhn assimilated least from Ludwik Fleck when writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. We can see that many Kuhnian concepts can find similarities in Fleck (paradigm, the scientific community, normal science, textbooks) (For a comparison between Kuhn and Fleck, see (Condé 2005) (Jarnicki and Greif 2022).), but, in his masterpiece, Kuhn did not explicitly present a biological or, more specifically, evolutionary orientation inspired in models like the one behind Fleck’s book and tradition. Unlike that evolutionary perspective, Kuhn belongs much more to the “revolutionary” tradition inaugurated by Koyré, in which the rise of modern science is seen as a rupture, than to Fleck’s “evolutionary” tradition in which science is an evolution that undergoes “mutations” (Fleck 1979 [1935], 26) in its development. Even though he finished The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by quoting Darwin, Kuhn needed many years to realize the tremendous explanatory power of an epistemological model based on the idea of evolution. In the final pages of his book, he had already considered knowledge as an evolution. As Kuhn remarked, evolution is “a process that moved steadily from primitive beginnings but toward no goal” (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 172). However, although the North American thinker

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still used an analogy between knowledge and biology in the postscript of his book, he took a long time, as he acknowledged (Kuhn 2000, 94–95), to understand that this conception could be effectively extended to an epistemological model (Ironically, Carnap, as referee of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, realized, before Kuhn himself, this possibility of extending the model of evolution to epistemology. See Gattei (2008, 180).). Thus like Fleck, Kuhn finally transposes this idea of evolution into epistemology and understands that his new theory of science should be an “evolutionary theory of knowledge,” as the subtitle of the promised book suggests. Knowledge comes about by a process of speciation (Kuhn 2000, 116) and no longer by paradigm shifts as he previously thought. Regarding the importance given to language in building scientific knowledge, instead of the notion of paradigm, Kuhn, inspired by Wittgenstein (1953), then speaks of a linguistic community. He creates the lexicon concept as the semantic and pragmatic field proper to each specialty of knowledge or each scientific community (or niche, to stay with his new biological reference) (Kuhn 2000, 103). Each new field develops its language through a lexicon that structures its theories and practices. This lexicon is replicated in its departments, associations, and specialized journals. Sharing a particular lexicon forms the basis for conducting and evaluating a group’s research. At the same time, it relieves the group of the need to communicate with others outside the group, maintaining its isolation from members of other specialties. Kuhn’s lexicon theory bears much resemblance to Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language (Wittgenstein 1953). It can be seen in many explicit and implicit uses of Wittgensteinian concepts throughout Kuhn’s texts, such as language game (Kuhn 2000, 100), use (Kuhn 2000, 63, 67), family resemblance (Kuhn 1970b [1962], 45), forms of life (Kuhn 2000, 244–245), and language as a technique. Like Wittgenstein’s notions of grammar and language games, for Kuhn, “to possess a lexicon, a structured vocabulary, is to have access to the varied set of the worlds which that lexicon can be used to describe” (Kuhn 2000, 61). However, different lexicons or worlds are no longer necessarily incommensurable, as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions would have us believe. On the contrary, there can now be partial overlaps between different lexicons, different scientific communities in the same epoch, or between the present and past epochs. In effect, Kuhn asserts the possibility of intertwining these worlds. “Different lexicons, those of different cultures or different historical periods, for example, give access to different sets of possible worlds, largely but never entirely overlapping” (Kuhn 2000, 61). For Kuhn, we could find the mechanism for understanding different worlds through language. Namely, to understand different worlds, it is necessary to understand their lexicons and their possible similarities and differences. “To understand some body of past scientific beliefs, the historian must acquire a lexicon that here and there differs systematically from the one current in his own day” (Kuhn 2000, 58). This perspective would not necessarily lead to relativism since the difference between lexicons would no longer mean that there is no overlap between them. What do exist are varying degrees of linguistic differences.

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Although there are difficulties in understanding different lexicons, this does not mean that understanding them is impossible. Kuhn clarifies that, for example, the proposition “the earth is a planet” (Kuhn 2000, 94) has very different meanings before and after Copernicus, but this does not prevent the historian from understanding this difference. Therefore, what were previously for him revolutions are now changes in the lexicon or differences between the lexicons of different scientific communities. The lexicon of one world is specific to that world and not to another, although there may be overlap with other worlds and their different lexicons. There is a “plurality of possible worlds,” as the title of the promised book suggested. However, according to Kuhn, these changes are not random creations but something structured in the lexicon based on the relationship between language and nature. Language plays a crucial role in our scientific understanding of the world. However, nature is always there, along with language. We can name nature appropriately or not, but this does not diminish its role. Gradually, we create different lexicons to understand it better. In effect, for Kuhn, the development of science, within a field or towards new areas of knowledge, is a process of speciation according to the evolutionary model, and it is accompanied by the change of the language (lexicon) used by a given community to express its way of perceiving nature. Although we can see a Wittgensteinian inspiration in the lexicon concept, there are also important points of divergence between Kuhn’s lexicon and the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. Perhaps, the main difference between the two authors regarding language is Kuhn’s attempt to “categorize” the lexicon. In other words, Kuhn draws a parallel between the lexicon and Kantian categories, even though he makes restrictions on specific aspects of the author’s categories in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kuhn’s categories are not eternal but historically and culturally conditioned. Here, Kuhn adds his linguistic theory of the lexicon to the Darwinian evolutionary orientation of his project for a new theory of science. Putting side by side evolution and lexicon, the American philosopher clarifies his position, The position I’m developing is a sort of post-Darwinian Kantianism. Like the Kantian categories, the lexicon supplies precondition of possible experience. But lexical categories, unlike their Kantian forebears, can and do change, both with time and with the passage from one community to another. (Kuhn 2000, 104)

Nevertheless, Kuhn completely distanced himself from Wittgenstein by further emphasizing his Kantian position, saying that what guarantees the possibility of change among lexicons is some kind of Kantian “thing in itself” (Ding an sich). “Underlying all these processes of differentiation and change, there must, of course, be something permanent, fixed and stable. But, like Kant’s Ding an sich, it is ineffable, indescribable, undiscussable” (Kuhn 2000, 104). However, Kuhn tries to mitigate the metaphysical nature of Kantian categories and the Ding an sich by giving them historical and social aspects. Perhaps his old idea of paradigm was much more sociological than his new idea of categorization and thing in itself, albeit these are historical.

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Even though Kuhn could not fully formulate his new theory of science, his importance to the historiography of science is unquestionable. In terms of affirming the idea of the historicity of science, Kuhn’s work, by reaching a broad audience, echoed this perspective like no other. The major challenge we have to face, according to Kuhn, is the need to embrace the idea of scientific knowledge as the human activity that emerges from our historical and social interactions with nature. So naturally, we need to consider this science-nature polarization, even assuming the historicity of scientific knowledge, as an “essential tension”; it may never be resolved; nevertheless, we have to live with it. Finally, in closing, we return to the initial question. What type of classic is the body of Kuhn’s thinking? We may not yet have all the elements or the distance necessary to answer this question. However, when we consider what type of classic Kuhn is, we must first consider that his work is inescapable. Secondly, we must note that philosophical reflection on science has never occupied a central place in philosophy in a broader sense. The great epistemologists have not necessarily been considered the most influential philosophers. Even though Kuhn was the philosopher of science who had the most widely published, commented on, and followed work of all time, for some he would not have attained a sufficient degree of complexity to call him a philosopher. In Kuhn’s obituary, Richard Rorty highlights these issues and states that it is necessary to consider that Kuhn was not only a philosopher but was the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century (Rorty 1996). In the face of the new approaches to science studies, Kuhnian conceptions about science seem to some to make Kuhn an already dated author. However, these interpretations ignore the philosophical aspects that underlie Kuhn’s work and make us think philosophically about it. Kuhn will thus continue to be an authority for thinking about science and contemporary culture since science is the epicenter of this culture. As much as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, or any other thinker of the twentieth century, Kuhn was a great thinker of our time, and we will echo his legacy for a long time.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have seen that Kuhn’s work was crucial for the historiography of science for different reasons. Among them, his idea of establishing “a role for the history” of science was fundamental for a better knowledge of scientific activity and its history, thus resulting in a more detailed understanding of science itself. Although he followed the way of other authors by highlighting the social and historical dimensions in the production of scientific knowledge, Kuhn gave a peculiar outline to this idea, responding to the needs of his context. By producing a work that achieved significant impact, Kuhn drew the attention of the central epistemological perspective of the period represented by Karl Popper’s epistemology. The eminent Austrian thinker understood Kuhn’s history of science as a representative of relativism. The well-known debate held in London in 1965 showed that it would be very difficult to reconcile the perspective of the two authors.

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They would be different worldviews, and even though they deal with the same problems, in the Kuhnian perspective, they operate in different paradigms. We have also seen that Kuhn opposed the group of radical socio-constructivists who exaggerated the role of negotiations in science. The Kuhnian critique falls specifically on Bloor’s Strong Program and the historiography of science that followed it, mainly as represented by Shapin and Schaffer’s book Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. For Kuhn, in attempting to present the prominent role of negotiations in science, those authors ignored essential factors, which could reveal how Boyle’s hegemony over Hobbes was scientific and not just rhetorical. Kuhn sought to draw a lesson from the exaggerations of the Strong Program by attempting to reevaluate his own work. Insofar as his theory of science faced difficulties, Kuhn understood that he should create a new theory of science. Although he had not finished writing a new book, Kuhn left texts in which he partially developed this new theory, thus allowing us to have an idea about it. Besides Kuhn’s work being based on a social approach, it seems that his new theory would have two more basic postulates: the conception of evolution as an epistemological north and the emphasis on the role of language. Kuhn would thus be one of the few authors, if not the only one, to think that a good theory of science for writing the history of science should seriously consider social aspects, the idea of evolution, and the role of language.

Cross-References ▶ Historical Epistemology: A German Connection ▶ Ludwik Fleck: Thought Style and Thought Collective in the Historiography of Science ▶ The Historiography of Scientific Revolutions: A Philosophical Reflection ▶ The Origins of Alexandre Koyré’s History of Scientific Thought

References Barra ESO (2013) Três Perspectivas Kuhnianas sobre a Filosofia Histórica da Ciência. In: Condé M, Penna-Forte M (eds) Thomas Kuhn e a Estrutura das Revoluções Científicas [50 anos]. Fino Traço, Belo Horizonte Bloor D (1973) Wittgenstein and Manheim on the sociology of mathematics. Stud Hist Phil Sci 4 (2):173–191 Bloor D (1983) Wittgenstein: a social theory of knowledge. Macmillan, London Bloor D (1991 [1976]) Knowledge and social imagery. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Condé ML (2005) Paradigma versus Estilo de Pensamento na História da Ciência. In: Condé ML, Figueiredo B (eds) Ciência, História e Teoria. Argvmentvm, Belo Horizonte Cupani A (2013) Por que ainda Thomas Kuhn? In Condé, Mauro and Penna-Forte, Marcelo. In: Thomas Kuhn e A Estrutura das Revoluções Científicas [50 anos]. Fino Traço, Belo Horizonte Daston L, Galison P (2007) Objectivity. Zone Books, Cambridge Dyson F, J. (1999) The sun, the genome, the internet: tools of scientific revolutions. Oxford University Press, Oxford

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Fleck L (1979 [1935]) Genesis and development of a scientific fact. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Fuller S (2004) Kuhn vs. Popper: the struggle for the soul of science. Columbia University Press, New York Gattei S (2008) Thomas Kuhn’s linguistic turn and the legacy of logical empiricism: incommensurability, rationality and the search for truth. Ashgate Publishing Company, Aldershot Hacking I (1983) Representing and intervening. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Jarnicki P, Greif H (2022) The ‘Aristotle experience’ revisited: Thomas Kuhn meets Ludwik Fleck on the road to structure. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 0. https://doi.org/10.1515/agph2020-0160 Kuhn T (1970a [1962]) The structure of scientific revolutions. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Kuhn T (1970b) Logic of discovery or psychology of research? In: Lakatos I, Musgrave A (eds) Criticism and the growth of the knowledge. Cambridge University, London Kuhn T (1977) The essential tension. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Kuhn T (2000) The road since structure. The University of Chicago, Chicago Kuhn T (2022) In: Mladenovic B (ed) The last writing of Thomas Kuhn: incommensurability in science. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Latour B, Woolgar S. (1996 [1979]) La Vie de Laboratoire: La Production du Fait Scientifique. La Découverte, Paris Masterman M (1970) The nature of a paradigm. In: Lakatos I, Musgrave A (eds) Criticism and the growth of the knowledge. Cambridge University, London Popper K (1970) Normal sciences and its dangers. In: Lakatos I, Musgrave A (eds) Criticism and the growth of the knowledge. Cambridge University, London Popper K (1992 [1935]) The logic of scientific discovery. Routledge, London/New York Reichenbach H (1938) Experience and prediction: an analysis of the foundations and the structure of knowledge. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Rorty R (1996) Um Mestre Iconoclasta. Folha de São Paulo, São Paulo, 06 out. 1996. Caderno Mais, Seção autores, p 05 Shapin S, Schaffer S (1985) Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the experimental life. Princeton University Press, Princeton Wittgenstein L (1953) Philosophical investigations. Basil Blackwell, Oxford

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Bourdieu and the Social History of Scientific Reason Gerardo Ienna

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biographical Sketches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Foundational Role of Historical Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History and Social Temporalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sociology and Social History of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beyond Logicism and Relativism: Historicist Rationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflexivity and the Social History of Social Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The themes of the historical roots, the social function, and the validity of the sciences (both human and social sciences and natural sciences) represent one of the nerve centers of Bourdieusian reflections. In the thought of this author, the theme of science has been both an object of socio-historical investigation and a cardinal problem of epistemological reflection – a way to justify the validity of sociological research in itself (the problem of reflexivity). The main objective of this chapter is to show the originality of Bourdieu’s approach to the analysis of science by showing its link and theoretical positioning with respect to the main contemporary historiographical debates (such as historical epistemology and science and technology studies).

G. Ienna (*) Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship (MISHA, Horizon 2020; GA: 101026146), University of Verona and University of Maryland, Verona, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_7

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Keywords

Pierre Bourdieu · Historical epistemology · Science and technology studies · Social history of science · Structuralism · Constructivism · Historicist rationalism · Scientific field · Habitus · Capital

Introduction It is now an indisputable fact that Pierre Bourdieu is one of the most relevant authors not only in the field of sociology but also in the humanities and social sciences in general. As has recently been noted, the international (and interdisciplinary) circulation of his work has been very wide, and he is currently one of the most widely quoted contemporary authors in the world (Santoro 2008; Santoro et al. 2018). Despite this, its relevance in the field of meta-scientific debates has not yet been reconstructed to its full extent. Indeed, increasingly Bourdieu’s theoretical tools have been used by epistemologists, sociologists, and historians of science and applied to concrete case studies. The themes of the historical roots, the social function, and the validity of the sciences (both human and social sciences and natural sciences) represent one of the nerve centers of Bourdieusian reflections. In the thought of this author, the theme of science has been both an object of socio-historical investigation and a cardinal problem of epistemological reflection – a way to justify the validity of sociological research (the problem of reflexivity). The main objective of this chapter is to show main axes of Bourdieu’s approach to the analysis of science by showing its link and theoretical positioning with respect to the main contemporary historiographical debates (such as historical epistemology and science and technology studies). For this reason, I will therefore limit myself to analyzing this author’s theses (while leaving out a detailed study of the reception of his theses).

Biographical Sketches To fully understand Pierre Bourdieu’s intellectual trajectory, as well as his theoretical stances, it is essential to know at least some elements of his biography (for more details see also Bourdieu 2008; Lescourret 2008; Fabiani 2016). Bourdieu was born on August 10, 1930, in Denguin, a rural village located in the Béarn region, an area of southwestern France. Despite growing up in a culturally peripheral environment, Bourdieu distinguished himself by succeeding in being admitted to the khâgne un (2-year preparatory curriculum for admission to a prestigious university) at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand in Paris. He thus successfully obtained admission to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) where he enrolled in the faculty of philosophy. In this context, he had the opportunity to engage with great intellectual personalities of the time. At the ENS, he follows the classes of Henri Gouhier, Martial Guéroult, Louis Althusser, and others. At the Sorbonne, the École Pratique des Hautes Études

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(EPHE), and the Collège de France, on the other hand, he followed courses by authors such as Alexandre Koyré, Eric Weil, Georges Canguilhem, and Jules Vuillemin. During this period, he focused on studies in the history of philosophy (especially Leibniz), phenomenology, and historical epistemology. After obtaining the agrégation in philosophy, Bourdieu became particularly close to the figure of Canguilhem with whom he planned to write a Ph.D. thesis devoted to the study of the temporal structures of affective life. That work would never be completed because Bourdieu will be called to military service in Algeria, an experience that ultimately led him toward ethnographic research and, later, sociology. Algeria was indeed for Bourdieu the occasion for a “conversion of the gaze.” Based on profound epistemological questions, Bourdieu investigates colonialism under the profile of a conflict between different social temporalities. He soon publishes his first works such as Sociologie de l’Algérie (1958) and Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (1963). Meanwhile, with the help of Raymond Aron, Bourdieu obtained a position at the Sorbonne where he soon became co-director of the Centre de sociologie européenne. The period between 1960 and 1970 was marked by a strong interest in the sociology of culture and education. After obtaining a position as maître de conférence at the University of Lille, in 1964, Bourdieu was appointed as Directeur d’études in the VI section (social sciences) of the EPHE (later renamed École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)). During this period, he worked especially in synergy with Jean-Claude Passeron, publishing several papers, essays, and volumes such as The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture (1964); Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1970), and others. At the same time, however, he is interested in the sociology of art publishing some volumes such as Photography: A Middle-Brow Art in 1965 (with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, and Jean-Claude Chamboredon) and The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public in 1969 (with Alain Darbel). A cardinal contribution of this period is The Craft of Sociology (1968), a textbook on historical epistemology of social sciences written by Bourdieu in collaboration with Passeron and Chamboredon. I will devote the next section to an analysis of this contribution. In the period between 1970 and 1980, Bourdieu’s scientific production was characterized by the acquisition of full theoretical awareness. It was during this period that this author published some of his classic works such as Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), and The Logic of Practice (1980), which are currently recognized as “classics” in the field of social theory. As will be seen in the following pages, Bourdieu also wrote important contributions dedicated to the historical sociology of science during this period. This is particularly the case with influential articles such as La spécificité du champ scientifique et les conditions sociales du progrès de la raison (1975) and Le champ scientifique (1976). Bourdieu’s election to the Collège de France in 1981 ushered in a season of definitive intellectual consecration. In this period, Bourdieu’s research activity became even more intense. In the context of the sociology of intellectuals and public

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education systems, Bourdieu published Homo Academicus (1984) and The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (1989). At the same time, he further developed his research in the field of the sociology of art by publishing The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992) and teaching courses on Manet’s Symbolic Revolution at the Collège de France between 1998 and 2000. All of these works are not only imbued with a deep historical sensibility but also attracted the attention of historians (I will return to this point). Other relevant works from this period include, for example, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (1988), The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (1993), Masculine Domination (1998), and many others. As can be seen from Pascalian Meditations (1998) and courses taught at the Collège between 1981 and 1986, all of this research was an opportunity for Bourdieu to refine his general social theory and to explore various epistemological issues. It is extremely relevant to note that Bourdieu devoted his last course at the Collège (2000–2001) to the sociology of science, published under the title Science of Science and Reflexivity (2002). Shortly before his death (in Paris on Jan. 23, 2002), Bourdieu completed a significant sociological deconstruction essay of his own biographical and intellectual trajectory entitled Sketch for a Self-Analysis (Ienna et al. 2021).

The Foundational Role of Historical Epistemology As I have already mentioned, Bourdieu’s philosophical training took shape within the ENS in Paris. Like his contemporaries, Louis Althusser or Michel Foucault, in the course of his formation, Bourdieu found himself having to choose between the two dominant philosophical trends of the time: the tradition of the so-called philosophy of the subject, represented by authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and, on the other hand, a “philosophy of the concept” hinged on the historical-epistemological research carried out by authors such as Gaston Bachelard, Jean Cavaillès, Georges Canguilhem, and Alexandre Koyré (These expressions were used in a famous speech by Michel Foucault entitled La vie: l’expérience et la science (Foucault 1985). Rejecting Sartre’s positions completely, (see, for example, Bourdieu (1977, 2000). Bourdieu embraced the tradition of French historical epistemology within which his social theory takes shape. In 1968, Bourdieu, in collaboration with Passeron and Jean-Claude Chamboredon, published The Craft of Sociology. This text – a textbook written for courses on the epistemology of sociology that Bourdieu and Passeron taught at EPHE – shaped at least two generations of specialists by paving the way for a historical inquiry into the formation of the social sciences and also fostered new forms of critical attention nourished by the sociology of sociological formation and the sociology of science (Brian 2012). This fact is even more significant if one keeps in mind that the latter was published in the years when American sociology, especially of the empiricist persuasion, was widely in the mainstream. Indeed, as can be clearly seen from Beate Krais’s 1988 interview with Bourdieu, The Craft of Sociology is openly conceived as an epistemology of the social sciences alternative

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to the theoretical tendencies of the American sociological approach. Bourdieu’s polemical target was especially represented by what he called the capital triad of sociology composed by Parsons, Merton and Lazarsfeld. Bourdieu also stated that he refused, at this time, to attend Lazarsfeld’s lecture series organized at the Sorbonne (Bourdieu and Krais 2005, V–XIX). Bourdieu and his colleagues proposed an integration of theoretical tools coming from both historical epistemology (French and otherwise) and the social sciences (such as those of Marx, Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber). On this point in fact, Bourdieu stated: “I have tried to transpose to the terrain of the social sciences a whole epistemological tradition represented by Bachelard, Canguilhem, Koyré” (Bourdieu and Krais 2005, 7). The epistemological model he developed is the result of an eclectic integration of Bachelardian theory with the reflections of Canguilhem and Koyré, which thus comes to represent a typical posture of épistémologie historique of this period (as it was for Althusser, Foucault, and others). For example, the discontinuist perspective is a staple of this volume: “In other words, if it is true that every scientific theory clings to the “given” as a historically constituted, provisional code which, for the space of an epoch, constitutes the sovereign principle of an unequivocal distinction between the true and the false, the history of a science is always discontinuous because the refining of the interpretative grid never goes on forever but always culminates in the substitution of one grid for another” (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 29). In compliance with the principles of Bachelard’s Le Rationalisme appliqué, Bourdieu used the concept of “craft” to demonstrate the inseparability of “scientific practices” and “epistemology” (i.e., the meta-level of reflection on scientific practices). From the very first lines of the text, referring to Auguste Comte, the impossibility of keeping the theoretical analysis and that of the concrete working mechanisms of scientific practice separate is made explicit, a thesis further justified by the notion of Bachelardian open or applied rationalism, which presupposes a constant dialogue between science and technology. Failure to adopt such a methodological posture would risk “to force on researchers a split image of scientific work” (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 1) and would produce the image of an “epistemic reason” completely divorced from the analytics of scientific praxologies and the exercise of a profession subject to the social division of research labor. If, as Bachelard argued, “science does not get the philosophy it deserves” (Bachelard 1953, 20), Bourdieu and colleagues set out to analyze the social sciences with an instrumentation from historical epistemology in order to implement a renewal from within. Following the thesis of epistemological regionalism, the authors argue that there is a specificity proper to sociological rationalism as much as there is one for electrical rationalism (Bachelard 1949) or that of the life sciences (Canguilhem 1994). The aim of The Craft of Sociology is precisely to highlight the criteria of scientificity that govern this epistemological region so that sociology can prove itself to be a science like any other (in its relation/opposition to the natural sciences). This epistemology rejects the formalism and fixism of a single, indivisible Reason in favour of a pluralism of rationalisms linked to the scientific domains that they rationalize. [. . .]. It is

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thus predisposed to provide a language and theoretical assistance to the social sciences, which, in order to constitute their regional rationalism, have to overcome some particularly daunting epistemological obstacles. (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 81)

For sociology to prove itself a science like any other, it must therefore overcome various epistemological obstacles. The first of these is the attribution of validity to knowledge derived from immediate experience. The second involves breaking with the so-called illusion of transparency, that is, that tension of claiming to understand a social fact solely from the analysis of the intentions that produced it. Third, it is necessary to distance oneself from “artificialism,” i.e., “the illusory representation of the genesis of social facts according to which the scientist can understand and explain these facts merely through ‘his own private reflection’” since the latter would be founded “on the assumption of an infused science which, rooted in the feeling of familiarity, is also the basis of a spontaneous philosophy of knowledge of the social world” (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 15). Rather, sociology is an experimental science that constructs explanatory theories capable of defining social facts in terms of relations and variations, without recourse to essences, substances, invariants, or residuals, i.e., human or social “natures.” Moreover, this discipline must radically break with “social propheticism.” Sociology, willingly or unwillingly, is assigned the ability to answer ultimate questions concerning civilization by establishing a relationship with its audience like that which the prophet has with his audience. If the chemist has to fight the alchemist in him, then the sociologist must not be carried away by the temptation to social propheticism. On this basis, the sociologist must therefore constantly enact an “epistemological break” with common sense and its related naive language. The inheritance of ideas is linked to the inheritance of words. The naive language of common sense carries with it a “spontaneous sociology,” which structures the way social agents view and divide the world, to which a scientific view of the social world is opposed. The divisions made by common language clearly act as unconscious pre-constructions of objects, bringing with them an implicit philosophical conception of society. In sociology, the break with common sense is even more necessary than in other fields of research because this discipline has to deal with an entirely peculiar relationship to its object of study. In observation and experimentation, the sociologist enters a relationship with his object which, being a social relationship, is never one of pure knowledge. The data therefore appear to him as living, singular, ‘all-too-human’ configurations that tend to impose themselves as object structures. (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 14)

From these constatations, it is necessary for sociology to place at the center of its disciplinary methodology a necessary objectivization of the subject of objectivization, that is, of the conditions of possibility of sociological practice itself. It is a matter of adopting an “epistemological vigilance” that allows one to distance oneself from the objects preconstructed by the naive view of common sense. “Epistemological vigilance is particularly necessary in the social sciences, where the separation between everyday opinion and scientific discourse is more blurred

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than elsewhere” (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 13). This “reflexive” dynamic becomes a tool that allows for the emergence of the implicit assumptions that each observer adopts in his or her relation to his or her object of research and that must be applied in a Bachelardian way as a modus operandi and not an analysis on the opus operatum; that is, it must be incorporated as a “system of intellectual habits” (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 2). The second part of the text is devoted to structuring a theory, again explicitly Bachelardian, of the construction of the object of research. From this point of view, in continuity with the first part, it is necessary to make a distinction between “common objects,” which are the products of a language derived from common sense, and “scientific objects,” which, on the contrary, represent an achievement against common sense. The historical epistemology is in this sense integrated with Durkheim’s theses from The Rules of Sociological Method and vice versa (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 34). Adopting the theses of Koyré’s Galileo Studies, the authors suggest that “direct experience played no part, other than as an obstacle, in the birth of classical science” (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 37). All sciences thus won against experience (in the empiricist-positivist sense of the term); for this reason, the epistemological vector proceeds from the “rational to the real” and, therefore, is defined as a realizing vector (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 36). The authors’ ambition is to deconstruct the dogma of “immaculate perception,” arguing rather that a “social fact” is always a fact conquered, constructed, and ascertained against the naive experience of the social world. The construction of the object then passes, for Bourdieu and his collaborators, through a problematization of the intervening relationship between hypothesis and experience and the role played in this by scientific instruments and their inherent theoreticality. Bourdieu in this part, through an ongoing comparison with the classical texts of epistemology, sociology, and anthropology, turns to an examination of traditional techniques of inquiry such as statistics and the interview, understanding their preparation as a fundamental part of the construction of the scientific object. For example, statistics, one of the most traditional sociological research tools, must be interrogated from time to time by the social scientist who uses it by clarifying its methodological assumptions. In other words, the manner in which the object of study is created must always be self-reflective (e.g., wondering whether there is a real break with the representation of common-sense objects, or again, questioning the manner in which the object of study in question is defined). Picking up on Max Planck, the authors argued that. To set up apparatus to make a measurement is in itself to ask nature a question [. . .]. Measurement and measuring instruments and, more generally, all the operations of sociological practice, from drawing up questionnaires and coding to statistical analysis, are so many theories in action, inasmuch as they are conscious or unconscious procedures for constructing facts and relations between facts. (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 39)

The preparation of a statistical survey or interview plays a key role in the creation of a scientific object. Starting from this, it is clear that the sociologist must not give in

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to the temptation, on the one hand, to “pull out of his mouth” the information he needs to confirm his theory and, on the other hand, neither can he place himself in a totally passive manner before the data he receives because, in this way, he would only reproduce the philosophy implicit to spontaneous sociology. In preparing a test, statistic, or interview, one must implement a construction of the object of inquiry in break with common sense by relating factors that, on a daily basis, in naive perception remain separate. For this, the authors mention as a reference point the Galilean revolution operated by Durkheim in sociology, which consists of that theoretical gesture he made in studying social facts as things (i.e., as systems of quantifiable relations). The techniques of observation and experimentation, in sociology, as in the other sciences, are only apparently neutral. Research activity is divided into a more or less structured set of research procedures that serve as the paradigm unconsciously incorporated by most researchers. These operational protocols are the projection into an epistemological space of a bureaucratic division of labor, and its constraints are similarly embedded in technical tools (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 57). In this sense, the sciences are organized around objects that no longer have anything in common with those from common-sense perception. Sociology represents the division of scientific labor as “a real partition of the real.” The classical representation of the scientific procedure, as a cycle of successive stages (observation, hypothesis, experimentation, theoretical elaboration, observation, etc.), is nothing but a positivistic pedagogical illusion that substitutes for reality an enchanted image of epistemological acts (especially with regard to the “bureaucratized” division of scientific work). Indeed, this false representation lets slip the logical order of epistemological acts, which is not reducible to the chronological order. This epistemological posture will remain unchanged in Bourdieu’s later works, allowing this author to develop a sociological inquiry strongly focused on the cognitive dimension of power (hence the notion of “symbolic power”). But before analyzing in detail Bourdieu’s specific contributions with respect to the study of the “scientific field,” it is necessary to highlight how certain theoretical elements drawn from the tradition of épistémologie historique were implemented in Bourdieusian social-historical methodology and theory.

History and Social Temporalities Although Bourdieu is largely known – especially in Anglo-Saxon debates – as a theorist of social reproduction, in fact, his contributions aim at the same time to construct a general theory of historical change, transformation, and symbolic revolutions. In Bourdieu’s social theory, history occupies a decidedly central place, and certainly many cultural historians have adopted his perspective in their work (see Gorski 2013; Steinmetz 2011; Bourdieu et al. 1985; Bourdieu and Chartier 1988; Bourdieu 1999). For example, Eric Hobsbawm said that by reading Bourdieu, he could find a common approach: “For him as for me, it was about knowing how men and women live in a period of historical change.” In the famous afterword to

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Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, as is well known, one of the first occurrences of the term “habitus” appears through which Bourdieu addresses the problem of how innovation of cultural structures is possible through the contribution of an individual endowed with specific dispositions (in particular, the contribution of Abbot Suger to the creation of the Gothic style is very relevant). Along with “field” and “capital,” the concept of habitus represents the third pillar of Bourdieu’s social theory. The history of this concept is long and starts from Aristotle and passes through Leibniz, Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, to Erwin Panofsky and Norbert Elias. Bourdieu’s definition is as follows: “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor” (Bourdieu 1990, 53). In later works such as The Rules of Art, Homo Academicus, and the various lectures at the Collège de France devoted to Manet, On the State and the last one on the Scientific Field, Bourdieu also proceeds to the historicization of social fields and cultural production by adopting a strongly discontinuist approach declined in sociological terms. According to Bourdieu, modern societies are highly differentiated, and social space is formed by relatively autonomous social microcosms, called social “fields.” In analogy to the language of physics, these social microcosms are fields of forces, structured at all times by the balance of forces within them. In this sense, fields are spaces of objective relations structured according to specific stakes irreducible to those of other fields. The autonomy of a social field is not given once and for all but is the result of a historical achievement that must be constantly renewed with respect to “external pressures on the field” (Bourdieu 2022a). As heir to historical epistemology, he elaborates an approach based on a form of dynamic nominalism, which implies a form of historicization of ontology (with various possible similarities to the works of another influential continuer of historical epistemology such as Ian Hacking. See Hacking 2002, 2004, 2009). On this point, for example, Roger Chartier argues, “This notion of field, in my view, allows us to think about discontinuity. Here we find the problem of nominalism, that is to say that it is necessary to have words in language, scientific or otherwise, to designate institutions, objects, practices. These words may be the same but, behind this stability, specific configurations are designated” (Bourdieu and Chartier 1988, 84). Bourdieu is indeed very careful not to fall into the anachronisms that historians often fall into by not historicizing their analytical categories. For Bourdieu, in fact, historians very often make use of irreflexive language in their research practice. In responding to Chartier, Bourdieu argues, “The paradox is that, for example, historians [. . .] are often extraordinarily naïve in their use of categories” (Bourdieu and Chartier 1988, 29). Bourdieu brings as an example the paradoxicality of attempting to make a history of medicine, the notion of which is historically determined, without taking into consideration that the concept of “medicine” has never stopped changing

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(not all healing practices can be said to be medical). It must therefore be methodologically acknowledged that “It is the very categories with which history constructs the historical object that must be the object of historical analysis” (ibid.). In a panel discussion organized at the Société d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, Bourdieu reiterates his theoretical stance by arguing This is an important point, and I think that historians, whom I read with much more pleasure than sociologists, do not make enough use of historical reflexivity and are content to say that anachronism must be avoided, whereas they could use their historical culture to interrogate their historical concepts. Durkheim says roughly that “the unconscious is history,” by which he means that our unconscious is the forgotten or reformulated product of collective (and not just individual as Freud says) history. One of the unconscious – we can probably have several – that we have to struggle with when working scientifically is what history has deposited in our brains, as sediments, concepts, problems, automatisms of language and thought. Only a reflexive use of history can therefore give us freedom from history, give us the possibility of not conveying concepts weighed down by their historicity. (Bourdieu 1999, 18)

This is a complete integration of the methodological principles of Canguilhemian conceptual history. Bourdieu aims to understand those moments of strong historical discontinuity of the processes of cultural transformation; it is therefore an extension of the method of historical epistemology to a broader field of phenomena (such as those related to the artistic field, the religious field, the field of power, etc.). From a methodological point of view, to open to an innovative historiographical model, Bourdieu aims to overcome the dichotomy between “subject” and “structure” of classical Marxism through a focus on the concept of “practice” (Bourdieu 1977; 1990). Against all forms of epistemic apriorism, he argues that all theoretical expression is the result of socially and historically situated epistemic practices. The flow of historical time is a scientific-epistemic abstraction; that is, it is the result of the practice of historians. The latter have an idealized view of historical time as an “a priori frame” in which practices are situated. On the contrary, for Bourdieu, it is practice that determines temporal rhythms. This conception of time is implicitly indebted to the Bachelardian theses set forth in L’intuition de l’instant and Dialectique de la durée. Continuities “need to be built. One has to sustain them. So that in the end the continuity of duration does not present itself to us as an immediate fact but as a problem” (Bachelard 1936, 8). For Bachelard, in fact, time cannot be conceived as an immutable, a priori structure within which events are placed. In the wake of Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics, this author attempts to construct an epistemology and metaphysics of time of a materialist and dialectical kind such that it is the relation between instants that generates an activity of timing. Bourdieu writes: Like the body-as-thing of the Cartesian idealist vision, time-as-thing, the time of clockmakers and scientists, is the product of a scholastic point of view which has found its expression in a metaphysics of time and history which considers history either as a pregiven reality, a thing in-itself, previous and external to practice, or as the (empty) a priori framework for every historical process. We can break with this point of view by

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reconstructing the point of view of the acting agent, of practice as “temporalization”, thereby revealing that practice is not in time but makes time (human time, as opposed to biological or astronomical time). (Bourdieu 2000, 206)

Sociological analysis allows us, on the one hand, to put the accent back on the role of practices in the scanning of social rhythms and vice versa. For Bourdieu, in fact, temporality is always twofold: on the one hand, it is temporality of social agents, and on the other, it is temporality of structures. The notion of habitus allows us to describe how history is incorporated by social agents in the form of trajectories, positions, and social dispositions. On the other hand, social temporality describes history objectified and inscribed in structures. This perspective makes it possible to overcome the apparently obligatory alternative between a structural and an eventsbased history (histoire évenémentielle) (Bourdieu 1988, 174). The relationship between these two poles is of mutual influence (Bourdieu 2000, 150–55) and at the same time makes it possible to describe both the change and the reproduction of social and cultural structures. In Algerian works and in On the State, it clearly emerges that social temporality is considered by Bourdieu as an organizing and unifying principle of social communities (Bourdieu 1979, 27; 2014, 7–9). Social temporality is an abstraction shared within a society and regulating its internal time, rhythm, and order. Consequently, each social context determines different temporal arrangements in social agents. “The social order is first of all a rhythm, a tempo. Conforming to the social order is primarily a matter of respecting rhythms, keeping pace, not getting out steps” (Bourdieu 1979, 27–28).

Sociology and Social History of Science Indeed, it is on these epistemological foundations and historiographical stances that Bourdieu – from the mid-1970s until his last course at the Collège de France in 2000–2001 – proposed a sociology of science and knowledge in direct continuity with the principles of historical epistemology. In this series of texts, Bourdieu provided a description of scientific activity as a field animated by conflict and strongly characterized by phases of historical discontinuity. The first contribution devoted to reconstructing the dynamics of the functioning of the scientific field dates back to 1975 and was published in the pages of the journal Sociologie et sociétés (Bourdieu 1975). The following year a more articulate theoretical systematization of Bourdieusian reflections on this topic was published in the journal directed by Bourdieu, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (Bourdieu 1976). Bourdieu returned to work in the scientific field only in the 1990s, with two essays. The first, The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason, has been published on Sociological Forum in 1991 (Bourdieu 1991a). The second contribution, from 1997, is a lecture entitled Les usages sociaux de la science: pour une sociologie clinique du champ scientifique (Bourdieu 1997). But the most significant text, and certainly the most articulate, is the volume that collects the lectures at the Collège de France in the year 2000–2001, Science of Science and Reflexivity (Bourdieu 2004). However, it is

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necessary to point out, at least cursorily, that in the progressive structuring of the concept of the scientific field, it is possible to detect different shades of epistemological orientation. In the contributions of the 1970s, in fact, Bourdieu describes its logical workings based on a sociology of conflict model and opposing, consequently, Mertonian-style sociology because, in the author’s view, it is too prone to provide irenic descriptions of the social dynamics within the scientific field. To Merton’s positions, Bourdieu will instead approach from the 1990s onward in an attempt to stem the growing success enjoyed by the likes of Bruno Latour and SSK in general. In these texts, Bourdieu emphasizes the self-regulating capacity of the scientific field – while not denying its internal struggles. In fact, during this second phase, Bourdieu seeks to address the theoretical and intellectual tensions generated by the so-called Sokal Affair within the field of Science and Technology Studies and Cultural Studies. He was especially concerned by the relativistic outcomes of positions from the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK). Among the main polemical targets was especially the perspective elaborated by Latour – an author who among other things emphasized the non-compatibility of historical epistemology with the British tradition in SSK (Latour and Bowker 1987) – given the progressive recognition it was gaining in the French academic field. There are at least three aspects of Latour’s production that Bourdieu directly attacks in his course at the Collège de France in 2000–2001. The first, of a sociological and methodological nature, is the tendency developed in Laboratory Life (volume co-signed with Steve Woolgar) to privilege a microsociological research, which, according to Bourdieu, forsakes the ambition to contextualize the position of the “laboratory” within a broader social structure and correlative power relations – that is, this physical space is described as entirely separate from the world – and proposes a distorted sociological image of the scientific enterprise. The second aspect, on the other hand, is purely epistemological. Again in Laboratory Life, Latour and Woolgar, according to Bourdieu, deliberately play on an ambiguity: “By saying that facts are artificial in the sense of manufactured, Latour and Woolgar intimate that they are fictitious, not objective, not authentic” (Bourdieu 2004, 26). Finally, Bourdieu offers a methodological critique regarding the use of a semiotic paradigm as an interpretive key to understanding scientific practices. Here, Bourdieu refers not only to the aforementioned Laboratory Life but also to other contributions by Latour such as The Pasteurization of France in 1988. “The semiological vision of the world which induces them to emphasize the traces and signs leads them to that paradigmatic form of the scholastic bias, textism, which constitutes social reality as text (in the manner of some ethnologists, like Marcus (Marcus and Fischer 1986) or even Geertz, or some historians, who, with the ‘linguistic turn’ at about the same time, started to say that everything is text). Science is then just a discourse or a fiction among others, but one capable of exerting a ‘truth effect’ produced, like all other literary effects, through textual characteristics such as the tense of verbs, the structure of utterances, modalities, etc. (The absence of any attempt at prosopography condemns them to seek the power of texts in the texts themselves.) The universe of science is a world which succeeds in imposing universally the belief in its fictions” (Bourdieu 2004, 28). It is interesting to note that the relationship between

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Bourdieu and Latour was not so strained at least throughout the 1970s. In fact, it was Bourdieu himself who had one of Latour’s first articles – coauthored with semiotician Paolo Fabbri – with the title The Rhetoric of Science published in his journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1977 (Latour and Fabbri 1977). At the same time, in the first edition of Laboratory Life, the devices of Bourdieu’s theory are mentioned on several occasions regarding the concept of the “circle of credit” (Latour and Woolgar 1979, 205–6). According to Bourdieu, the social sciences have a duty to solve the problem they themselves have raised, namely, whether it is possible to claim that science is a product of history and at the same time produces trans-historical truths (Bourdieu 2004, 1) (Here, it is possible to find another point of contact with the program developed by Hacking See: Hacking 2009, 24–26). The tendency to historicize reason without relativizing it is the beating heart of historical epistemology, which is endorsed by Bourdieu precisely as an antidote to the increasingly relativist outcomes of SSK. Bourdieu’s authentic Bachelardism emerges especially on this antirelativist point and on the project of constructing a “historicist rationalism” (Bourdieu 2000, 106–8) that largely echoes Bachelardian “applied rationalism.” Such an epistemological position for Bourdieu is based on overcoming a series of false oppositional dichotomies: logicism vs. realism; dogmatism vs. skepticism; constructivism-idealist vs. positivism-realist; absolutism-logicist vs. relativismhistoricist; and idealism vs. realism (Bourdieu 2000, 2004) (cf. para. 5). To pursue this goal, this author proposes a sociological analysis of science alternative to both the Mertonian tradition and SSK program. From a historiographical point of view, as mentioned above, Bourdieu is very careful about the risk of anachronism. What we call science today is the result of a long historical process of achieving relative autonomy. To claim that the “scientific field” emerges in a particular historical period does not mean that everything that precedes this moment cannot have any scientific value. Rather, supporting this position means recognizing how, prior to this event, there was substantial overlap or indistinction in the field of cultural production between scientific, religious, magical, political, craft, etc., practices. The emergence of modern science is situated within a more general process of reorganization of social space that leads to the emergence of areas in relative autonomy from one another. In Bourdieu’s interpretation, the scientific revolution is properly that event that makes the distinction between scientific knowledge and other spheres of cultural production (e.g., art, religion, politics, and so on). Underlying the conquest of the relative autonomy of the scientific field is the process of mathematization of knowledge, which – especially with Newtonian physics – has resulted in a series of convergent phenomena at once social and intellectual: 1. Social inclusion/exclusion criterion: the use of mathematics determines the social distinction between amateurs and professionals. 2. Transformation of the concept of explanation: it is through mathematics that the physicist produces explanations and then moves on to the test of experimentation. 3. Replacement of Aristotelian substances with functional relations and structures: it is the logic of symbolic manipulation that guides the physicist’s research activity.

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Despite the specificity of each field of cultural production, their “relative” autonomy indicates a non-independence of these fields from the rest of the social space. As for the historical emergence of a field, this is traced by Bourdieu to the achievement of autonomy on the basis of at least three basic criteria: the first is a specific stake recognized as such by the social agents participating in that field. This stake is thus connected with its own axiomatics, specific interests, a specific form of capital, and specific authority. The second criterion consists of the common interest on the part of the participants in that field (while being in constant struggle with each other) in the reproduction and perpetuation of that field. The third is the criterion of field effects, which reveals the impossibility of understanding a specific work without knowing its socio-historical conditions of production (relative to that field). Indeed, the boundaries of fields are relatively blurred – “We may think of a field as a space within which an effect of field is exercised” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 100). Bourdieu’s sociology especially equips itself with a concept of the field aimed at being used as a functional tool of inquiry to shed light on the inherent conflictual nature and power relations underlying the structure of society. The field, in the Bourdieusian formulation, is a microcosm within the social space that is relatively autonomous from the others. The latter is the product of a process of “differentiation of ways of knowing the world” such that “to each of the fields corresponds a fundamental point of view on the world” (Bourdieu 1997, 105). The scientific field is especially defined in the following way: The structure of the scientific field is defined, at every moment, by the state of the relations of power among the protagonists in the struggle, that is to say, by the structure of the distribution of the specific capital (in its various kinds) that they have been able to accumulate in the course of previous struggles. It is this structure that assigns to each scientist his or her strategies and scientific stances, and the objective chances for their success, depending on the position he/she occupies in it. (Bourdieu 1991a, 9)

In this sense, the distribution of scientific capital (understood as the possession of knowledge, the material and symbolic means of producing research, and the internal positioning within the structure of resource distribution) is the result of the previous stages of negotiation and struggle in the field that finds its direct objectivation in the forms of institutionalization and the structuring of complex forms of arrangements that determine objective strategies and possibilities within the field in the present struggles of the social agents involved. In Bourdieu’s theory, each field produces its own form of capital, and each of these – primarily economic, social, and cultural – is convertible to each other. Its main form is that of symbolic capital, which is a form of capital that can be exercised only on those agents who possess the categories of perception necessary to know and recognize it (Bourdieu 2004, 55–56). In this sense: “The struggle for scientific authority, a particular space of social capital which secures a power over the constituent mechanisms of the field and which can be reconverted into other species of capital, owes the essential of its characteristics to the fact that producers tend to have no other possible clients than their competitors (the more autonomous the field the more so)” (Bourdieu 1976, 91; 1975, 95).

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Bourdieu conceives the scientific capital as divided internally into two subtypes. On the one hand, there is a proper scientific capital (also called “pure”) and, on the other, a temporal scientific capital (traceable to social and thus political capital). Pure scientific capital corresponds to that body of knowledge produced and ratified by the field (a specific form of cultural capital). Temporal capital, on the other hand, coincides with membership in scientific organizations, committees, and commissions. To occupy positions of power within scientific organizations is to exercise power within the field that is political in nature, defined by Bourdieu as “temporal” in that such power is not necessarily earned because of the possession of the field’s specific knowledge (Bourdieu 2004, 56–57). “The two species of scientific capital have different laws of accumulation: “pure” scientific capital is acquired mainly by means of recognized contributions to the progress of science, inventions or discoveries (publications, especially at the most selective and the most prestigious organs, thus proper to confer prestige, in the manner of symbolic credit banks, are the best index of this); institutional scientific capital is acquired essentially through specific political strategies that all have in common that they are time-consuming-participation in commissions, more or less fictitious scientific seminars, ceremonies, meetings, etc. – The result is that it is difficult to say whether, as its holders willingly profess, its accumulation is the principle (by way of compensation) or the result of less successful accumulation of the more specific, and more legitimate form of scientific capital” (Bourdieu 1997, 30). The aspect of the description of the scientific field, which Bourdieu calls “physicalist,” corresponds to the description of this field of forces according to the principles of social physics. Individual scientists, équipes, laboratories, and scientific institutions through their relationships structure the very space that in turn determines them as such. Each social agent, understood as a source of field, deforms the space around him or her in having relations with others, thus creating its structure and determining the different conformations of the force relations that describe it. Each scientist, at the same time, undergoes the effect of the field and helps to structure it. This, in fact, is able to exert a force on the latter according to the amount of capital, in this case, scientific capital held by him. According to the rules of reproduction, the structure of this social universe is defined and defines the distribution of scientific capital within it. The dominant is thus the one who has the power to make the structure of the field act in his favor. Thus, opposing all those irenic views of the scientific problem of neo-positivist matrix, the second aspect of the description of the field proposed by Bourdieu corresponds to the description of the dynamics of struggle within the field. As is well known, for Bourdieu, the field is always a field of struggles where social agents, endowed with different habitus, clash to preserve or transform the structures of power relations. To speak of the scientific field as a site of struggles also implies the idea that “the very functioning of the scientific field produces and assumes a specific form of interest” (Bourdieu 1976, 89). “Each scientific act, like every practice, is the product of the encounter between two histories, a history embodied, incorporated in the form of dispositions, and a history objectified in the very structure of the field and in technical objects

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(instruments), writings, etc.” (Bourdieu 2004, 35). In the scientific field, the maintenance of the specific form of capital takes on a particularly economic configuration through the preservation, in the figure of formulas, of a treasure accumulated through centuries of history. History is at every moment ratified and reproduced, thus taking the form of the objective structure of the field through the practical action of individual social agents who have in turn incorporated that history. Consider, for example, a young college student of physics who is able to master a historically given amount of knowledge because of the economic form it takes. A single mathematical formula, for example, allows the practical use, even in an unreflective manner, of centuries of history. Scientific instruments themselves are historical concretions, the result of accepted, ratified, and objectified theories in the field. In this part, it is possible to see a strong commonality with Kuhnian thought. For the adequate analysis of a practical act within the scientific field, we must therefore necessarily consider the dialectical interplay between these two modes of preservation and validation of history. “To reintroduce the idea of the habitus is to set up as the principle of scientific practices, not a knowing consciousness acting in accordance with the explicit norms of logic and experimental method, but a ‘craft’, a practical sense of the problems to be dealt with, the appropriate ways of dealing with them, etc.” (Bourdieu 2004, 38). Agents in their practical acts adopt strategies that are closely related to the conditioning resulting from their position in the field, trajectory, and cultural training (both scholastic and disciplinary). On the basis of each scientist’s position within it, the structure assigns to him his scientific strategies and position-takings and their objective chances of success. These position-takings are the product of the relationship between a position in the field and the dispositions (the habitus) of its occupant. Every scientific choice [. . .] is also a social strategy of investment oriented towards maximization of the specific, inseparably social and scientific profit offered by the field [. . .]. (Bourdieu 2004, 59)

The habitus of agents assumes the supreme function of mediating between the space of positions and stances. It is only through the habitus that it is possible to explain how each agent can grasp the space of possible stances then taken in the field. The space of possibilities, when perceived by a habitus that possesses that form of investment in and interest in that game, allows one to perceive the possible ways (to that agent) of doing science. Embedded in the habitus are scholastic dispositions, social position, the trajectory taken within a field, etc. It is only through the notion of habitus that it becomes possible to overcome the opposition between structuralist and constructivist description of a social phenomenon. Perceiving the space of internal positions involves knowing and recognizing the symbolic forms of capital that are at stake so that one can orient oneself in the field. This is where the anticipatory function of habitus comes into play, as every field comprises a space of more or less probable actions. To know the structure is thus to possess the means to understand the state of the field and attempt to use it to one’s advantage (to produce and reproduce one that is convenient to oneself).

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The notion of the field makes it possible to overcome the “false assumptions” of the communitarian theory of science developed by Merton. The communitarian view fails to capture, according to Bourdieu, one of the fundamental factors in the functioning of the scientific field. Describing the scientific community as a collection of social agents cooperating, peacefully, with a view to a well-defined end is something that for Bourdieu contradicts the facts. The struggle among scientists is anything but peaceful: The scientific field is an armed struggle among adversaries who possess weapons whose power and effectiveness rises with the scientific capital collectively accumulated in and by the field (and therefore, in the incorporated state, in each of the agents) and who agree at least to appeal to the verdict of experience, the ‘real’, as a kind of ultimate referee. This ‘objective reality’ to which everyone explicitly or tacitly refers is ultimately no more than what the researchers engaged in the field at a given moment agree to consider as such, and it only ever manifests itself in the field through the representations given of it by those who invoke its arbitration. (Bourdieu 2000, 112–13)

The component of competition, within the scientific community, for the monopoly of legitimate manipulation of scientific goods serves a crucial function because it allows us to see that for every scientific act proposed within the field, there is the light of critical scrutiny by more competent competitors. Breaking with the idea of science seen as a sympathetic community or “realm of ends,” however, does not imply adherence to the description of this field as bellum omnium contra omnes. The scientific field comes to be seen as one of the most autonomous fields. It cannot be inferred from this, however, that it enjoys complete autonomy. In fact, Bourdieu speaks of “relatively autonomous” fields regarding both science and art. The autonomy of the scientific field is possible because of very selective entry requirements. To say that the field is relatively autonomous with respect to the encompassing social universe is to say that the system of forces that are constitutive of the structure of the field (tension) is relatively independent of the forces exerted on the field (pressure). It has, as it were, the ‘freedom’ it needs to develop its own necessity, its own logic, its own nomos. (Bourdieu 2004, 47)

The autonomy of a given scientific community is not something that is established from the day of its “creation” but is always the result of a long and arduous historical achievement. Bourdieu traces this process of autonomization to that interval of time between the work accomplished by Copernicus and the creation of the Royal Society in London that we commonly call the scientific revolution. The goal achieved by this long historical process was precisely to ensure that science could achieve an activity as independent as possible from conditioning from other fields (religious for example). A question now arises: How is the transformation of the field possible if it always tends to reproduce and strengthen itself? Changes within the field are generated by changes related to its boundaries, which in turn challenge the very definition of the

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field and its stakes. History is thus determined by a progressive alternation of “symbolic revolutions” linked as cause or effect “the sudden arrival of new entrants endowed with new resources” (Bourdieu 2004, 34) that make possible the evolution of the field. On the side of the praxeology of individual social agents, scientists who revolutionize the “paradigmatic” status of normal science are always heretics placed on this liminal and frontier zone between scientific disciplines. This kind of heterodox positioning is often what enables scientific innovation beyond the reproduction of disciplinary orthodoxy (Bourdieu 2004, 68–69). The frontier is thus the place where that “essential tension” between tradition and iconoclasm of which Kuhn already spoke is most exercised (Kuhn 1977). Agents clash within the scientific field to have a way of knowing recognized and consequently affirmed. Dominants, that is, those who are recognized by the community as such, impose, by their mere presence in a field, the principles they enact in their practical actions as a universal norm. Of all things, the practice of the dominant is thus the measure. Indeed, this establishes the correct mode of action in the field, with discrediting effect against those who do not conform. Those who possess scientific capital have the power to determine the structure of the field, thereby producing the respective objects of research by directing on them not only their own investment but also that of all competitors to the field. Revolutionary innovation is always contested, as it has as its natural effect the destruction of the distribution structure of capital and consequently the reduction (or cancellation) of the profits of those agents tied to the old structure. The revolutionary is described as one who is not content to play within the limits imposed by the game as passed on to him by his schooling. The pedagogical function, both here and in the Kuhnian perspective, is to reproduce a paradigm by showing the state of play as perfectly irenic. Another model of epistemological struggle, brought by Bourdieu, perfectly traces the Kuhnian model whose terminology he also uses: Struggles over priority often pit a scientist who has discovered a simple fact, often an anomaly in terms of current knowledge, against a scientist who, with the aid of more advanced theoretical equipment, has constituted it as a scientific fact, a component in a new way of understanding the world. (Bourdieu 2004, 63)

Following a Canguilhemian approach, Bourdieu argues that “One of the particularities of scientific revolutions is that they introduce a radical transformation while conserving the previous achievements. So they are revolutions that conserve past gains – without being conservative revolutions aimed at overthrowing the present to restore the past”(Bourdieu 2004, 64). However, this aspect has an essential correlate in the structure of scientific society itself, which poses a constant challenge between conservatives – those in a dominant position in the field – and innovators. Scientific revolutions have the effect of transforming the hierarchy of importances: things considered unimportant may be reactivated by a new way of doing science, and, conversely, whole sectors of science may be overtaken, rendered obsolete. The struggles within the field are struggles to be or remain contemporary. Someone who introduces a new legitimate way of doing things shakes the power relations and introduces time. If nothing happened, there would be no time; the conservative agents would like to abolish time, to eternize the present

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state of the field, the state of the structure that is favourable to their interests because they occupy the dominant positions within it, whereas the innovators, without even seeking to ‘compete’ with anyone, introduce change by their mere intervention and bring about the specific temporality of the field. (Bourdieu 2004, 64)

The scientific revolution comes to be framed as the insertion of temporality within the field. The conservative scientist would like to eliminate temporality from the field in order to eternalize his own “status quo” as dominant. In the revolutionary upheaval, the hierarchies between the positions of the respective competitors are disrupted causing the redefinition of the investment in the field (the goal to be pursued), rendering entire disciplinary fields inactual and outdated. In the Bourdieusian view, it is the dialectical interplay between structured and structuring structures that produces the possibility of change within the scientific field. As is the case in other fields, the scientific field produces its own form of nomos, corresponding to a set of principles of vision and division that represent the construction of reality operated by a specific discipline, irreducible to that of another field, which precisely takes the name of disciplinary eye (embodied in the habitus of the singular social agents). Note also that scientific disciplines produce a “disciplinary habitus” that operates as a “historical transcendental,” as a pattern of perception and evaluation (Bourdieu 2000, 175–176). A “discipline is characterized by a set of socio-transcendental conditions, constitutive of a style” (Bourdieu 2004, 65). The incorporation of this disciplinary habitus acts as an embedded system of censure on what can be said or thought and what cannot be said or thought within the sphere of scientific production. Here, Bourdieu plays with the characteristic and revealing ambiguity of the term discipline, in one sense understood as a scientific-disciplinary field, on the other as the imposition of rules of action, of patterns of perception that operate as censorship. There is also another dimension of the right of entry: that which imposes, on the social agents of the scientific field, submission to a particular form of interest, the interest in disinterestedness. “Valid testimony was a relation of honour between men of honour, between ‘disinterested free men, gathered freely around experimental phenomena and creating the fact attested’” (Bourdieu 2004, 52). But this particular form of interest, which is connected to the reproduction and acquisition of specific capital, is a victim of the structure of the symbolic exchange economy. Taking his starting point from Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, Bourdieu argues that the exchange economy, within the scientific field, possesses a symbolic character and must therefore, in order to assert itself, disguise its own logic of operation and present itself as disinterested. For Bourdieu, however, the economy of the symbolic is not based on equal exchanges, but there is a very substantial value gap between the dominated and the dominant. Science partakes of the ambiguity of the symbolic economy, in that the relations within the field are, as we have said, based on recognition (and consequently recognition). The Bourdieusian project, as already mentioned, aims at the search for an alternative position to both logicism and relativism. The closure upon itself of the field through the process of autonomization would be “the historical principle of the

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genesis of reason and the exercise of its normativity” (Bourdieu 2004, 54). It becomes possible to say that reason emerges from history (without the need for a metaphysical-transcendental foundation), but that it is not subjected to a form of relativistic reductionism.

Beyond Logicism and Relativism: Historicist Rationalism It has been seen that one of Bourdieu’s intentions is to overcome the antinomy between subjectivism and objectivism, which this author considers “false.” But it is not the only one Bourdieu rails against. Also constituting another polemical target, regarding the scientific field, is the antinomy between logicism and relativism described as an evolution and/or variant of the old controversy between dogmatism and skepticism. As we previously highlighted (cf. para. 4), Bourdieu identified a series of conceptual antinomies that need a critical overcoming such as logicism/ realism; dogmatism/skepticism; constructivism-idealist/positivism-realist; absolutism-logicist/relativism-historicist; and idealism/realism. Science, for Bourdieu, must instead pursue a realist rationalism. Is it possible to say that science is a product of history while at the same time producing trans-historical truths? We have to acknowledge that reason did not fall from heaven as a mysterious and forever inexplicable gift, and that it is therefore historical through and through; but we are not forced to conclude, as is often supposed, that it is reducible to history. It is in history, and in history alone, that we must seek the principle of the relative independence of reason from the history of which it is the product; or, more precisely, in the strictly historical, but entirely specific logic through which the exceptional universes in which the singular history of reason is fulfilled were established. (Bourdieu 2000, 109)

This project in Pascalian Meditations is also called “rationalistic historicism.” If one accepts that scientific reason is a product of history and that it asserts itself ever more strongly with the growth of the relative autonomy of the scientific field with respect to external constraints and determinations [. . .] then one is led to reject both of the commonly accepted alternatives: ‘logicist’ absolutism, which claims to give a priori ‘logical foundations’ to scientific method, and ‘historicist’ or ‘psychologistic’ relativism, which, in the formulation that Quine gives of it, for example, holds that the failure of the attempt to reduce mathematics to logic leaves no other recourse than to ‘naturalize epistemology’ by referring it to psychology. (Bourdieu 2000, 107)

Bourdieu derives from the concept of autonomy of the field (i.e., that form of its closure to external conditioning, such as religious, political, etc.) the idea that the social agents who participate in it are the best prepared and suited to understand, criticize, and refute it. The internal struggle within the field turns out to be regulated by socially established norms that aim at the monopoly of the scientifically legitimate representation of reality. Researchers tacitly agree to accept the arbitration of the real by setting themselves, in fact, as the goal of research, the production of a realistic representation of the real. The ontological postulate underlying this

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discourse is obviously that there is an objective reality, which turns out to be the stake of the scientific field. This postulate imposes another in turn, namely, that about the world one cannot say just anything but that there is a meaning, an order, a logic, in short, something to be understood in the world (Bourdieu 2004, 69). One of the assumptions, of the analysis proposed by our author, takes its starting point from the idea that the scientific subject is not a single agent but a field absolutely peculiar to others because it is capable of producing trans-historical truths. However, it is necessary at this point to question a number of postulates of epistemology. Bourdieu argues that it is necessary to substitute, for the now classic subject-object relation, the study of the relation of various subjects to each other vis-à-vis the subject-object problem. This approach makes it possible to go beyond both the realist view – which would like to give scientific discourse the status of a reflection of reality – and the relativist view according to which science is the product of a construction oriented by interests and cognitive structures producing multiple worldviews. According to Bourdieusian historicist rationalism, the principles of the relative independence of reason are to be found in the historical and social structure of knowledge itself. The degree of objectivity of the scientific product turns out to be conditioned by the way in which conflicts within science are regulated. Even the epistemological principles and ethical-communicative norms shared by science are not the result of “immaculate conception” but the fruit of the “peculiar history of the scientific reason” (Bourdieu 1991a). “Epistemological rules are nothing other than the social rules and regularities inscribed in structures and/ or in habitus, particularly as regards the way of conducting a discussion (the rules of argumentation) and settling a conflict” (Bourdieu 2004, 71). These norms are the result of a progressive autonomization that the scientific field has implemented with respect to conditioning, for the most part, of a social, political, and religious nature. The right of access to a field presupposes the implicit acceptance of those communicative and argumentative norms that make possible the validation of scientific facts. Dialectical reason, dialogue, and critical examination by the field’s competitors allow, in the Bourdieusian view, the legitimation of knowledge through validation by the scientific community. Each field (discipline) is the site of a specific legality (a nomos), a product of history, which is embodied in the objective regularities of the functioning of the field and, more precisely, in the mechanisms governing the circulation of information, in the logic of the allocation of rewards, etc., and in the scientific habitus produced by the field, which are the condition of the functioning of the field. (Bourdieu 2004, 83)

At the same time, however, according to the methodological principle of the “illusion of transparency,” it is not possible to judge the validity of a fact or theory from the analysis of the intentions that produced it (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 15). Consequently, the validity of a product of the scientific field remains irreducible to its conditions of production. Scientific knowledge is nothing more than what survives present, past, and future (socially and culturally determined) objections. According to such a perspective, it is precisely the structure that the scientific field has historically acquired in its internal self-regulation – according to the specific

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nomos of “self-interest” and “truth-seeking” – that guarantees the veracity of the results produced in it, by virtue of having passed through the scrutiny of history and the scientific community. Note, however, that for Bourdieu, this process is not conceived as irreversible. As the conditions of relative autonomy of the scientific field with respect to other social fields change, the internal norms of validation and control may also transform, and scientific reason may once again come under check. For this reason, constant epistemological vigilance over the conditions of production of scientific knowledge is necessary. It becomes clear that the resulting idea of objectivity is not based on the actions of an individual scientist but on those of the coordinated community. Objectivity depends on ‘the agreement of a class of observers about what is recorded by the measuring devices in a very precise experimental situation’. So one can say that there is no objective reality independent of the conditions of its observation, without calling into question the fact that what manifests itself, once these conditions are determined, retains a character of objectivity. (Bourdieu 2004, 74)

Every scientific act is in fact a social construction: Newton and Einstein, Bourdieu argues, are not classifiable as “individual geniuses” because they worked in collectives with tools that incorporate objectified history into the scientific field. Individual constructions then turn out to be historical and collective constructions, regulated by the principles with which the scientific field has endowed itself (its internal norms) so that common goals can be pursued with the possibility of excluding those who transgress them. Universalization and departicularization, which are possible through this process of social circulation of a theory, are inseparably social and intellectual in character. In this sense, it is possible to speak of a socio-logical process of verification. According to this perspective, a scientific fact is realized as such only when the totality of the structure of the scientific field has cooperated in its formation; in this sense, scientific reason is historical and social. The fact is won, constructed, observed, in and through the dialectical communication among subjects, that is to say through the process of verification, collective production of truth, in and through negotiation, transaction, and also homologation, ratification by the explicitly expressed consensus – homologein – [. . .] A fact truly becomes a scientific fact only if it is recognized. The construction is socially determined in a twofold way: on the one hand, by the position of the laboratory or scientist within the field; on the other hand, by the categories of perception associated with the position of the receiver (with the effect of imposition, authority, being that much greater the lower this position is in relative terms). [. . .] A true idea has an intrinsic force within the scientific universe, in certain social conditions. (Bourdieu 2004, 73)

The true idea imposes itself on competitors in the field because of its intrinsic force. Given the very high right of access to the scientific field, the agents involved cooperate in verification work. But how can they, competing agents, arrive at a state of homologein? Homologein does not correspond to the common dialogue between any social agents but is that form of discourse which, based on the pursuit of regulated dialogue, allows agreement to be reached on rational grounds among the

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participants. It becomes clear that the resulting idea of objectivity is not based on the actions of an individual scientist but on those of the scientific community. The universalization and departicularization that are possible through this process of social circulation of a theory are inseparably social and intellectual in character. This is why it is possible to speak of a socio-logical process of verification. Recall that this model of verification obtains value only when the field reaches such a degree of autonomy that it can base this verification on exclusively rational principles. The more international a field is, the more autonomous it turns out to be, in that it is untied from that form of power of a temporal nature that we discussed earlier. The autonomy of the field provides the means by which that universalization, depersonalization, and departicularization of which the scientific fact is the fruit are possible. What are the strictly epistemological consequences of these analyses? Struggles for the monopoly of the scientifically legitimate representation owe their specificity (one should say their exceptionality) to the fact that, in contrast particularly to what is observed in the artistic field, the logic of competition leads (or forces) scientists to apply at every moment all the available cognitive instruments and all the means of verification that have been accumulated in the course of the whole history of science, and so to give its full efficacy to the arbitrating power of ‘reality’ (as constructed and structured in accordance with socially defined principles). (Bourdieu 2004, 77)

The producers within the field have as their only customers the most critical and competent of the field’s competitors. According to the Bourdieusian perspective, reason can thus be rescued from being founded on transcendent principles and deus ex machina, asserting instead that the origin of scientific reason is rooted in history. That is not to say, however, that reason is condemned to relativize itself, since the struggles among competitors to assert their views are governed by the logic of the best argument (in accordance with the norms outlined above), allowing the production of trans-historical truths. Paradoxically, being subject to social constraints (on which interested struggles among participants depend) favors rational exchange as long as it is obedient to the established rules for universalization. Objectivity is an intersubjective product of the scientific field that results based on the shared assumptions in that field. To conclude, for Bourdieu, science, and therefore scientific reason, would be the result of a historical process, in a sense of a construction – but the product of the scientific field remains irreducible to the conditions that produced it.

Reflexivity and the Social History of Social Sciences The epistemological, historiographical, and sociological reflections proposed by Bourdieu lead, finally, to the theme of reflexivity that we have already evoked several times. As demonstrated precisely by the articles we have considered and especially La spécificité du champ scientifique et Les conditions sociales du progrès de la raison, the question of reflexivity is present in Bourdieusian thought from the earliest works (see also Bourdieu 2022b). To speak of epistemic reflexivity for

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Bourdieu is to speak of the study of the conditions of knowledge, further referring to the task that the social sciences take on regarding research aimed at “objectivating the subject of objectivation (Bourdieu 2004, 88).” What is attempted to show is that the sociologist (understood as social scientist) is uniquely capable “To bring to light what is ‘the hidden’ par excellence, what escapes the gaze of science because it is hidden in the very gaze of the scientist, the transcendental unconscious” (Bourdieu 2004, 88). Given this main function, sociology, in order to obtain the status of science itself and thus be legitimized for this type of research, must be able to apply the method it applies to the other sciences to itself as well. “Social science has the privilege of being able to take its own functioning as an object and to be able to bring to consciousness the constraints that weigh on scientific practice: it can thus make use of consciousness, and of the knowledge that it possesses of its functions and functioning, to try to remove some of the obstacles to the progress of consciousness and knowledge. Far from ruining [in this way], as it has been said by many, its own foundations, by condemning to relativism, such a reflexive science can on the contrary provide the principles of a scientific Realpolitik aiming at assuring the progress of the scientific reason” (Bourdieu 2022b, 98). It is necessarily historicize the subject of historicization and objectify the subject of objectivation, that is, seek those conditions of possibility that enable science (and the social sciences included) to escape relativistic condemnation. It becomes clear that this method of objectivation must also be put to work on the sociologist himself. In fact not all sciences have the same degree of development in that they do not possess the same degree of autonomy. The most obvious reason is the historical one. Each fielddiscipline possesses a history of its own, marked mainly by its struggles to gain autonomy. The social sciences, for example, do not yet possess, in the Bourdieusian view, a sufficient degree of autonomy to permit progress toward objectivity. This leads Bourdieu to two different ways of applying reflexivity: the first of a historiographical order and the second of a methodological order. Among the main innovations made by Bourdieusian sociology is that it has paved the way for a sociological investigation of the history of the human and social sciences. Indeed, this is an aspect that is largely neglected by strands of research such as Science and Technology Studies and SSK, which have traditionally been concerned with analyzing almost exclusively case studies drawn from the natural sciences. As emerges from a number of unpublished writings, it is precisely the social history of the social sciences that plays a strategic role in the epistemological strengthening and emancipation of these sciences (see Bourdieu 2022b). The concepts of field, habitus, and capital provide a useful tool to overcome those naive “internalist” or purely intellectual reconstructions of the history of the social sciences. This is a rich line of research still continued and further developed today by various scholars of Bourdieusian orientation. In this context, the sociology of academic and intellectual fields proposed in works such as Homo Academicus (Bourdieu 1988), The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Bourdieu 1991b), and research on the dynamics of international circulation of ideas (Bourdieu 1999, Bourdieu 2023) were some of its main sources of stimulus. Methodologically, on the other hand, reflexivity translates into a process of incorporating a set of principles into the very practice of sociological research. In this

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author’s perspective, the sciences then needs the work of the sociologist, as the latter is able to bring to light a series of fallacies that are continually being reproduced in the field. From this point of view, for example, Bourdieu clearly states: “many epistemological conflicts can be understood from an analysis of the conditions under which sociological researchers are recruited” (Bourdieu 2022b, 38). Bourdieu also argues that the methodological structure of epistemic reflexivity should not be applied ex post to the opus operatum but should be, for the sociologist, an integral part of his scientific habitus so that he can act on the modus operandi a priori. Pierre Bourdieu devotes the very last pages of his last course at the Collège de France to a reflexive self-analysis aimed precisely at objectifying himself. Moreover, between October and December 2001, he devotes himself to writing a new, expanded, and reworked version of precisely the last chapter of Science of Science and Reflexivity, which will be published as a stand-alone text under the title Sketch for a Self-Analysis (Bourdieu 2008). Such a posture is aimed at the consideration, within one’s own biographical journey of those three points we have listed above, so that we can objectify those implicit categories that, in our practical actions, we continually enact. Objectifying the implicit patterns of one’s habitus means having the possibility of overcoming those false assumptions so as to be able to obtain an objective view.

Conclusion This chapter highlighted how Bourdieu proposed an original approach in the field of metascientific debates compared to the majority currents of thought of his time (mainly historical epistemology, Mertonian sociology of science, and SSK). After a summary of this author’s intellectual trajectory (para. 1), it was shown how Bourdieu integrated some tools from French historical epistemology with those of classical sociology in order to construct an innovative perspective in epistemology of social sciences (para. 2). Bourdieusian social theory was also marked by a strong historical sensibility on the basis of which this author’s main theoretical devices such as that of “field,” “capital,” and “habitus” took shape. Attentive to the work of professional historians, Bourdieu proposed a conceptualization of conflicts between different social temporalities (as the engine of historical discontinuities) in order to overcome certain disciplinary naiveté prevalent in the community of historians (para. 3). On this theoretical basis, Bourdieu elaborated an original perspective in the sociology of science aimed at showing the articulation of the power structures underlying the production of knowledge and the dynamics of the acquisition of a relative autonomy of this context of cultural production with respect to other social fields (para. 4). This description of the scientific field also hinged on a profound process of historicization without condemning scientific reason to a process of relativization (para. 5). Finally, it has been illustrated how, for Bourdieu, the analysis of the dynamics of scientific knowledge production cannot be divorced from a reflexive practice on the part of the sociologist who must necessarily objectify the conditions of the objectification practice itself (para. 6).

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Cross-References ▶ Gaston Bachelard and Historical Epistemology: A New Perspective for the History of Science in the Twentieth Century ▶ Historical Epistemology: A German Connection ▶ The Beginning of the Epistemological History of Science: Gaston Bachelard’s Responsibility Acknowledgments This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101026146.

References Bachelard G (1936) La Dialectique de la durée. PUF, Paris Bachelard G (1949) Le rationalisme appliqué. PUF, Paris Bachelard G (1953) Le matérialisme rationnel. PUF, Paris Bourdieu P (1975) La spécificité du champ scientifique et les conditions sociales du progrès de la raison. Sociologie et sociétés 7(1):91–118. https://doi.org/10.7202/001089ar Bourdieu P (1976) Le champ scientifique. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 2(2):88–104. https://doi.org/10.3406/arss.1976.3454 Bourdieu P (1977) Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Bourdieu P (1979) Algeria 1960: the disenchantment of the world: the sense of honour: the Kabyle house or the world reversed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Bourdieu P (1988) Homo academicus. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto Bourdieu P (1990) The logic of practice. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto Bourdieu P (1991a) The peculiar history of scientific reason. Sociol Forum 6(1):3–26 Bourdieu P (1991b) The political ontology of Martin Heidegger. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto Bourdieu P (1997) Les usages sociaux de la science: pour une sociologie clinique du champ scientifique. Quae, Paris Bourdieu P (1999) The social conditions of the international circulation of ideas. In bourdieu: a critical reader, ed. Richard Shusterman, 220–228. Oxford; Malden: Wiley-Blackwell Bourdieu P (2000) Pascalian meditations. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto Bourdieu P (2004) Science of science and reflexivity. Polity, Cambridge Bourdieu P (2008) Sketch for a self-analysis. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Bourdieu P (2014) On the state: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992. A cura di Patrick Champagne, Remi Lenoir, Franck Poupeau, e Marie-Christine Rivière. Tradotto da David Fernbach. Polity, Cambridge/Malden Bourdieu P (2022a) Microcosmes. Théorie des champs. Raison D’agir, Paris Bourdieu P (2022b) Retour sur la réflexivité, EHESS, Paris Bourdieu P (2023) Impérialismes: Circulation internationale des idèes et luttes pour l’universel. Raisons d’agir, Paris Bourdieu P, Chartier R (1988) Le Sociologue et l’historien. Agone, Paris Bourdieu P, Krais B (2005) Entretien avec Pierre Bourdieu – recueilli par Beate Krais en décembre 1988. In: di P Bourdieu, J-C Chamboredon, J-C Passeron (eds) Le métier de sociologue, 5a ed. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York Bourdieu P, Wacquant L (1992) An invitation to reflexive sociology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

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History of Science as History of Our Best Errors: Joseph Agassi’s Critical Historiography of Science Stefano Gattei

in memoriam Joseph Agassi (1927–2023) dear teacher and friend The past is, by definition, a datum which nothing in the future will change. But the knowledge of the past is something progressive which is constantly transforming and perfecting itself. Marc Bloch (1949/1953), p. 58. There is nothing more necessary to the man of science than its history, and the logic of discovery [. . .]: the way error is detected, the use of hypothesis, of imagination, the mode of testing. John E. E. Dalberg-Acton (Lord Acton) Cambridge University Library, Add. MSS 5011:266

Contents Introduction – The Historian’s Tasks: Explanation, Reconstruction, Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Inductivist Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Conventionalist Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Critical Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Popperian Path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A (Keplerian) Footnote to Agassi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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S. Gattei (*) Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_8

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Abstract

In his classic Towards an Historiography of Science (1963) – and in other related works spanning over his entire career (including Faraday as a Natural Philosopher, 1971; Science and Its History, 2008; and The Very Idea of Modern Science, 2013) – Joseph Agassi presents his wide-ranging and original understanding of the history of science. It emerges from the criticism of two distinctive approaches, each informed by the uncritical acceptance, on the part of historians, of two philosophies of science: inductivism (scientific theories emerge from facts) and conventionalism (scientific theories are mathematical frameworks for classifying facts). Both produce unsatisfactory historical reconstructions, in which errors are either concealed or condemned. Karl Popper’s philosophy, by contrast, allows for a picture in which science grows from the recognition and criticism of our best and wisest errors. The chapter presents and discusses Agassi’s proposal for a critical historiography of science, setting it against the background of Popper’s groundbreaking works in the philosophy of science. And it calls attention to what is possibly Agassi’s most relevant contribution to the historiography of science: regarding the history of metaphysics as integral to the history of scientific research, Agassi celebrates the wedding of the history of science with the history of ideas – a wedding that, unfortunately, is still widely contrasted by contemporary historians of science. Keywords

Inductivism · Conventionalism · Role of errors · Scientific controversy · Critical rationalism · Problem situation · Metaphysics · History of ideas

Introduction – The Historian’s Tasks: Explanation, Reconstruction, Assessment The principal task of the historian of science is to explain past science and describe how scientists accomplished their work. Neither part of that task is easy, and since some reading of the history of science is as close as most people ever come to learning about older science, much of the burden of its preservation and understanding falls upon the historian. Unlike literature and the arts, which can for the most part speak to anyone who takes the trouble to examine them with care and sensitivity, science is mostly technical and requires various kinds of prior knowledge just to be intelligible. Moreover, in the course of their development, the sciences have undergone changes so great that in many cases neither the methods nor the subject matter of earlier science is self-explanatory even to the reader who is familiar with contemporary science. We are all accustomed to modern renditions of Euclid’s geometry: were we to read the Elements as Euclid actually wrote them; however, they would require a much greater effort, even just to understand the very first definitions.

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Medieval physics is conducted through a qualitative and philosophical manner of description that was made obsolete by the work of Galileo and Newton. In turn, the physics of Galileo and Newton employs mathematical techniques that dropped out of school curricula in the nineteenth century and earlier. And whatever becomes obsolete eventually becomes unintelligible. The task of describing (or, better, of reconstructing) how earlier scientists worked, what they saw as problems and what solutions they deemed acceptable, what procedures led to their discoveries, and what work of their predecessors or contemporaries they made use of – all this is even more difficult. The problem is already inherent in the subject, for scientific writing often reports only the most logical and most direct path to specific results, omitting the less organized and roundabout ways followed by the original investigations. There are occasional exceptions, of course: Archimedes wrote the Method, explaining how he was able to discover a number of important and, in some cases, surprising theorems that could later be subjected to rigorous proof. Johannes Kepler, in the Astronomia nova (1609), described in detail (although not quite completely) the ingenious but very laborious and very indirect procedures he went through in analyzing the motions of Mars and the Earth, through which he formulated the first two laws of planetary motion (see Stephenson 1987 and Voelkel 2001). Yet such accounts are highly uncommon and not entirely reliable. No scientist writes for later historians, and the virtues of scientific exposition are, above all, rigor, purity, and avoidance of the superfluous. The model was already set in antiquity – for mathematics by Euclid, for everything else by Aristotle, particularly in his biological writings – and has changed very little to the present day. The historian’s most challenging, and most interesting, task is to get beneath the surface of the finished work in order to reconstruct the motivation and procedures that led to its creation. Closely connected with explanation and reconstruction is the more problematical matter of judgment, or assessment. There are some criteria, of course. An oftenquoted remark by David Hilbert is that the importance of a scientific work can be judged by the number of earlier publications it makes superfluous to read. Another criterion is durability, since a work that continues to be in use for possibly hundreds of years is certainly of interest. Finally, one may note to what degree a particular work is productive of further developments, opening new fields of investigation or providing new methods applicable to a variety of problems in previously unrelated subjects, or else connecting domains previously deemed independent from one another. But the difficulty with such criteria is that they are often not very interesting, and their application usually requires little more than compiling catalogues. While they may allow one to say what is important, they do not necessarily allow one to say what is admirable – which is, after all, what judgment is all about. For this, one must turn to more subjective criteria, inquiring into the difficulty and the significance, both contemporary and historical, of problems and into the ingenuity and success of solutions within the bounds of period knowledge and procedures. In what follows, I will present the outline and discuss Joseph Agassi’s assessment of two such criteria, as well as his own proposal for a critical historiography of

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science, as presented in the first comprehensive study of the subject and its later articulations. This study was a consequence of Popper’s challenge to the dominant methodological theories of science and aimed at showing, on the basis of a number of examples from historiographical works, that developments in the history of science may be better understood and described within a Popperian methodological framework, rather than by appealing to the established frameworks of inductivism and conventionalism. A pupil of Karl Popper’s, Joseph Agassi (1927–2023) was one of the most inspiring, challenging, and thought-provoking philosophers of our time. A “philosophical all-rounder” as Ian Jarvie and Nathaniel Laor aptly described him, employing a cricket metaphor – see Jarvie and Laor (1995), which offers an introductory account of Agassi’s multifaceted contributions (that have since then significantly increased) – not only has he contributed to every major field in philosophy (philosophy of the exact sciences, metaphysics, philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of technology, philosophy of education, moral philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, psychology and psychiatry, not to mention history and historiography of science), but just as an all-rounder in cricket can play superbly in all positions, so has Agassi made a mark in various subfields of philosophy and superbly played all available roles: scholar, publicist, speaker, discussant, and above all teacher, always engaging peers and encouraging students to widen their cultural horizons and uphold their intellectual independence. (If I may add a personal note: had it not been for Agassi – and for Karl Popper, who changed my life more than anybody else – I would not have devoted myself to history and philosophy of science. For this, I cannot thank him enough).

The Inductivist Approach In his classic Towards an Historiography of Science (1963) – which, together with a number of other works (including The Very Idea of Modern Science, 2013, and Faraday as a Natural Philosopher, 1971, not to mention a few important related papers, most of which have been usefully gathered in Science and Its History, 2008; in fact, The Very Idea of Modern Science is Agassi’s first written and last published work on the subject, being Agassi’s PhD dissertation, completed in 1956 at LSE, under the supervision of Karl Popper; the most important historiographical paper not included in Science and Its History is possibly Agassi 1973, which, however, had already been reprinted in Science and Society (1981)), present and exemplify his wide-ranging understanding of the historiography of science – Joseph Agassi discusses two criteria for historical assessment, both stemming from the uncritical acceptance of two philosophies of science: “the inductivist philosophy of science, according to which scientific theories emerge from facts,” and “the conventionalist philosophy of science, according to which scientific theories are mathematical pigeonholes for classifying facts” (Agassi 1963, 2008, p. 119). Both are unsatisfactory, Agassi says, although the latter improves on the former.

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The inductivist philosophy, which characterizes most classical or contemporary history of science, bears the stamp of Francis Bacon’s understanding of science. His philosophy basically divides thinkers into two categories, variously characterized as right and wrong, scientific and nonscientific, open-minded and dogmatic, observers of facts and speculators, and so on. Truth is out there for anybody to see: it only requires that we honestly do our job. Accordingly, open-minded researches look at the world and diligently record the facts they observe; no opinions are formed until a significant number of facts allow them to lead to sound, scientific judgements. By contrast, prejudiced researches advance bold speculations, conjure hypotheses, and end up seeing the world through the distorting lenses of their own preconceptions, forcing facts to fit their predetermined schemes. Prejudiced researches, that is, cannot bring themselves to see possible contradictions between their views and the facts; they set themselves in a position that prevents them from the very possibility of correcting their mistakes and end up adopting a dogmatic attitude. Yet, Agassi notices, “once a person, historian or not, accepts a division of mankind into openminded and closed-minded, he almost invariably finds himself on the right side. And being on the right side, he is assured by Bacon that he can see facts as they are” (Ibid., p. 126). The inductivist historian is, by definition, open-minded: he sees facts correctly; he knows who holds a correct theory and who does not. In his picture of the history of science, all events are clearly painted either in black or white. According to the inductivist approach, scientific disciplines must display an impeccable pedigree: from close observations to carefully following the various steps up the ladder of increasing generalization, less general theories invariably precede more general ones, and general theories must have consequences that lead to new discoveries and inventions. To offer but one famous example: It is to our immortal countryman Bacon that we owe the broad announcement of this grand and fertile principle; and the developement [sic] of the idea, that the whole of natural philosophy consists entirely of a series of inductive generalizations, commencing with the most circumstantially stated particulars, and carried up to universal laws, or axioms, which comprehend in their statements every subordinate degree of generality, and of a corresponding series of inverted reasoning from generals to particulars, by which these axioms are traced back into their remotest consequences, and all particular propositions deduced from them; as well those by whose immediate consideration we rose to their discovery, as those of which we had no previous knowledge. (Herschel 1830, §96, p. 104; the title page of the book bears the image of a bust of Bacon)

In so doing, the inductivist historian of science makes the history of a particular science an essential part of that very science and ends up compiling large masses of historical details that are meant to prevent any questions or doubts. Revolutions are allowed, but at the cost of regarding the overthrow of a view as proof that ever having held such view was pointless. No room is left for critical thinking, nor for the consideration of what Agassi rightly regards as the most important factors in the history of science, namely, contending schools of scientific thought. Whereas Agassi sees the history of science as “the history of the choice of central problems and of the various schools of thought that attempted to answer these problems” (Agassi 1963,

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2008, p. 150) – hence the strong affinity and intertwinement between the history of science and the history of ideas, which remain distinct but are brought together within the broader context of a metaphysical research program – inductivism tells us that science begins not with problems (as Popper famously observed), but with observations of hard and fast facts: no time needs to be wasted on free intellectual choices based on preconceived ideas. The inductivists’ blindness to the fact that we can learn from criticism is fundamentally unhistorical.

The Conventionalist Approach The golden age of inductivism – its faults and myths notwithstanding, inductivist history of science produced remarkable works, such as Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments, London: James Dodsley, Joseph Johnson and Thomas Cadell, 1767; Pierre Simon de Laplace, Exposition du système du monde, Paris: Imprimerie du Cercle Social, 1796, 2 vols.; Thomas Thomspon, The History of Chemistry, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831, 2 vols; William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences: From the Earliest to the Present Time, London: John W. Parker, 1837, 3 vols. (it must be noted, however, that Whewell was partly Baconian and partly Kantian); and John Munro, Pioneers of Electricity: Or Short Lives of the Great Electricians, London: The Religious Tract Society, 1890 – came to an end with the rise of the conventionalist philosophy of Pierre Duhem and Jules Henri Poincaré, at the end of the nineteenth century. According to their understanding of science, scientific theories are neither true nor false, but offer general (mathematical) frameworks within which to store empirical information. Which grid to adopt in order to sort evidence is a question of choice, and simplicity is the criterion: we may change the grid, or rearrange it, without thereby implying its falsehood or unscientific character. And since theories may fit facts with a higher or lower degree of simplicity, the latter becomes a criterion not of absolute, but of relative merit: simplicity provides a substitute for the absolute criterion of merit of the inductivist. As demonstrated by Duhem’s own works, the conventionalist view that a simple theory is preferable to a less simple one – not a true theory to a false one – has proved to be a useful tool in the hands of historians. The key element, however, is not that simplicity is of particular relevance; rather, it is the introduction of a new criterion of graded assessment to replace the old, inductivist criterion that rigidly divides theories into bad and good ones, black and white. Serious studies of the history of science require the exercise of judgement and demand comparison of different theories against a given historical background. The conventionalist historian of science avoids the black-and-white pictures of the inductivist historian by accommodating varying degrees of simplicity, thereby adopting a comparative method. Conventionalism allows for more imaginative, multifaceted, and resourceful accounts, getting rid of one of the chief claim of inductivism, namely, that theories are empirical, or evidence-based. The price for that, however, is that of viewing theoretical science as purely mathematical and empirical science as the fitting

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together of theories and facts (with varying degrees of simplicity, depending on the facts and theories available). In the eyes of the conventionalists, history of science is the history of the step-by-step development of simple theories, where all theories are indebted to their predecessors. Such continuity theory is historically important, as it represents a source of a set of problems concerning the extent and causes of continuities and disruptions throughout the history of science. Science never starts afresh: Where inductivist historians relate the story of a black theory and of a white theory, conventionalist historians will try to show the indebtedness of the allegedly white thinker to the allegedly black one. (Agassi 1963, 2008, p. 153)

Still, conventionalist historians are seriously limited. For, by allowing simplicity as their sole criterion of choice, they cannot make much sense of controversies extending over a long period of time: the intellectual obstinacy, dissatisfaction, and restlessness that are so characteristic of scientific research escape the wide mesh of their sieves. In Agassi’s own words: Both the emergence and the comparative methods are, in toto, post mortem procedures; they miss the very life and living force of science, its problems and difficulties, its struggles and disappointments. The conventionalists have done much to move away from the picture of the history of science as a smooth success story, but their account still leaves much to be desired. (Ibid., p. 169)

The Critical Approach Neither inductivist nor conventionalist historians can avoid being wise after the event: the former, because they keep the path of science clean by sweeping errors under the carpet, and the latter because, while allowing for errors, they consider criticism as condemnation. And yet, Agassi argues, we may avoid being wise after the event. Trying to see the world through the eyes of our predecessors would let us better appreciate our heritage: knowledge of the struggles that led to our present conditions would help us avoid taking them for granted and understand them more thoroughly. The only way to do so, he suggests, is by appealing to Popper’s “situational logic,” (see Popper 1957, 19613, §31) which allows for the reconstruction of problem situations of past thinkers by appealing to theories that are open to criticism. Scientists themselves tend to forget the problem situations they were immerged before the event, and the series of false starts, blind alleys and failures they encountered before their breakthrough. Historians, in turn, tend to be wise after the event because it is hard for them to realize how the world looked before the event took place and the scientific errors that the event corrected. In so doing, they tend to misrepresent, underestimate, and, in fact, belittle the great difficulty of having produced the event, or its intellectual value:

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The great merit of the conventionalist method is rooted in its daring revival of old errors, and the serious shortcomings of this method are rooted in the fear of admitting that the revived errors were indeed errors. The conventionalists too are still under Bacon’s spell; they too still cannot boldly admit the existence of errors of which humanity can be proud. By contrast, Popper’s doctrine of errors treats most of human greatest intellectual achievements as errors to be proud of, and human greatest discoveries of facts as the refutations of such great errors. (Agassi 1963, 2008, p. 174)

By regarding “to err” and “to be wrong” as synonyms, Agassi notices, ordinary language – “especially in the present day, when it has become the idol of a philosophical cult” (ibid.; this remark, although written 60 years ago, still applies) – fails to account for the crucial differences of different kinds of errors: valueless and irresponsible ones and those committed responsibly and judiciously. In so doing, ordinary language confuses and conflates what ought to be carefully considered and distinguished, thereby implying that all errors are faults and all those who err are wrong – hence, all errors are to be avoided. By contrast, it is by allowing for respectable errors (by calling attention to errors that were easy to endorse and difficult to criticize, that is) that we can successfully avoid being wise after the event. In science, Popper argued, problem situations are the result of three factors: the discovery of an inconsistency within the ruling theory; the discovery of an inconsistency between theory and experiment (experimental results contradict, i.e., falsify, a theory) and the relation between the theory and what Popper labelled “metaphysical research program.” Metaphysics permeates science at almost every stage of its development – untestable ideas, that is, which not only determine what the most pressing problems are, but also what kinds of answers to those problems we shall consider as satisfactory or acceptable and as improvements of earlier answers. In so doing, metaphysical systems function as unifiers and generators of research agendas (see Agassi 1964a, as well as 1964b and 1974, all reprinted in Agassi 1975). This is possibly Agassi’s most relevant and lasting contribution to the historiography of science: in most cases, at any given time, those scientific problems are chosen which are related to metaphysical problems of the period, and conversely, those scientific results are sought which could throw light on topical metaphysical issues. By regarding the history of metaphysics as a component of the history of scientific research, Agassi celebrates the wedding of the history of science with the history of ideas – a wedding that, unfortunately, is still widely contrasted by contemporary historians of science (see also Agassi 1996, 2008, pp. 259–262, and 2007, pp. 101–102).

A Popperian Path In Agassi’s view, most of contemporary works in the history of science are prejudiced by at least implicit adherence to either of two inadequate philosophies of science. Given the failure of the old, intellectualist view of science, according to which it rests on purely rational foundations, historians have opted for either empiricism and inductivism (science rests on experience), or conventionalism and

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instrumentalism (theories serve as instruments for the classification and prediction of factual information; in fact, conventionalism and instrumentalism are different approaches: whereas the latter is a theory about the content of theories (theories have no content: they merely organize data neatly), the former is a theory about truth (theories do not tell us about nature, how it really is: they merely provide logical reconstructions of phenomena). Inductivism is the view of science as error avoidance: science disregards all traditions and relies on facts alone to guarantee the truth of its theories, or at least their high probability. Conventionalism, on the other hand, suggests that science is nothing but a mathematical toolkit. By depriving scientific theories of any informative content, conventionalists are left with no view of the world. To be sure, they endorse some traditional views of the world, but at the same time shield it from any possible impact from scientific discovery. The alternative theory Agassi proposes is the critical view, which takes theories at face value as true or false and research as the process of advancing explanatory conjectures and undertaking their tests, in an endless process of error elimination. Agassi criticizes the history of science informed by inductive philosophy by appealing to arguments drawn from the conventionalist approach. Although he decidedly prefers Duhem’s approach to Bacon’s, he declares the conventionalist approach seriously limited, too, as it cannot adequately account for scientific controversies. He then advances his own views on how the history of science should be written. Interestingly, Agassi’s line of argument resemble the path Popper followed in the early stages of his intellectual development. Despite his well-known deductivism, in his early writings (dating back to the late 1920s, but actually published only in 2006), Popper held an inductivist position (for what follows, see Gattei 2004. Alternative and richer reconstructions of Popper’s early intellectual development may be found in Hacohen 2000, pp. 107–213, and Wettersten 2005). In his 1927 thesis, ‘Gewohnheit’ und ‘Gesetzerlebnis’ in der Erziehung (as well as in his 1928 doctoral dissertation, Zur Methodenfrage der Denkpsychologie, which, however, focuses on the theory, rather than on the psychology, of knowledge), he held induction as the characteristic feature of empirical science: contrary to Freud’s, Adler’s, and others’ psychological theories, which often go beyond what is factually verifiable, the theories of natural science, he said, only abstract from empirical data, never asserting something beyond the facts. It was only with his third, 1929 thesis, Axiome, Definitionen und Postulate der Geometrie (the three theses were first published in Popper 2006), that Popper set himself on the path towards a satisfactory solution of the problem of demarcation. Up to 1929 epistemology entered Popper’s reflections only as far as the problem was that of the justification of the scientific character of these fields of research. However, in that year, while surveying the history of non-Euclidean geometries, Popper explicitly discussed the cognitive status of geometry without referring to psycho-pedagogical aspects, thus turning from cognitive psychology to the logic and methodology of science. As a consequence of his reflections on the problematic relationship between geometrical-mathematical constructions and physical reality, Popper was able to get over a too direct notion of such a relationship, cast doubts on inductive inference, and started conceiving in a

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new (strictly noninductivist) manner the relationship between theoretical and observational propositions. In 1929, Popper agreed with conventionalist Jules Henri Poincaré (against inductivist Hermann von Helmholtz): our choice of geometry for physical space is free and physical theories can always be reinterpreted in the light of geometry — but such reinterpretation often requires introducing too many ad hoc hypotheses. Therefore, Popper adopted the methodological proposal that scientific theories require the greatest economy in the use of hypotheses (Popper 1935, 199410/1959, 19804, pp. 82–83). Our choice among competing geometrical metrics to describe our space can be methodologically decided. It is Popper’s first statement on the methodology of natural science. The methodological path he set himself to take is clear: while accepting a strong conventionalist component in methodology, Popper chose to make tests express the final verdict upon our decisions. For sure, the acceptance of these results is conventional, but our decision bears an epistemic value. Together with the idea of simplicity, the metaphysical assumption of realism paves a new way, rigorously deductive, far both from Poincaré’s conventionalism and Helmholtz’s inductivism. For sure, his breakthrough was still far (philosophically, at least, not chronologically) in the future: it took Popper a few more years of intellectual struggle and critical feedback to realize that his attempt at completing Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (1930–1933) could not work; he then gave up his original project and focused on an entirely different one, which quickly took the shape of Logik der Forschung. Popper appealed to conventionalist arguments to criticize inductivism and then successfully criticized conventionalism by developing a new philosophy that views science as an intellectual activity that consists in imaginative proposals or solutions to given problems and in successful criticism of these solutions – which, in turn, lead to new problems (See Popper’s solution to “Fries’ trilemma,” in Popper 1935, 199410/1959, 19804, pp. 93–94, 104–105): proposals that are open to experimental criticism and the attempts that have been made to criticize them experimentally he takes to be the body of empirical science.

A (Keplerian) Footnote to Agassi As historians and philosophers, we are invited to aim at the truth, but to give up the search for certitude. Situational logic leads to theories that are open to criticism; at the same time, it is the application of situational logic that should prevent us from being wise after the event and encourage us to try to reconstruct the problem situations of past thinkers. The history of science, as the history of our culture, is the history of human efforts to know more about the world we inhabit. As such, it is the history of our best and wisest errors. All too often, philosophers and historians of science struggle in vain to show that since science is possibly our best and most reliable form of knowledge, it is free of errors. As a consequence, historians of science undertake the impossible task of concealing all past errors, as expression of

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their admiration for science. Agassi’s main point is that science has no need for these distortions, or for any other. If scientists’ concealment of errors is regrettable in its own right, when reinforced by historians of science it fatally vitiates their work. Concealing such errors would amount to violating an unwritten “supreme rule” in the historiography of science, akin to the one laid down by Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (§11), in order to prevent other rules of scientific procedure from protecting any statement against falsification (ibid., p. 54). No doubt, the recognition of the obstacles on the way to new ideas may increase our appreciation of it. Still, Agassi contends, while we may appreciate false starts or blind alleys, we may judge uninteresting to dwell on them because, important as they may have been, they indeed led nowhere: “we should appreciate Einstein’s indebtedness to those who made false starts,” writes Agassi, “since they discouraged him from trying to do what they failed to do, and thus directed his energies to perhaps more fruitful channels,” (Agassi (1963, 2008), p. 169.) but it would be tedious and pointless to go into the various theories of the ether in too much detail. “To say this,” Agassi acknowledges, “is to concede to the conventionalists that in certain respects we are allowed, as historians, to be wise after the event in the interest of arousing our readers’ curiosity” (ibid.). It may well be a mistake, he concludes, but he makes this concession without further debate. It is a minor point, of course, but I beg to differ. I do not think we need to make any such concession. Let us consider, for instance, the case of Kepler. At the very opening of his magnum opus, the Astronomia nova (1609), we read: The scope of this work is not chiefly to explain the celestial motions, for this is done in the book On the Sphere and on the theories of the planets. Nor yet is it to teach the reader, to lead him from self-evident beginning to conclusions, as Ptolemy did as much as he could. There is a third way, which I hold in common with the orators [. . .]; that is, a historical presentation of my discoveries. Here is a question not only of leading the reader to an understanding of the subject matter in the easiest way, but also, chiefly, of the arguments, meanderings, or even chance occurrences by which I, the author, first came upon that understanding. Thus, in telling of Christopher Columbus, Magellan, and of the Portuguese [Vasco de Gama], we do not simply ignore the errors by which the first opened up America, the second the China Sea, and the last the Coast of Africa; rather, we would not wish them omitted, which would indeed be to deprive ourselves of an enormous pleasure in reading. So, likewise, I would not have it ascribed to me as a fault that, with the same concern for the reader, I have followed this same course in the present work. (Kepler 1609/2015, p. 41: Kepler’s caveat notwithstanding, most historians of science have indeed ascribed this to him as a fault, reading his narrative as a mark of his indebtedness to the Middle Ages and early Renaissance prescientific tradition he was still – as opposed, for instance, to Galileo – very much soaked in.)

With the Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632), Galileo was determined to convince his opponents of the truth of the heliocentric hypothesis by exposing their errors. Some twenty years earlier, Johannes Kepler, himself great dialectician, implicitly adopted a similar, dialogical approach. Just as Galileo, he was very confident in his achievements and aimed at convincing his opponents – but, unlike the Italian scientist, he genuinely wanted to record his own intellectual

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journey so as to show fellow astronomers the path he followed, the series of false starts, blind alleys, and failures he encountered on his road to eventual success. Most importantly, he not only wanted to convince them by exposing their errors, but also to critically engage his readers by showing his own errors. This is particularly evident when – as in the case of Kepler’s little book on the hexagonal symmetry of snow crystals (The Six-Cornered Snowflake, published in 1611 but actually written in 1609: see Kepler 1611/1966). In the book, Kepler considers a number of possible explanations for the preference nature seems to accord invariably to hexagons over other geometrical shapes. At the end, after a final appeal to metallurgists and alchemists to know from them something more about the inner structure of matter, which would possibly allow us to know why snow crystals are always six-cornered, Kepler concludes by “knocking at the door” of chemistry and leaves the problem to future generations of scientists (ibid., p. 45). As he did in other works of his (most notably, the Astronomia nova), here Kepler chose to present his readers with a rational reconstruction of his own failed attempts to solve the problem he had set himself: he wanted other scientists to know what he had suggested and refuted, so that they may build on his work and move forward. As a man of science, he was determined to engage his readers in a critical dialogue, asking them to collaborate with him in the common effort to approach the truth.), shortly after the Astronomia nova) – he did not have an answer to his questions, or a positive thesis to offer (see Gattei 2009). Kepler’s works contain a long, sustained argument, carefully constructed and tightly knit; its purpose is twofold: on the one hand, he wished to convince his readers of the validity and strength of his conclusions; on the other hand, he wanted to prevent their criticism by highlighting that he had already contemplated of a particular objection and followed it until it revealed as a mistake. Furthermore, Kepler believed in the didactic power of errors and wished his contemporary astronomers to learn about and from his own – just as he himself had done. Kepler himself thought that his failed attempts (which tell us what he thought was promising), the obstacles on his path (which tell us what went wrong, or what turned from promising to problematic), and the critical engagement with his contemporaries (which tells the kind of feedback he expected from his peers) were at times even more important than the final result. Why should we ignore even the weirdest of his assumptions, or the wildest of his guesses? Why should we be wise after the event? Besides making the story of Kepler’s achievement and intellectual development much more interesting for readers (although this is quite subjective, of course), they grant scholars a precious vantage point into Kepler’s worldview, thereby allowing for a much better understanding of what scientific research meant for him and his contemporaries (or to put in differently: a much better grasp of their metaphysical research program). All too often, philosophers and historians of science struggle in vain, in futile efforts to show that since science is possibly our best and most reliable form of knowledge, it is free of errors. As a consequence, historians undertake the impossible task of concealing past errors, as expression of their admiration for science. Agassi’s

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main point is that science has no need for these distortions, nor for any other (just as knowledge, Popper thought, requires no foundations). If the scientists’ concealment of errors is regrettable in its own right, when it is reinforced by philosophers and historians of science it fatally vitiates their work – and may well affect the public understanding of science, causing huge and widespread damages in society, which may well take decades to recover (the current opposition to COVID-19 vaccinations speaks volumes about the sweeping misunderstanding of science and its procedures by the general public, a misunderstanding that history of science, coupled by proper communication, might help remedy). Whereas western scientific tradition is the most critical one that humanity has ever known, the traditional assessment of science has been (almost) always uncritical and presented science as having little to do with criticism. By directing attention to the controversies and turmoils of science rather than to its alleged triumphs, Agassi illustrates the full power and fruitfulness of criticism, which he sharply distinguishes from mere debunking: for whereas the appraisal of errors as follies makes for their debunking, the appraisal of errors as reasonable makes for respectful criticism of them, thus allowing for the growth of knowledge.

Conclusion This chapter delves into Joseph Agassi’s far-reaching view of the history of science. Agassi began his criticism of two traditional and distinctive approaches, each informed by the uncritical acceptance, on the part of historians, of two philosophies of science: inductivism and conventionalism. These two approaches produce unsatisfactory historical reconstructions in which errors are concealed or condemned. Instead, based on Karl Popper’s philosophy, Agassi allows for a new picture in which science grows from recognizing and correcting our best and wisest errors: far from being something scientists should be ashamed of, and historians would better suppress, errors are opportunities for improvement and growth. As human beings, we should be aware of our fallibility and critical of our theories – but we can move from the awareness of our fallibility to the criticism of our theories only if we deliberately aim at the truth. That is why truth plays, for Popper – as opposed as for Kuhn and Wittgenstein, for example – the role of the regulative idea of scientific research and rational discussion. This very approach, as I argue, informs Agassi’s proposal for a critical historiography of science, setting it against the background of Popper’s understanding of rationality as critical dialogue. Finally, I call attention to what is possibly Agassi’s most relevant contribution to the historiography of science, which is closely related to one of Agassi’s most enduring legacy in the philosophy of science: by regarding the history of metaphysics as integral to the history of scientific research, Agassi celebrates the wedding of the history of science with the history of ideas – a marriage that, unfortunately, is still widely contrasted by contemporary historians of science.

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Cross-References ▶ Early Historiography of Science ▶ Gaston Bachelard and Historical Epistemology: A New Perspective for the History of Science in the Twentieth Century ▶ Historiography of Science and the Relationship Between History and the History of Science ▶ Pierre Duhem: Between the Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History ▶ The Beginning of the Epistemological History of Science: Gaston Bachelard’s Responsibility ▶ The Historiography of Scientific Revolutions: A Philosophical Reflection ▶ The Origins of Alexandre Koyré’s History of Scientific Thought ▶ Thomas Kuhn’s Legacy for the Historiography of Science

References Agassi J (1963) Towards an historiography of science, History and theory, Beiheft 2; reprinted, with corrections, in Agassi (2008), pp 119–242 Agassi J (1964a) The nature of scientific problems and their roots in metaphysics. In: Bunge M (ed) The critical approach to science and philosophy: in honor of Karl Popper. The Free Press/ Collier-Macmillan, New York/London, pp 189–211; reprinted in Agassi (1975), pp 208–239 Agassi J (1964b) The Confusion Between Physics and Metaphysics in Standard Histories of Science. In: Guerlac H (ed) Actes du dixième Congrès international d’histoire des sciences/ Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of the History of Science: Ithaca, 26 VIII 1962–2 IX 1962. Hermann, Paris, pp 231–250; reprinted in Agassi (1975), pp 270–281 Agassi J (1971) Faraday as a natural philosopher. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London Agassi J (1973) Continuity and discontinuity in the history of science. Journal for the History of Ideas 34:609–626; reprinted in Agassi (1983), pp 283–299 Agassi J (1974) The logic of science and metaphysics. In: Philosophical Forum, 5, pp 406–416; reprinted as “questions of science and metaphysics”, in Agassi (1975), pp. 240–269 Agassi J (1975) Science in Flux. D. Reidel, Dordrecht-Boston Agassi J (1981) Science and society: studies in the sociology of science. D. Reidel, DordrechtBoston-London Agassi J (1996) The place of metaphysics in the historiography of science. Foundations of Physics 26(4):483–499; reprinted in Agassi (2008), pp 254–265 Agassi J (2007) Rationalizing the historiography of science. Nuova Civiltà delle Macchine 25(2): 87–102 Agassi J (2008) Science and its history: a reassessment of the historiography of science. Springer, New York Agassi J (2013) The very idea of modern science: Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle. Springer, New York Bloch M (1949) Apologie pour l’histoire ou Metier d’historien, Paris: Librairie Armand Colin; English translation by Peter Putnam, The Historian’s craft, introduction by Joseph R. Strayer. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1953 Gattei S (2004) Karl Popper’s philosophical breakthrough. Philos Sci 71(4):448–466 Gattei S (2009) Why and to what extent may a false hypothesis yield the truth? In: Parusnikova Z, Cohen RS (eds) Rethinking Popper. Springer, New York, pp 47–61

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Hacohen MH (2000) Karl Popper – the formative years, 1902–1945: politics and philosophy in interwar Vienna. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Herschel JFW (1830) A preliminary discourse on the study of natural philosophy. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Taylor, London Jarvie IC, Laor N (1995) The Philosopher as All-Rounder. In two parts: Jarvie IC, Laor N (eds) Critical rationalism, metaphysics and sciences: essays for Joseph Agassi, vol I, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht-Boston-London, pp XI–XXII; and Jarvie IC, Laor N (eds) Critical rationalism, the social sciences and the humanities: essays for Joseph Agassi, vol II, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht-Boston-London, pp IX–XVII Kepler J (1609) Astronomia nova ΑΙΤΙΟΛΟΓΗΤΟΣ, sev physica coelestis, tradita commentariis de motibvs stellæ Martis, ex observationibus G. V. Tychonis Brahe, Heidelberg: Gotthard Vögelin; reprinted in Johannes Kepler gesammelte Werke, vol III: Astronomia Nova, edited by Max Caspar, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1937, pp 5–424; English translation by William H. Donahue, Astronomia Nova, new revised edition, Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion Press, 2015 Kepler J (1611) Strena Seu De Niue Sexangula, Frankfurt: Gottfried Tampach; reprinted in Johannes Kepler gesammelte Werke, vol IV: Kleinere Schriften 1602–1611. Dioptrice, edited by Max Caspar and Franz Hammer, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1941, pp 259–280; English translation by Colin G. Hardie, The Six-Cornered Snowflake, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1966 Popper KR (1935) Logik der Forschung: Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft, Springer, Vienna; then Tübingen: Mohr JCB (Paul Siebeck), 199410; English translation, The logic of scientific discovery, Hutchinson, London, 1959; Routledge, London-New York, 19804 Popper, Karl R. 1957. The poverty of historicism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 19613 Popper KR (2006) Hansen TE (ed) Frühe Schriften. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen Stephenson B (1987) Kepler’s physical astronomy. Springer, New York Voelkel JR (2001) The composition of Kepler’s Astronomia nova. Princeton University Press, Princeton-Oxford Wettersten JR (2005) New insights on young Popper. J Hist Ideas 66(4):603–631

Embodied Boundaries of Historical Studies of Science: A Vision of Steven Shapin’s Historiography

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Sociological Wittgenstein for the History of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mundaneness of the History of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Science Incarnated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Boundaries of Scientific Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From the Receiver of the Air-Pump to the Stomach of the Spokesman for Reality . . . . . . . The Public-Private Tension in Knowledge-Making Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Our work aims to analyze the way in which Steven Shapin rewrites the past of scientific practices while assuming both the artifactual character of scientific knowledge and of all historical narrative. Shapin’s historiographical perspective is an attempt to displace the boundaries of scientific practice established by traditional historiography. These displacements entail a commitment to the central theses of meaning finitism, postulated by the Strong Program of the sociology of scientific knowledge. We will focus on the examination of these theses and their implications for the Shapinian history of science. We will examine, on the one hand, what Shapin calls “lowering the tone in history” and, on the other, the centrality of the preconditions of knowledge – the place of knowledge, the body, and the credibility of true searchers – as topics of embodied science. Finally, we will analyze the exemplary case of the experimental philosophy of the English seventeenth century in order to show the way in which Shapin links the logic of

M. A. Martini (*) Universidad de Buenos Aires/Universidad Nacional de Moreno, Buenos Aires, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_9

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finitism with the preconditions of knowledge in his approach to a fundamental theme in his work: the boundaries of scientific practice. Keywords

Meaning finitism · Historical naturalism · Scientific boundaries · Historiography of science · Steven Shapin

Introduction One of the central problems addressed by the theory and philosophy of history is the controversial nature of the study of the past. The coexistence of conflicting interpretations of the same past events cannot be resolved by ruling out some or most of such interpretations on the charge of historians’ lack of professionalism or failure to use available evidence. There is hence a need to rethink the nature of the realistic representation of history. According to the narrativist philosophy of history, historical controversies dispute both the past and what constitutes a more adequate representation of it in both epistemic and ethical terms (White 1973). In this sense, writing about the past displays its insoluble conflict: the impossibility of reaching a definitive consensus on the past and the inevitability of polemical pluralism. What is at stake here are alternative realistic strategy options and their ethical and epistemic commitments, rather than the value of the evidence as such (Tozzi Thompson 2021). The question that Ewa Domańska formulates for the humanities, “what kind of approach to the past should I promote in order to build a better world (that is, a less violent, more inclusive and respectful world that would be habitable for different forms and ways of being)?” (Domańska 2021: 142), animates the idea that the rewriting of the past is a continually unfulfilled promise (White 1999a). The historiography of science does not escape this controversial character. The histories of science strive for dominance in establishing the meaning of science’s past while projecting themselves into the future as the engines of new and realistic configurations. Starting in the 1960s, social studies of science questioned what should be understood by scientific practice and sharply criticized essentialist and prescriptivist approaches to science, truth, and the scientific method. Inquiries into scientific practice acquired a local character in the conviction of the contingent and artifactual nature of knowledge-making. Faced with these challenges to classical epistemology, the traditional form of the historical narrative of science that “perpetuates the illusion that the task of the historian is to relate ‘real history’ as opposed to just telling stories” (Rheinberger 1994: 66) loses its explanatory power. Golinski (2005) questions the renewed promise of writing about the science of the past: once the contingent nature of scientific knowledge is recognized, what kinds of stories ought we to be telling? This chapter focuses on the way in which Steven Shapin’s historiography rewrites a history of science that disputes with traditional history the realistic presentation of

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the past of scientific practices through a strategy that entails, at the same time, accepting the artifactual character of scientific knowledge and of all historical narration. The Shapinian historiographical narrative tells stories about science as a practice “produced by people with bodies, situated in time, space, culture, and society, and struggling for credibility and authority” (Shapin 2010). With this purpose at hand, Shapin disarms the inherited disciplinary limits and rearms them on the basis of the postulate of worldliness, rejects the study of scientific method and truth as the exclusive themes of history so as to be able to focus on unexpected topics, and problematizes the ways in which the boundaries of science are established. These displacements assumed the philosophical commitment to a finitistic semantics formulated by the Strong Program of the sociology of scientific knowledge. To the extent that “[t]here are no grounds for asserting that where a culture employs, over a period of time, a specific written sign or a specific noise, there is an associated fixed meaning or ‘unit idea’” (Barnes 1982b: 36), finitism opens the way for historians of science to investigate the scientific practices of the past in its particularities: How are the boundaries of science drawn in a given community? What practices are allowed and which are excluded? What components make them up? The answer to these questions cannot be given prescriptively. Thus, the itinerary of the chapter starts from the analysis of the central theses of meaning finitism, to focus on the implications of these theses, firstly, on what Shapin calls “lowering the tone of history” (Shapin 2010); secondly, on the centrality of the preconditions of all knowledge (the place of knowledge, the body, and the credibility of the true searchers); and, finally, on the interpretation of the boundaries of scientific practice as Wittgensteinian language-games.

A Sociological Wittgenstein for the History of Science Meaning finitism accounts for the application of empirical concepts and the consequent development of knowledge (Barnes 1981, 1982a, b, 1987; Barnes et al. 1996; Bloor 1996, 1997). This semantic view is one of the ways of approaching the inescapable character of the “next case” problem, which Wittgenstein postulated (Bloor 1997). According to the Wittgensteinian rule-following analysis, finitism is faced with the problem of moving from previously known to unknown cases: “What, for example, makes the next bird a bird, or the next electron an electron?” (Barnes 1982b). In this sense, finitism has been considered a general theory of non-extensional meaning (Kusch 2002), which goes beyond the compromises and difficulties presented by semantic deterministic approaches. Broadly speaking, finitism holds that language learning is ultimately founded on ostension-based training. The set of examples used in this process of ostensive learning is always finite. Learners develop aptitudes for applying a given expression to a new case on the basis of the examples an authority shows them. The operation of these provisions could be reconstructed as judgments of similarities and differences between, on the one hand, the set of learned examples and, on the other, the newly found cases that are considered candidates for inclusion within the same term.

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Yet the exemplars cannot determine those judgments. The past use of the terms could provide a sufficient basis for future uses only if the relation of resemblance were replaced by a stronger relation such as the relation of identity. But unless one wants to assume an essentialist position in relation to the referents of the terms, it is not possible to accept that the application of a term to new cases is made on the basis of the relationship of identity between them and the cases learned by ostensive definition. Given that “[c]oncepts do not come with labels attached, carrying instructions which tell us how they are to be used” (Barnes 1981: 313), future applications of the terms are open-ended. What is more, to the extent that we ourselves take past usage as precedent on which basis to determine which applications are suitable, the latter will also be open to correction. No act of classification is irrevocably correct. Both new applications and precedent cases can be reviewed or dismissed. Reclassification, as is known, is a ubiquitous phenomenon in science (Barnes et al. 1996). On this matter, one of the main difficulties that finitism must face in relation to processes of reclassification is the problem of the collective preference in favor of one application strategy instead of another. Barnes’s (1987) response is to complement semantic finitism with a radical instrumentalism. The choice between strategies invariably corresponds to their relevance in relation to the agents’ objectives and interests. This solution postulates the constitutive character of the interests and objectives in the processes of the generation, extension, and stabilization of knowledge. However, the commitment to a finitist approach does not mean assuming that the world will disappear. Finitism should not be interpreted as idealism. Classification decisions are made in the light of experience and in relation to the world. This presents constraints that are at the same time subject to other constraints, which implies that the world enters into the structure and development of our knowledge, but always and necessarily together with our conventions, decisions, and purposes (Bloor 1982). All the accepted applications of the terms have the character of social institutions, insofar as they are “things that have to be sustained in being on a moment-bymoment basis. They, too, do not and cannot exist independently, or in advance of, the acts of reference which constitute them” (Bloor 1996: 851). Every social institution refers to something created collectively through self-referential practices. But then the social institutions are themselves subject to the dynamics of finitism. Now, what is true for empirical descriptive terms is also true for the expressions “science” and “scientific knowledge.” Their applications are established in local contexts and are maintained as and through social activity by a specific community. Given that knowledge in general and scientific knowledge in particular are both social institutions, sociological studies become particularly relevant. Each case of the appropriate use of scientific terms as well as the cases of the appropriate use of the terms “science” and “scientific knowledge” must be explained separately by reference to concrete, local, and contingent determinants. Consequently, the commitment to meaning finitism had implications for the history of science. On the one hand, it involved a break with historiographical traditions that essentialized science, understood scientific ideas isolated from their

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context of use, endowed those ideas with intrinsic agency, and celebrated and defended science’s past inasmuch as it heralded modernity; on the other hand, and in a proactive sense, it promoted a naturalist historiographical approach, which aimed to understand the past of science in its situated specificity. Shapin weaves a web of naturalistic historiography that links Alexandre Koyré, Thomas Kuhn, and the sociologists of scientific knowledge. The link that unites them is the Koyrean sensibility for exploring the different rules of the scientific games of the past. This sensitivity led Koyré’s followers to propose diachronic interpretations of the different scientific games. However, with the irruption of the sociology of scientific knowledge and hand in hand with finitism, naturalist historiography calibrated the focus to explore “whether those tough nuts could be cracked by more and more detailed, and more contextually sensitive, accounts of scientific episodes” (Shapin and Schaffer 2011; Shapin 2015).

The Mundaneness of the History of Science Shapin (2010) claims to have lowered the tone in the making of the history of science. This means falling into a heresy, which juxtaposes the sacred with the profane. Shapinian historiography managed a set of movements that, far from devaluing science, made visible the ways in which scientific knowledge-makers modeled their activity and themselves as being essentially different from each other through the appropriation of available cultural resources. At the same time, the configuration of a heretical history implied not only a distancing from traditional histories but also the investigation of the devices through which historians of science shaped their discipline as the study of the sacred of modern culture. The establishment of the sacred through the history of science meant that “science itself was considered to be such an extraordinary phenomenon – atypical, drawing on special cognitive abilities, playing by special and coherent rules, standing apart from historical contingency and flux” (Shapin and Schaffer 2011: xix). At the same time, it involved its vindication and celebration as the greatest of human achievements. Shapin chooses George Sarton as being responsible for creating an elevated narrative in order to establish the history of science as the only history that could illustrate the progress of humanity. If the historian of science wants to go beyond a mere chronicle of events: “It is not enough to make us see how each science developed by a natural and logical succession of small steps; he must show as well the development of the heroes of his story” (Sarton 1923: 16). This historical narrative, with its evaluative and teleological imprint, linked the scientific spirit with exceptional people in the achievement of progress of humanity and focused on the elaboration of narratives about the unique scientific norms and the unique scientific method. Thus, the task of the historian was presented as a moral duty: the duty to point out where the hopes of freedom and justice resided and where secular salvation would come from (Shapin and Schaffer 2011). Likewise, the historiographic internalism/externalism debate about the causes of scientific change drew the boundaries of science in terms of purity-contamination.

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Robert Merton’s work managed a disciplinary division between the history and sociology of science through the internal/external dichotomy. The theory of scientific change found in an embryonic state in his 1938 monograph supposes a double dissociation: on the one hand, it decoupled the social dimension of science from its conceptual component, and on the other, it separated the processes of legitimation and expansion of scientific activity from its conceptual transformation. Through this movement, sociology was prevented from understanding the conceptual content and methodological procedures of scientific knowledge in terms of social variables. Unlike the internalist history of science, sociology cannot contribute to the study of the conceptual contents of science (Shapin 1988b, 1992). According to Hayden White, we can interpret the mechanisms of sacralization of science used by traditional history as the constitution of a discourse that narrativizes, that is, “a discourse that feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story” (White 1987: 2). In the same way that scientific knowledge-makers make themselves invisible through literary technologies that distance phenomena spatially and temporally in order to reify them, historians of science act as “ventriloquists” of the past. Thus, historians performatively established the frontier of their investigations in the products of the activity of theorizing through narratives that closed the meaning of the past: “If one aspires to do history in a properly “disinterested” way, it is difficult simultaneously to act as apologist for science, making out its past as a disembodied interaction between rational minds and reality” (Barnes and Shapin 1979: 10). However, according to the logic of semantic finitism, nothing prevents us going beyond these conventionally established limits. Shapin opens the game: he points out the contingent and disputed nature not only of scientific knowledge but also that of all historiographical production. The heretical historiography to which Shapin’s work belongs displaces science from a privileged place: “what we are accustomed to call ‘science’, and, accordingly, to theorize about, is a diverse set of cultural practices, which may not have common methods, conventions or concepts, or at least common features distinguishing them from ‘non-science’ or the common culture” (Shapin 1992: 346). However, the heresy also requires breaking with the closure that the great teleological narratives managed by making the historical facts speak for themselves. Shapin claims that historians have an institutionalized intention to tell stories about the past as it really happened. However, this purpose does not lead them to fall into the naivety of maintaining that the stories told do not reflect the interests or concepts of the present. Rather, the adequacy or inadequacy of historical works depends on the historians’ purposes, such that histories speak of both the present and the past (Shapin 1985, 1999). But, as White states: To assess the past from the standpoint of its utility for the present, which is not to suggest that this “present” is something known in its essence or some-thing to which we should commit ourselves without reservation. On the contrary, the “present” is as much a construction as the “past” or the “future.” (White 1999b: 33)

In the introduction to the second edition of Leviathan and the Air-Pump in 2011, Shapin and Schaffer rethink their book as a product of its time and, in that sense, as a

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historical document of a moment in changing scholarly traditions, changing conventions, problems, and purposes. However, far from positioning themselves now as “ventriloquists” of the past, the authors understand the complexity of their task in terms of performative acts of intervention in the present that seek to dispute the meaning of the past. Leviathan and the Air-Pump bursts in showing the artifactuality of historiographical representations. Its intervention in the present demonstrates the responsibility that making history entails as a project of self-creation: “As we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know. Knowledge, as much as the state, is the product of human actions” (Shapin and Schaffer 1985: 344). The new naturalistic perspective on the history of science seeks to interpret what traditional historiography took for granted: “they have, to a great extent, been producing accounts coloured by the member’s self-evident method. In this method the presuppositions of our own culture’s routine practices are not regarded as problematic and in need of explanation” (Shapin and Schaffer 1985: 5). Naturalism explores the ways in which scientists themselves used available cultural resources to shape the exceptionality of their knowledge systems (Shapin 1995). The practice of history-making is now governed by the mundaneness postulate (Shapin 1999): the historian must not prejudge which overt features of everyday scenes may or may not be relevant in relation to making and justifying situated scientific knowledge. This postulate invites us to focus on the daily and material aspects of scientific practice. These practices are now investigated in the domains of the small, the intimate, the personal, the embodied, and the emotionally textured and often also in the domains of the familiar and the face-to-face. So if scientific knowledge is formed from common processes of interaction in mundane practices, there is no substantial difference in historical genres between writing the history of the forms of culture of the intellectual elites and that of the daily practices of the masses (Shapin 1994, 1999). To make history of scientific knowledge, of the scientific method or of truth, is to tell stories about a set of practices with a lowered, situated, and embodied tone (Shapin 2010).

Science Incarnated Shapin designates the subject that most clearly expresses the naturalistic sentiments of his historiography as “preconditions for any body of knowledge as manifested in situated contexts” (Shapin 1995). The incarnated character of science means, in the first instance, exploring the ways in which trust in knowledge-makers, their bodies, and the places of knowledge-making are shaped. Shapin’s work (1994, 1995; Shapin and Schaffer 1985) constitutes a significant contribution to the elucidation of the problem of trust in knowledge-making, the understanding of the value of testimony, and the visibility of the link between the epistemic order and the morality that involves focusing on trust rather than truth. Now, it is worth asking: How does this movement of displacement from truth toward trust operate? Shapin’s starting point in revising the trust problem is the equivalence

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postulate formulated by Barnes and Bloor (1982: 23): “Our equivalence postulate is that all beliefs are on a par with one another with respect to the causes of their credibility. It is not that all beliefs are equally true or equally false, but that regardless of truth and falsity the fact of their credibility is to be seen as equally problematic.” In the same way as meanings are not attached to terms in accordance with non-deterministic semantics, truth and falsity are not inherent properties of propositions: “‘True’ and ‘false’ are terms which are interesting only as they are used by a community itself, as it develops and maintains its own accepted patterns of concept application” (Barnes 1982b: 31). If this is so, then the trustworthiness of a proposition need not refer to its truth (understood as correspondence with the facts). The problem of trust, argues Shapin (1995), can be better understood if trust is considered as being articulated within a metonymic (or representational) relationship. The testimonies about certain events maintain a metonymic relationship with those events. In this way, the knowledge that we possess about facts that have not been directly experienced depends on the acceptance of the legitimacy of that relationship. The testimony I make about events in my life will only be credible to those who have not witnessed them if they accept the metonymic relationship between my statements and the events experienced. Something similar happens with scientific statements. Inductive inferences from the known to the unknown are not logical but tropological relations. Statements about local and specific events, to which some scientists have direct access, allow scientific generalizations to be viewed as shorthand for the natural world. The latter achieve trust on the basis of the metonymic relationship that has been established. At the same time, as direct access to local events is restricted, testimony is required both within a scientific community and between different communities and, even more so, on the part of non-scientific agents. Then again new layers of tropological relationships are required (Shapin 1995). In this way, testimony has an ineradicable role to play in the constitution of knowledge. What others tell us is constitutive of knowledge, and trust in their words enables the joint production of both the epistemic and social orders: Knowledge is a collective good. In securing our knowledge we rely upon others, and we cannot dispense with that reliance. That means that the relations in which we have and hold our knowledge have a moral character (. . .) [T]he fabric of our social relations is made of the knowledge – not just knowledge of other people, but also knowledge of what the world is like – and, similarly (. . .) our knowledge of what the world is like draws on knowledge about other people – what they are like as sources of testimony, whether and in what circumstances they may be trusted. (Shapin 1994: XXV–XXVI)

Knowledge is produced in a moral field and mobilizes evaluations of the virtues and characteristics of people. Furthermore, attributions of knowledge honor good informants for contributing to the existence and flourishing of the community. By contrast, not granting such powers to a person is a form of censorship and dishonoring. This practice of shaming marks someone as incapable of participating in the constitution of a collective good and as unfit to be part of a community (Shapin 1994). Without trust, there is no knowledge.

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All the cultural resources that come into play in the constitution and distribution of trust occupy a relevant place in the understanding of knowledge-making. According to the logic of semantic finitism, there is no set of criteria in a particular culture that uniquely determines what will be believed. Consequently, the historian is not limited when considering what is significant in ensuring trust in a given situation. It is not possible to rule out any aspect as irrelevant to a given situation of trust prior to carrying out a historical investigation. However, there seems to be a close relationship between the acceptance of another’s report and its distribution in knowledge-making spaces. The problematization of access to knowledge-making sites operates through a fundamental epistemological distinction between direct knowledge and testimony: “A division in the map of knowledge flows from placement in physical and social space: on the one side, immediate experience; on the other, reliance on the authority and trust” (Ophir and Shapin 1991: 9). Those who have not seen things know them through the trust placed in those who have had a direct relationship with those things or have trusted those who trusted those who have known those things (Shapin 1994). Thus, the connections between knowledge-making and the spatial distribution of the participants interweave spatial arrangements, social practices, and trust. The answer to the questions about who can enter the spaces of knowledge-making and how the regulation of income is linked with the valuation of knowledge shows the links between materiality, moral economy, and knowledge: “When we point to the setting of knowledge-making activities, we stipulate at the same time those relations and constellations of value that render the knowledge in question either authentic, safe, and valuable, or fraudulent, dangerous and worthless” (Ophir and Shapin 1991: 11). To know means to be in a place. If there is no place, there is no knowledge. Furthermore, without bodies, there is no knowledge (Shapin 1995). A naturalist historiography approaches the study of science as corporeal ways of living in the world and modeling it together with knowledge-making. In Science Incarnate (1998), Lawrence and Shapin seek to recover the extraordinarily rich repertoires we once possessed for speaking about the bodily circumstances that either assisted or handicapped the processes by which genuine knowledge was to be attained (. . .) The way we lived, that is to say, was once understood to be intimately connected to the way we think. (Shapin and Lawrence 1998: 1)

Shapin dwells on a culturally significant corpus of “stories that speaks about them [bodies and dietetics], about their meaning and uses, and about the conditions of their circulations” (Shapin 1998b: 44). The different bodily identities of truth seekers, the available cultural resources that people with bodies have used so as to configure their own disembodiment and that of the knowledge they have produced, the stomachs opposed to the minds of scientists, and the movement that leads from the ascetic truth seeker to the expert of the twentieth century, who does not know differently but who knows more and who no longer needs to be a special person who inhabits a special body, are some of the topics through which Shapin reconfigures the historiographical boundaries by lowering the tone (Shapin 1994, 1998a, 2003, 2008).

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The study of corporal practices, which visibly and publicly portray the position, identity, and value of knowledge in different cultural contexts of the past, does not deal with a trivial aspect of knowledge but with a constitutive one. In this way, the historiographical works that accept the inalienable connection between body and knowledge have as their object of investigation nothing other than knowledge itself. In what follows, we will analyze the exemplary case of the experimental philosophy of the English seventeenth century in order to exhibit the way in which Shapin links the logic of finitism with the preconditions of knowledge in the approach to a theme, which we consider central in his work: the boundaries of scientific practice.

The Boundaries of Scientific Practice Seen in the light of meaning finitism, the historiographical problem of reconstructing the boundaries of scientific practice cannot be reduced to the problem of demarcation formulated by the standard philosophy of science. Behind the enunciative conception of scientific theories lies a philosophy of language that commits the descriptive fallacy (Austin 1962). Enunciative expressions have traditionally been singled out as the only utterances worthy of philosophical interest. As a consequence, declarative expressions were examined in light of the dichotomy between verifiable (factual) statements and meaningless pseudo-statements. This dichotomous partition was extended to the point of acquiring an all-encompassing character: any expression of language that was of interest had to be evaluated in those terms. In accordance with this perspective, the problem of demarcation was formulated in terms of the search for prescriptive criteria that would allow the unmasking of discourses that were presented as legitimate scientific knowledge, although in fact they were not. The new formulation of the problem assumes the performative character of language and questions the situated practices through which a scientific community creates and stabilizes the uses of “science” and “scientific knowledge” in accordance with the interests of said community of practice. According to Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) was meant to be “a large-scale instantiation of what the sociology of knowledge might look like if it rejected the “rules of the game” presupposed by traditional exercises” (Shapin and Schaffer 2011: xl). This work fully addresses the problem of scientific boundaries. Naturalistic historiography of science goes “beyond asking what scientists believe to asking what they are trying to do” (Shapin 1985:50) when they draw the boundaries of scientific practices. It seeks to understand the practices through which actors constitute limits in social institutions: We should view actors’ categories like cultural boundaries as institutions. That is to say, we can understand them as a set of constructed and maintained marks in cultural space which allow collectivities effectively to tell members where they are, where they may and may not go, how permissibly to behave in this place. (Shapin 1992: 355)

Both the stability of and the changes to the boundaries of science are governed by the vicissitudes of human practices.

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Thus, it is enlightening to appeal to the words of Alan Richardson (2000: 153), who points out that he is obliged to Shapin for his interpretation of Bloor’s perspective (1991) “as a naturalized Wittgensteinized Kuhn, moving questions of meaning and paradigms into the realm of forms of life and then, naturalizing Wittgenstein by explaining forms of life from the perspective of sociology.” Bloor allows us to understand Kuhnian incommensurability in a more practical and less linguistic way: What it is to be a Newtonian, for example, is to adhere to a certain set of paradigmatic problem-solving practices. Rather than a meaning incommensurability between Newtonian theory and Einsteinian theory, what one would have is a social incommensurability between being a Newtonian and being an Einsteinian. (Richardson 2000: 153)

This starting point allows us to interpret Leviathan and the Air-Pump as an effort to reconstruct the outline of the boundaries of experimental philosophy in seventeenthcentury England in terms of a Wittgensteinian form of life and language-game. The Wittgensteinian framework not only emphasizes the embeddedness of knowledge in streams of practical life that is characteristic of the late Wittgenstein (Ophir and Shapin 1991) but also prevents the limits that were drawn contingently from being reified. This approach to the boundaries of scientific practice brings into focus the dynamic appropriations of and slides from the lines already drawn, rather than the sharpness of the peripheral edges. Boundary drawing takes the form of Wittgenstein’s metaphor of language as a city that grows without plan, following only the needs and purposes of its inhabitants (Wittgenstein 1968: §18). The reconstruction of the boundaries of experimental philosophy embodies the dictum of Leviathan and the Air-Pump on the joint production of the social order and of the order of knowledge. The unfolding of the different overlapping layers of the limits shows the ways in which the cultural resources mobilized to build a materialepistemological-ethical-political texture. The present analysis of the boundaries of experimental philosophy integrates the work of Shapin and Schaffer (1985) with a set of case studies in which Shapin (1988a, 1992, 1994) investigates the preconditions of knowledge, as well as the practices of constructing knowledge and protecting scientific knowledge as a social institution. The knowledge-making spaces constitute the access that we choose so as to reconstruct, in accordance with the Shapinian approach, the different components that interweave the limits of the experimental form of life. There are two fundamental spaces from which it is possible to analyze the acts of delimitation of the experimental way of life: the air-pump and the laboratory, although the latter is under construction at the same time.

From the Receiver of the Air-Pump to the Stomach of the Spokesman for Reality By constituting the air-pump in a space where the matters of fact were accessed but not their causes, experimental philosophy diluted one of the epistemological frontiers most dear to classical philosophy: the separation between knowledge and

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opinion. The experimental form of life imported from gentlemanly society the recognition that theoretical items, such as the causes of matters of fact, were only probabilistic. However, it was possible to have moral certainty about the matters of fact. The testimonies constituted the matter of fact in an epistemological-social category: “The foundational item of experimental knowledge, and of what counted as properly grounded knowledge generally, was an artifact of communication and whatever social forms were deemed necessary to sustain and enhance communication” (Shapin and Schaffer 1985: 25). Matters of fact were social institutions and, as such, self-referential: their ultimate foundation was the experimental form of life, that is, “the total pattern of activities which includes discursive practices” (Shapin and Schaffer 1985: 52). In the context of the vacuist/plenist dispute, the receiver is the space in which Boyle undertook a first epistemological-political-social delimitation. He carried out the exemplary experiments of the vacuism/plenism dispute – for example, the Torricelli experiment – although he separated the concept of emptiness from traditional discourse and included it in the new experimentalist discourse. The void could not be considered a metaphysical entity or a matter of fact, but rather a space in which to carry out experiments: What he was endeavouring to create was a natural philosophical discourse in which such questions were inadmissible. The air-pump could not decide whether or not a “metaphysical” vacuum existed. This was not a failing of the pump; instead, it was one of its strengths. Experimental practices were to rule out of court those problems that bred dispute and divisiveness among philosophers and they were to substitute those questions that could generate matters of fact upon which philosophers might agree. (Shapin and Schaffer 1985: 46)

These displacements were part of a strategy to dissolve the debate between vacuists and plenists. Boyle denounced the metaphysical character of the issue that confronted them and presented this dispute as the scandal of natural philosophy. The experiments in the air-pump could not be considered as a mechanism to decide in favor of vacuism. At the same time, the notion of the void worked in favor of a new political delimitation. In seventeenth-century England, it had to be accepted that disputes over knowledge led to civil strife. Through the definition of the void as a mere experimental space and the dissolution of the dispute about its metaphysical character, Boyle placed experimental philosophy at the center of the political problem of consensus and civil order. Given that the “very consensus was vital to the establishment of matters of fact as the foundational category of the new practice” (Shapin and Schaffer 1985: 73), experimental philosophers differed from those who, by producing knowledge, generated political conflict at the same time. The distinction that experimental philosophy introduced between the studies of nature and “human affairs” led to the prohibition of speaking of what could not be established as a matter of fact by means of experimental practices. One could neither speak of existing entities, such as God and immaterial spirits, nor of entities that probably did not exist, such as the ether. In this way, not only was an epistemological

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distinction between legitimate problems and metaphysical pseudo-problems introduced, but a new way in which natural philosophers related to each other in the production of knowledge was exhibited through the air-pump. Experimental philosophy could prevent civil war. Now, given that the testimony was constituted in the mechanism through which the presence of a true state of nature had to be ensured, the delimitation of the experimental form of life required giving an answer to the question about the identity of the philosopher of nature: Who can be a reliable witness? Who can be a spokesman for reality? Robert Boyle used his own biography as a model for the identity of the experimental philosopher: Boyle did not take on the identity of experimental philosopher, he was a major force in making that identity. And as he made the role, so he proffered ostensive arguments for the validity and legitimacy of what that role produced. (. . .) And if one wished to be an experimental philosopher, then the identity of Robert Boyle offered a paradigm of the new role. The legitimacy and validity of mid- to late seventeenth-century English experimental knowledge traded importantly upon the person of Robert Boyle and upon his personal presentation of gentlemanly identity. (Shapin 1994: 127)

Within the framework of the new experimental program, the identity of the spokesperson for natural reality had to be defined in such a way that its moral virtues would lay the foundations for trust, while trust became an unavoidable component in the construction of knowledge: “what we know of comets, icebergs, and neutrinos irreducibly contains what we know of those people who speak for and about these things, just as what we know about the virtues of people is informed by their speech about things that exist in the world” (Shapin 1994: xxvi). Boyle constructed his identity as a kind of bricolage, in which the existing repertoires of the gentleman and the virtuous Christian were respecified and reevaluated. Boyle’s life combined aristocracy with pious Christian virtue. But this combination presented a hurdle. The codes of conduct of the gentleman and the cultural resources that defined religious identity differed on one fundamental point. The vocation for an active life came into conflict with a religious contemplative life. Thus, Boyle saw himself as forced to commit himself either to civic obligations in public or to a life in solitude linked to the divine. Nevertheless, he opted for a virtuous life that reconciled elements of the repertoires of solitude and civic engagement. The rationale for it was that both roles, that of the virtuous Christian and the gentleman, shared the fundamental traits of integrity and independence. The gentleman was bound by the code of honor to be a spokesman for reality and not to lie to another gentleman. His ancestry and his economic position granted him freedom of action as a defining characteristic. There was, in this sense, a coincidence with the Christian, who was an active witness to the truth: he did not accept the authority of other men, and the Scriptures urged him to tell the truth. On the basis of the integrity and independence of the virtuous Christian gentleman, Boyle builds the identity of the spokesman for natural reality. The transfer of these resources to the experimental philosopher strengthened the links between the

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moral and epistemic orders. Now, the questions about who the spokespersons for reality were not only addressed the resources that made up their identities but also highlighted the exclusions. By reason of their various conditions of dependency, women, servants, the poor and wretched, as well as Italian and French gentlemen were not considered reliable witnesses. However, it was not dependency taken as being inherent to their nature that prevented them from acting as witnesses whose word could account for what really happened. Rather, it was the gentlemen’s performative practices of denying them the attribution of knowledge that ensured that they were expelled from the institution of testimony (Shapin 1994). Finally, there is one more element that intervenes in the modeling of the identity of the experimental philosopher. Just as the free action of the gentleman served as a resource to honor the spokesman for reality, his body, its anatomical and physiological condition, narrowed the distance between questions of identity, on the one hand, and legitimacy and trust in the knowledge, on the other: “The physical body was thus a text on which basic social identity might be inscribed and which might be written upon to secure other identities” (Shapin 1994: 152). Shapin sets out to answer the question of why the stomach was conceived as the polar opposite of the truth. The stomach of the lovers of the truth was established as a potential focus from which to think of the disembodied as a topic of practical epistemology. Boyle appealed to the persistent resource of the ascetic figure, which causally associated the types of bodies with the qualities of minds. If the way to cover a social event with dignity is to hide the organic processes (Douglas 1970), the incorporeality of the seeker of truth and the knowledge produced were devices to accentuate his authority. Thus, personal identity makes the constitution and legitimation of the experimental language-game. Until now, the experimental form of life anchored in the experimental space of the air-pump was configured through linguistic practices that expelled metaphysics, probabilistic epistemic practices, witnessing, the ethicalcorporeal identity of the witnesses of matters of fact, and the ethical-political commitments of philosophers who seek consensus in knowledge-making. It is still necessary to investigate the limits that are drawn together with the construction of the laboratory spaces.

The Public-Private Tension in Knowledge-Making Spaces The public or private character of the different experimental territories, and in particular of the laboratory, was also widely debated in the English seventeenth century. That the space was public and easily accessible was the condition required by experimental philosophers to produce reliable knowledge. This stipulation both limited and opened up possibilities about the physical-social space of knowledge. The cultural repertoires provided the tools with which not only to produce and legitimize the new place but also the norms of behavior appropriate to it. Although in its beginnings the laboratory occupied a great variety of different territories – pharmacies, cafes, the private residences of gentlemen, and the shop belonging to the manufacturer of laboratory instruments – the model for its configuration was

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taken from the physical space where the social relations of the experimental form of life most frequently occurred: the public rooms of the private residences of the gentleman. Shapin (1988a) analyzes how public and private spaces are jointly established in the laboratory, the appropriate social relationships in each of these areas, and the epistemic value of those who have preferential access to those places. The starting point in the Shapinian itinerary is the threshold of the experimental laboratory. This was built of both stone and social convention: it was a socially placed and maintained mark which circumscribed the distribution of knowledge. As a social space, it helped to establish both the limits of access and the type of social relationships appropriate to the laboratory. On each side of the threshold, the conditions of knowledge are different. Those who are left outside do not see what happens within. They cannot have knowledge of the issues that are going on inside unless those who have the right to access give them their testimony. In this sense, the threshold is a device to ensure that the knowledge produced within it corresponds to actually existing entities. Now, if you cross the threshold, you enter a private space, the house that is subject to the process of transformation into the public space of the experimental laboratory. Until this process ends, “the experimental laboratory and the places of experimental discourse did not have standard designations, nor did people who fund themselves within them have any tacit knowledge of the behavioral norms obtaining there” (Shapin 1988a: 390). The commerce between the private and the public was not evident. Private and public spaces had to be correlated with different epistemic practices so that their limits made sense (Shapin 1988a). To account for the transformation of the knowledge space, Shapin (1992) uses Erving Goffman’s (1959) concepts of front regions and back regions as a tool of analysis. The preparation of the staging of the experiment constituted a fundamental mechanism with which to sustain the trust in spokesman for reality through the different experimental spaces. The public should be distanced from any uncertainty in obtaining the experimental matter of fact. And since the experimental tests could fail, and usually did, the space where the first stages of the investigation took place had to be private (the back region). Thus, a new sense of spatiality bursts in: solitude. The experimental philosophers forged solitude as a space in which to build knowledge: the truth is discovered far from the interests and distortions of society. Solitude became a social instrument for the protection of the back region, and the resource available to shape it was religious seclusion. Self-absorption, isolation, and the denial of one’s own body were added as conditions for knowledge innovation (Shapin 1992). Despite Boyle’s use of a rhetoric of solitude, his laboratory was probably one of the places most highly populated with remunerated assistants, not to mention occasional visits from instrument builders and material suppliers (Shapin 1994). The antithesis between the hands and the gown (head) that the historiography of science made, in the first half of the twentieth century, the center of a debate about the value of science and of scientists completely changes its meaning through the Shapinian recovery. Marxist historiography, which showed the origin of modern science in the practices of artisans and in the concerns of scientists with answering

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technical problems, was perceived as an aggressive attempt to devalue science (Shapin 1992). Shapin takes up the study of the relationship between technicians and experimental philosophers, but now to show that the moral order of the laboratory was based on an economy of trust and power. Although the authorial voice belonged to Boyle, his explanations of the experiments spoke on behalf of what others had done, observed, and witnessed. The immediate and direct access that the technicians had to the experiments did not by itself confer epistemic value to their testimonies. This depended on the moral texture of existing social relations in the laboratory: The attribution of knowledgeability is, therefore, an expression of the capacity of certain individuals to define the action of the work scene. Boyle’s understanding and definition of experimental labor were superior to those of his assistants. Assistants’ hands were subsumed in his head. And this circumstance of subsumption massively expressed as well as constituted the political order of early modern England. (Shapin 1994: 383)

In this sense, the solitude of the experimental philosopher was a device intended to make invisible the chain of actors involved in knowledge-making, the work done by them, and, fundamentally, the distribution of trust between them. In contrast, the relationship modes were different in the public space (the front region). At the weekly meetings of the Royal Society, the experiments were demonstrated, and reflection among modest witnesses was promoted. These public displays were not simple reiterations of the events that took place in the private space: “they were demonstrations of ideal experiments, made ready to be displayed in public through endless private work devoted to making their phenomena docile, amplifying their read-outs, and routinizing their performances” (Shapin 1992: 207). Through this public space, causal links were established between the structure of the experimental community and the value of the knowledge produced: “The experimental polity was said to be composed of free men, freely acting, faithfully delivering what they witnessed and sincerely believed to be the case. It was a community whose freedom was responsibly used and which publicly displayed its capacity for self-discipline” (Shapin and Schaffer 1985: 339). If the consolidation of this form of life is hindered, the development of knowledge is prevented. This causal relationship drives a new link: the organization of the experimental form of life, although incipient, is offered as a promise to be followed by the structures of the state. The community of experimental philosophers, as a social microcosm, would unite all men under the aims of natural philosophy and teach how to reconcile them, leaving behind the divisions that had torn England apart in the two decades before the restoration of the monarchy. In his rewriting of the past, Shapin transfers the most valuable topics to the classical history and philosophy of science. The scientific method appears in Shapin’s historiography as well as in the standard philosophy of science as part of the reflections on the boundaries of science. However, Leviathan and the Air-Pump closes the heterogeneous network of boundaries by tightening the ties between the history of science and political history: the experimental method, as part of the

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experimental form of life of the seventeenth century, draws at the same time the borders of a knowledge that is known to be new, the identity of the experimental philosopher, the organization of a philosophical community that is being modelled, and the promise of an order which the English society of the seventeenth century expects from the restoration of the monarchy (1660). The naturalistic historiography of science enables unsuspected disciplinary pairings. In this sense, too, Shapin’s rewriting of the past must be read as a renewed promise to better represent the past rather than as a better representation of the past as it was. *** Let us return to the question posed at the beginning of the chapter: What kinds of stories ought we to be telling? If we accept that the historical accounts are not inscribed in the events of the past, reflection on the novelty in the rewriting of the past inevitably leads to the controversial character of the historiographical practice. However, the controversial pluralism that the writing of the past entails does not mean the impossibility of evaluation. The distinction introduced by White (1987) between narrating and narrativizing provides clarity in this regard. This distinction separates, on the one hand, the practice of telling a story that openly adopts a perspective from a discourse that pretends to make the past speak in the form of a story, on the other hand. The traditional historiography of science narrativizes. In its attempt to make an objective story, it presents itself as a definitive version of the past that goes beyond partialities. In this way, it closes the meaning of the past. Far from these narratives which serve to close off the past, Shapin’s historiography of science assumes the contingency of knowledge-making and conceives the rewriting of the past as performative acts undertaken from a given perspective. This means making stories that make their own artifactuality visible, committing themselves to the contingency of the writing of history and assuming that this writing is the result of the inevitable renegotiations of the meaning of reality.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have addressed the basic philosophical assumptions and the implications they have had within Steven Shapin’s historiography of science. The finitist semantics developed from the Strong Program of the sociology of scientific knowledge seeks to account for the application of concepts from a non-deterministic perspective. The commitment to semantic finitism is at the root of Shapin’s historiographical naturalism. Knowledge of the past of science exhibits, from this approach, the local and contingent nature of science. Thus, in Shapin’s historiography, the body of knowledge, knowledge-making spaces, and the credibility of science and knowledge-makers are the preconditions of all knowledge. In short, for Shapin, history-making is telling stories about the ways in which the boundaries of science are drawn as forms of life.

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Cross-References ▶ Ian Hacking’s Contributions to Historical Reflection on Science ▶ Thomas Kuhn’s Legacy for the Historiography of Science

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Ian Hacking’s Contributions to Historical Reflection on Science

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María Laura Martínez

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Words in Their Sites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historical Ontology and Historical Meta-Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Styles of Scientific Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The History and Philosophy of Science in Hacking’s Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter explores the philosophical use that Ian Hacking makes of history, as well as the relevance of his contributions to historical reflection on science. Although Hacking is an analytical philosopher, his work has a truly historical character as a result of his support in Michel Foucault’s history of the present and his proposal of a style of scientific reasoning based on Alistair Crombie’s notion of style of scientific thinking. Starting from this idea of the history of the present, Hacking aims to understand how we think and why some concepts seem inevitable and necessary. The chapter begins by addressing his idea that a serious project of the philosophical analysis of concepts requires a history of words in their sites, whose aim is to understand not only what the concept is but also its history. Hacking analyzes different types of constitution, not only of concepts but also of objects, practices, and ideas, which can be thought of as investigations that, although diverse, form part of the same family under the general notion of historical ontology, which includes that of historical meta-epistemology, which corresponds in turn to the study of the organizing concepts used in epistemology. M. L. Martínez (*) Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Institute of Philosophy, School of Humanities and Education Sciences, University of Republic, Montevideo, Uruguay e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_10

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The exploration of these notions leads, finally, to the analysis of styles of scientific reasoning, insofar as they are the providers of the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of these objects and concepts. Interest in this question of historical conditions of emergence is a result of Foucault’s fundamental influence on Hacking’s thought. Keywords

Ian Hacking’s contributions · Words in their sites · Historical ontology · Historical meta-epistemology · Styles of scientific reasoning · Historical conditions of possibility · Emergence of scientific concepts and objects · Michael Foucault · Alistair Crombie

Introduction Ian Hacking’s contributions to historical reflection on science are of such relevance that Lorraine Daston states that, in his text The Emergence of Probability (1975), Hacking asks “a new kind of question: What are the conceptual preconditions for the emergence of a concept so apparently simple, so useful, indeed indispensable -yet so strangely absent before circa 1650– as the modern notion of probability?” (Daston 2007: 802). This type of question arises from an interest that underlies, in general, all of Hacking’s work: the question of the historical and situated conditions of the possibility of the emergence of scientific concepts and objects. This interest was stimulated by his reading of the work of Michel Foucault.Although Hacking has repeatedly insisted that his project is not historical but philosophical, it is important to note that he not only draws on history to develop his philosophical ideas, but that his entire work reveals a sensitivity to history that is not typical of most philosophers trained, like him, in the analytical tradition. The historical nature of much of his work is the result of his foundations in, on the one hand, Foucault’s history of the present – since he is interested in understanding the current state of science through reflections on the past – and, on the other, his idea of styles of scientific reasoning, coined from the historian Alistair Crombie’s notion of styles of scientific thinking.

Words in Their Sites According to Hacking, it was Foucault’s idea of the history of the present that made him conceive of the history of probability in a new and different way. While he was working on the subject, Hacking says he read The Order of Things (2005) and Foucault’s works on madness, readings that produced an important change in his way of doing philosophy. It is in this respect that he has argued that since his writing of The Emergence of Probability, he thinks that philosophical problems are created

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when there is a mutation in the historical space of possibilities in which our thoughts are organized. Since then, Hacking has sought to understand how people think and why they seem to be forced to think in a certain way (Hacking 1990b: 71). He draws on history to explain or even undermine concepts that are used now and are considered unavoidable. It is along these lines that, in Rewriting the Soul (1995), for example, Hacking shows how, sometimes, there are sharp mutations in thought systems, redistributions of ideas that establish what later seems inevitable, unquestionable, necessary. In that book, Hacking uses multiple personality disorder as a microcosm of what was thought and said about memory in the last half of the nineteenth century and what is thought and said about it now, his aim being to investigate why something – in this case trauma, memory – seems inevitable, why a diverse set of interests is grouped under memory. To try to answer these and other questions, he observes what happens with memory and multiple personality disorder principally in France between 1874 and 1886, when the structure of the modern sciences of memory appears and becomes stronger. The occurrence – during those two decades – of important changes in ideas convinced Hacking that this period was a radically formative moment for the idea of memory and that it is not accidental that it is precisely in that period that the word trauma – previously used only to mean wounds in the body – acquired a new meaning and began to be applied also to psychological damage and to be intimately related to multiple personality disorder. Now, the fact that it is not asked how trauma became an injury to the soul and that it is taken for granted that memory is key to it shows that it is thought of as inevitable, invisible, and a priori. Contrary to that vision, Hacking will attempt in this text to answer the question – suggested by Foucault’s historicized Kantianism – of how this configuration of ideas arises and how it has made and shaped our lives, our customs, our science (Hacking 1995: 16). It is the specific details of the origin, the use, and the transformation of the concepts that allow us to understand them, but also allow us to understand, much of the time, what makes them problematic. In his article “Five Parables” (1984), Hacking argues that the problem is an excessive reliance on words as the substance of philosophy. Referring to the linguistic turn, he affirms that there is a subtle linguistic blindfold over the eyes of some philosophers, but to avoid the impoliteness of speaking of others, he refers to his own work, citing as an example his book The Emergence of Probability and his 1973 lecture, “Leibniz and Descartes: Proof and Eternal Truths,” and maintains: I had been reading Foucault, but, significantly, I had chiefly been reading Les mots et les choses (1970), a work that does not so much emphasize mots at the expense of choses, as make a strong statement about how words impose an order on things. (Hacking 1984: 34)

The Emergence of Probability, modeled on The Order of Things, concentrates on the prehistory and history of probability from a purely conceptual, albeit situated, perspective. His central claim is that many of the philosophical conceptions of probability were formed by the nature of Renaissance ideas that immediately

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preceded the mutation that occurred in that field around 1660. This reference has to do, on the one hand, with what is clearly shown in the first chapters of the book about how the space of possibility is structured so that the concept of probability arises. It also refers, on the other hand, to affirmations such as those made by Foucault in the first pages of The Order of Things (Foucault 2005: xxiii [1966: 13]) when characterizing the book as a study that strives to rediscover the basis on which knowledge and theories have been possible. Hacking understands that some of the philosophical problems about the concepts are the result of not knowing their history. A concept becomes possible at a moment and under conditions defined by an ordering of ideas that at another certain time collapses, disappears. The problem arises from the lack of coherence between the previous state and the new one, between the concept and that previous ordering of ideas that made it possible. Concepts are situated words (Hacking 1984: 35). They are words that can express different concepts through changes, revolutions, ruptures, mutations, or epistemological cuts, such as those that occur in bodies of knowledge. That is why Hacking’s emphasis is on the need to know the prehistory of concepts such as probability, chance, and determinism, assuming that the conceptual incoherence that creates philosophical perplexity is “a historical incoherence between prior conditions that made a concept possible, and the concept made possible by those priors” (Hacking 1981a: 184). In addition to noticing a foundational issue in the fact that many philosophical problems are essentially historically constituted, Hacking also discerns a matter of analysis and genesis in what he calls the Lockean imperative: understanding our thoughts and beliefs on the basis of giving an account of how they originate. Taking seriously the project of the philosophical analysis of concepts requires, as has been suggested, a history of words in their sites, whose objective is to understand not only what the concept is now but what it has been. To speak of situating the words is to allude to the statements –uttered or written – in which they appear, but it also implies situating them more broadly in terms of, for example, the institution, the authority, or the language through which they are expressed. To make the history of a concept is not merely to discover its elements, but principally to investigate the principles that make it useful or, eventually, problematic. Maintaining that the ways in which the conditions of the emergence and of the changes in the use of a word also determine the conditions in which it can be used can result in a complex methodology. However, that is what Hacking set out to do for the concept of probability in The Emergence of Probability or in The Taming of Chance (1990a) when analyzing the historical and situated conditions of the possibility of the emergence of current conceptions of chance, determinism, information, and control. He analyzes how these conceptions were formed and how the conditions of their construction limit present ways of thinking. This is what Hacking means by philosophical analysis and he claims that he knows of only one philosophical model supported by this type of research: some of the works of Michel Foucault (Hacking 1990b: 70). If, before undertaking a type of analysis such as the one that has been outlined above, it can be perceived that certain concepts are problematic, on the basis of that analysis, it is also possible to know why they are so. Each one of them is determined

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by a specific history and its analysis leads to a type of local historicism that deals with particular and separate fields of action and reflection. In this regard Hacking includes examples such as child abuse. Many social problems, he maintains, are closely related to philosophical problems. Sociology provides studies of kinds of people and behavior – social classes and in a certain way moral classes, such as child abuse – that culminate in a philosophical and historicist question about how the conditions of formation of the corresponding concepts determine their logical relationships and moral connotations. This is closely related to the idea of how the invention of a classification of people affects not only how they are thought of, how they are treated, and how attempts are made to control them, but also how those people see themselves as a result of how they are classified. It is a topic that has to do with evaluation, the creation of values, and, in some cases, social problems about a kind of people who are seen, consequently, as subjects for reform, control, isolation, discipline, etc. In the case of child abuse, for example, the kind emerged around 1960 as a result of discussions and observations made by a group of pediatricians in Denver and has since been shaped into its present form. This category – like many other moral categories – demands analysis and understanding in the aforementioned philosophical and historical sense. It is a kind that mixes fact and value, and for that reason, because it is evaluative, its effects on the researcher are different from those that natural kinds can have. In that sense it is an intrinsically moral topic. But it is also meta-moral because it can serve to reflect on the evaluation itself. These reflections can be made, according to Hacking, only if the origin of the idea of child abuse is traced and it is understood how the conditions of its formation restrict current ways of thinking about it.

Historical Ontology and Historical Meta-Epistemology The analysis of the emergence of child abuse, probability, objectivity, transient mental illness, ideas of the person, multiple personality disorder, trauma, etc. can be thought of, according to Hacking, as investigations that, although diverse, form part of the same family under the general notion of historical ontology (Hacking 2002: 4). The historical ontology that Hacking refers to as “[. . .] the ways in which the possibilities for choice, and for being, arise in history” (Hacking 2002: 23) deals with objects, classifications, ideas, people, kinds of people, and institutions that emerge from certain possibilities. That is, it deals with “[. . .] objects or their effects which do not exist in any recognizable form until they are objects of scientific study” (Hacking 2002: 11). According to Hacking, ontology concerns two types of being: on the one hand, the Aristotelian universals (trauma or child development, for example) and, on the other hand, the particulars that fall under these universals (this psychic suffering or that child development). Universals are not eternal but historical, and their instances, the children or the trauma victims, form and change as universals emerge.

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Influenced by Foucauldian thought, Hacking’s notion of historical ontology is related to the three axes referred to by Foucault: the axis of knowledge, the axis of power, and the axis of ethics. In other words, the historical ontology of ourselves has to answer an open series of questions: how we have constituted ourselves as subjects of our knowledge, how we have constituted ourselves as subjects that exercise or suffer power relations, and how we have constituted ourselves as the moral subjects of our actions (Foucault 1984: 48–49). Within the framework of a rereading of his previous trajectory, undertaken from the perspective of problem of the subject, and giving it a retrospective meaning, in “What Is Enlightenment?” (1984) Foucault gives a new name to his task: the historical ontology of ourselves. It is historical because it does not establish universal conditions. Foucault’s three great questions – What do I know?, What can I do?, and What am I? – do not have a universal answer because they vary with each social formation. And Foucault praises Kant, in this text, for having been perhaps one of the first philosophers to have posed the question “What am I today, a man of such an age,” instead of the question “I think, therefore I am,” in the universal form. Although the universal aspect of philosophy does not disappear, the task of the philosopher as a critical analyst of our world here and now is increasingly important. In this text Foucault takes up the Nietzschean difference between origin and invention, where beginning means human production at a certain moment in history. Foucault’s ontology of the present does not claim to be based on metaphysics but on history. They belong to a history of singular and unique events, and while they are not subsumed within a teleological chain, they do not respond to simple chance either; they are inserted at a crossroad of events. For Foucault as for Hacking – and unlike Kant: [. . .] the task is not that of fixing an ontologically primitive, definitively “real” stratum of historical reality, but in tracing the mobile systems of relationships and syntheses which provide the conditions of possibility for the formation of certain orders and levels of objects and of forms of knowledge of such objects: the uncovering of what Foucault terms a “historical a priori.” (Foucault 1980: 236)

His method does not lead to an ontological search for an ultimate determination, nor does it attempt to deduce these various orders of events from the causal principles of sufficient reason, but instead analyzes a multiplicity of political, social, institutional, technical, and theoretical conditions of possibility and reconstructs a heterogeneous system of relations and effects whose contingent interlocking builds what Foucault calls the historical a priori. What he thus achieves is a form of historical intelligibility whose concreteness and materiality lies in the true irreducibility of the different orders of events whose relationships he traces (Foucault 1980: 243). That is to say, “[. . .] the historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical” (Foucault 1984: 46). It must not be considered as a theory, a doctrine, or even a permanent body of knowledge that is collected, but rather as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the

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criticism of what we are is at the same time a historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and proof of their possible transgression. (Foucault 1984: 50) Foucault is interested in showing that what is has not always been, could cease to be, and is only the product of various chances and a precarious history. In the same way, Hacking’s ontology does not deal with being in general terms either. This is a constant in his work. What type of ontology is, then, Hacking’s? It is one that, as he himself says, deals with particular trajectories of being rather than with great abstractions, which leaves to one side the global theoretical debate so as to deal with a few entities in a particular way. It refers more to the space of historical and situated possibilities that surrounds the person for the formation of their character and which creates the potentiality for individual experience, than to the formation of character itself. It cannot be otherwise insofar as it emphasizes over and over again, for example, that the making up people -that is, “[. . .] the ways in which a new scientific classification may bring into being a new kind of person, conceived of and experienced as a way to be a person” (Hacking 2007: 285)-, does not occur in a general way but rather within particular and specific processes, and insofar as it maintains – in a vision that Hacking defines as almost existentialist (Vagelli 2014: 239–240) – that there is no completely fixed human nature to argue about. Hacking’s historical ontology refers, as we have pointed out, to the three Foucauldian domains of work: (1) an ontology of ourselves in our relationships with the truth, which allows us to constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; (2) a historical ontology of ourselves in our relationships to the field of power, the ways in which we constitute ourselves as an active subject that acts on others; and (3) a historical ontology of ourselves in our relations with morality, the way in which we constitute ourselves as ethical subjects that act on themselves. Under these three domains, the self does not designate a universal, but a set of singular positions. We constitute ourselves at a time and place, using materials that have a distinctively and historically formed organization. The presence of these three axes restricts, according to Hacking, the possibility that everything that arises in history belongs to the domain of historical ontology. This is what happens, for example, with the creation of natural phenomena proposed in Representing and Intervening (1983), since, although they arise in history, they are not historically constituted. The opposite occurs with the phenomena studied by the human sciences, subject to what Hacking calls the looping effect of human kinds, that is, “[. . .] the way in which a classification may interact with the people classified” (Hacking 2007: 286). In order to learn about people and their behavior, new classifications are constantly being created. Those classifications and our knowledge interact with the persons who are classified, persons who frequently change or modify their behavior in light of how they are classified and known. At the same time, this creation of new kinds implies the availability of new descriptions to which to adjust the behaviors. The case of the transient mental illness (Hacking 1999a: 100) known as multiple personality disorder clearly shows, according to Hacking, the interaction between the experts and the classified. In this case the experts are the doctors, who create the

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possibility of a conceptual space for the illness, and the classified are the patients, who are affected by the classification in their thought, treatment, and control and who act and are in a way that is not independent of the available descriptions, thus creating the need to review the classification and the very criteria of its application. Around 1840, says Hacking, a few cases of multiple personality disorder were recorded, but the image that doctors had of this disorder was very different from today. Their vision was different because their patients were different, and they were different because the experts had different expectations. The patients of each era tend to adjust themselves to the way they are classified. In turn, the way in which they do so acquires its own characteristics, which leads to a constant transformation and revision of the classification. In this process, Foucault’s three axes become visible. Knowledge becomes visible because the individual is recognized as having a kind of behavior and a sense of self in relation to the disease. Furthermore, the new classifications can modify not only the present and the future, but also reinterpret the past. If a description was not available in the past, you could not intentionally act on it. But when that description is created, the past can be reorganized in light of the new categorization. Not only do you change your mind about what you did, but by changing your understanding and sensitivity, the past comes back full of intentional actions that were, in a sense, unavailable when it happened. Power refers fundamentally to the anonymous conceptual power in relation to the disease, which acts on the life of the patient and of others, because the interaction of people with the classification occurs within a matrix of institutions and practices that surround the classification. Finally, ethics becomes visible, as the events related to the disease have to do with values that enable choices, ways of being, and ways of seeing oneself and others. Hacking follows the path marked out by Foucault in terms of thinking about the constitution of subjects, not in universalizable terms, but as a process that occurs at a time and a place, in specific local and historical forms, and using materials organized in a specific historical form. But Hacking examines various forms of constitution, of concepts, practices, ideas, and institutions, which we can treat as objects of knowledge. In this way, under this framework of historical ontology, the analysis of the most general concepts used in epistemology corresponds to historical meta-epistemology (Hacking 2002: 9). The Emergence of Probability constitutes one of the first examples of what Hacking calls historical meta-epistemology. Lorraine Daston has argued that this text exerted a decisive influence on her choice of the label historical epistemology to name a certain type of research that she understands – and practices – as being about the historical conditions in which fundamental epistemic categories of science, those that “structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation” (Daston 1994: 282), emerge. She has also argued that Hacking is one of the best practitioners of this contemporary trend. Hacking, however, reserves the expression historical epistemology to refer to the works of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. According to Bachelard, the essence of epistemology is to be historical. The discipline that takes scientific knowledge as its object of study must consider its historicity; it must account for

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the real conditions of the production of scientific knowledge. Science is in itself, in its practice, the producer of its own norms and criteria of its existence. Given the use that Bachelard makes of the notion of historical epistemology, Hacking argues that it is best to call the studies carried out by Daston and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute – and at any rate his own – historical metaepistemology. The objects of study to which Bachelard refers are the sciences, with their historical development, their obstacles, and their ruptures, that is, scientific knowledge. By contrast, the object of study of historical meta-epistemology is ideas about knowledge. It is not a theory of knowledge, but a study of ideas about or uses of knowledge. It is one thing to historicize scientific knowledge, its production, and validation processes and quite another to historicize epistemological categories. Where Bachelard insisted that historical considerations were essential to the practice of epistemology, historical meta-epistemology examines the trajectories of objects that play certain roles in thinking about knowledge and belief (Hacking 1999b: 53). Someone who is interested in historical meta-epistemology is not necessarily excluded from drawing epistemic conclusions, but that does not mean that his analysis is epistemological. Historical meta-epistemology is, according to Hacking, a way of doing the history and philosophy of the sciences, which can show how certain possibilities emerge. In this case, it deals with the emergence of organizing concepts related to knowledge, belief, opinion, objectivity, impartiality, proof, probability, argument, reason, rationality, evidence, facts, and truth. They are the words used by what Quine called semantic ascent and which Hacking calls elevator words in some of his works (Hacking 1999a: 21). They are words that are used to say something about what we say or think about the world. They and their adjectives have undergone substantial mutations in their meaning and value, although they are often thought of as independent objects, without history, with stable, transparent, and eternal meanings. Historical meta-epistemology is an analysis of concepts, not in a timeless way but in their historical sites. The logical relations between them are formed in time and, as has been seen, cannot be correctly perceived unless their temporal dimensions and their uses are taken into account. These organizing concepts, without which we could not think about our thinking, seem to satisfy the following criteria, according to Hacking (1999b: 65): 1. They structure thought about the world and organize a whole collection of subconcepts, practices, and values. They are categories of thought, although Hacking prefers to call them organizing concepts. They are cousins to Kant’s pure concepts of the understanding but, although they play a role similar to Kantian concepts, since they allow judgments, unlike them, they are not permanent, but historical. 2. They are historical and situated. They are constituted by tradition and use. They do not exist as a timeless resource. They change, evolve, undergo mutations, or emerge in the light of new practices or as a result of radical transformations of previous ones.

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3. They are unavoidable. They are, possibly, essential for the very functioning of society, the law, and the sciences. They are attached to us, which does not mean that they cannot be changed or that they do not change. It is in this way that The Emergence of Probability accounts for an inevitable concept, which came to structure the experience of the world in many ways, which gives form to the ways in which it is known and on the basis of which a space of possibilities opens up in which so many other concepts – variability, population, distribution, mean, etc. – are constituted. As Hacking points out, it is a concept without which we cannot conceive the world. In this text, Hacking analyzes the historical conditions that make possible the emergence of our present concept of probability. He begins with what he calls the prehistory of chance, beginning with the first random games such as talus, the predecessor of dice. Despite the antiquity of this pastime, ideas about probability and a mathematics of chance were not known until the Renaissance. At that time, probability basically meant the probability of an opinion. It is only around 1650–1660 that many of the necessary ingredients came together to form the space in which probability, as it is known today, arose. Around these dates a significant number of people independently arrived at the basic ideas of probability. Although there had been some anticipation, it would seem that the time was not ripe for giving birth to a concept of probability, the current concept of probability. That immaturity resulted, among other things, from the lack of a relevant concept of factual evidence, the formation of which is one of the preconditions of probability. By a relevant concept of evidence is meant the evidence of things or internal evidence, as distinguished from the evidence of witnesses and authority. In the Renaissance a new kind of testimony was accepted: the testimony of nature. Nature could confer factual evidence, in the modern sense of the atomic, isolated, independent fact, which can serve as an indicator, and even positive proof, of another, isolated, independent fact. But, since it was based on natural signs, it could only be trusted sometimes. Probability was communicated by what are now called lawlike regularities and frequencies. Thus, the connection of probability with stable lawlike frequencies is a result of the way in which the new concept of internal evidence came into existence. This is why it is only once the sign becomes evidence that the space of possibilities is opened up for a concept of dual probability to emerge. This concept of probability emerges in the context of what Hacking calls a style of scientific reasoning or style of scientific thinking & doing, a notion that is presented in the next section.

Styles of Scientific Reasoning Although Hacking identifies his project on styles of scientific reasoning as having begun in 1982 with the article “Language, Truth and Reason,” both his book, The Emergence of Probability, and his article, “Michel Foucault’s Immature Science” (1979), can be considered advances in that line of research.

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In the 1979 article Hacking argues that the first chapters of the 1975 book are perhaps the only detailed study – in English – of a change in the style of rationality and he advances, although without mentioning the notion of style, in some of those concepts that later will be characteristic of his proposal for a style of scientific reasoning, developed fundamentally in different articles from 1992. Indeed, it is in “‘Style’ for Historians and Philosophers” (1992b) that Hacking gives an account of its fundamental characteristics and the main influences in this field of his proposal: the work of the Australian historian Alistair Crombie and of Michel Foucault. With respect to the former, he points out that he adapted his idea of styles of scientific thinking in the European tradition for metaphysics and epistemology, although changing its name to styles of scientific reasoning because he considered that “reasoning was a slightly less mentalistic gerund than thinking” (Hacking 2010: 9). Years later he would maintain that “Science is as much a matter of activity as of thought. Since I want to emphasize action and intervention, I speak of styles of scientific thinking & doing” (Hacking 2010: 3). This is an expression that, in my opinion, more fully represents the idea that Hacking held from the beginning, that styles do not have to do only with thought but with doing and handling, with mind and body, in scientific practice. With respect to Foucault, several references appear in the abovementioned 1992 text and can be summarized as follows: his “influence on my idea of styles of reasoning is more profound than that of Comte or Crombie” (Hacking 1992b: 12). Hacking’s interest is to prepare a genealogy of scientific reason, in the sense of “how we found out how to find out” (Hacking 2010: 3). He is interested in analyzing the different styles of scientific thinking & doing, the various general methods of scientific work that can be recognized in antiquity, that solidified over the centuries and that are still practiced today. It is an anachronistic story of how the present has come about (Hacking 2010: 4). He proposes style of scientific reasoning as “a new analytical tool that can be used by historians and by philosophers for different purposes” (Hacking 1992b: 1). It is social and metaphysical at the same time, capable of building a bridge between the social studies of knowledge and the philosophical-metaphysical conceptions of truth, existence, logic, meaning, etc. It is an enduring and impersonal social unit, the intellectual preparation or availability of a particular way of seeing and acting. It is an anonymous and autonomous thought system, which is not constituted by the beliefs of a person or school. The style does not determine a content or a specific science; styles are, rather, different ways of investigating that can be deployed in a complementary way in any science. The style of scientific reasoning is not identified with, nor is it exclusive to, a science or a scientific community, but crosses over them and is shared by several of them. Neither is the style typical of a particular era. They should not be conceived as isolated entities, but as compatible and complementary, interacting with each other, although Hacking does not explain in detail or provide any examples of how this integration of styles is carried out in practice. Hacking bases himself on Crombie’s list of thinking styles:

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1. The simple method of postulation exemplified by the Greek mathematical sciences. 2. The experimental style for the control and exploration of postulation through observation and measurement. 3. The hypothetical construction of analog models. 4. The ordering of varieties by means of comparison and taxonomy. 5. The statistical analysis of population regularities and the calculation of probabilities. 6. The historical derivation of genetic development (Crombie 1988: 10–12). However, he does not think of this list as definitive and in fact distances himself from it in some respects. In the first place, as already stated, he prefers to use the term reasoning instead of thinking, since he considers that style implies not only argumentation but also manipulation, that it is not only private but also public, and that it includes not only speaking but also arguing and showing (Hacking 1992b: 3). Furthermore, Hacking is not satisfied with that list because he wants the history of the present, because what is important now may be different from what was important before, and because it is not an exhaustive list, in that it does not record other previous styles or non-western ones. As a result of these differences, Hacking proposes his own list of styles of scientific reasoning: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Mathematics: (1.a) geometric style and (1.b) combinatorial style. Laboratory style. Galilean style (of hypothetical modelling). Taxonomic style. (5.a) Probability style and (5.b) statistical style Historical-genetic style.

To Crombie’s history of styles, Hacking adds metaphysics, the microsociology of origins, and philosophical anthropology. He adds metaphysics because a set of novelties, including new types of objects, proof items, sentences, laws, possibilities, and new types of classification and explanation, is integral to each style. Style is a condition for the emergence of certain typical and distinctive objects. Their emergence is simultaneous: the style does not arise first and only then are a new type of object and a new method of reasoning introduced. Styles are made up of their methods and the types of objects they deal with. The emergence of a new domain of objects of study generates an ontological dispute, a debate about what exists. The new object types are individualized from the style and are not previously apparent. Therefore, ontological debates only take place within their own scientific style. Debates between realism and antirealism make no sense, according to Hacking, except in the context of a style of reasoning. Although Hacking’s list of styles is internal, he considers that the microsociological aspect, the circumstances in which a style emerges, must be taken into account. The style is situated in the midst of people, it responds to the needs, interests, or curiosity of some of its members. It begins by being driven by social

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vectors and is inseparable from the institutions that develop and enable it. We have to resort to social analysis not only to explain the origin of each style, but also their continuation, expansion, and revitalization. In this sense, styles are contingent, made possible thanks to historical, institutional, and economic conditions, among others. As it matures, the style becomes less shaped by those interests and conditions. Each style evolves at its own pace and reaches maturity in its own time. When this happens, it no longer needs support or rhetoric to become self-confident and generate his own norms. Stabilization techniques become autonomous of the surrounding conditions as the style develops and strengthens. The existence of such techniques is a condition for a style to produce a relatively stable body of knowledge; ensure openness, creativity, and self-correction; and generate new knowledge and applications. Finally, the study of scientific reason is part of anthropology. Innate human abilities and the development of social institutions constitute an orientation through which to understand scientific reason. Each style is based on universal, innate human capacities that are discovered, exploited, and developed in specific historical situations and used differently in different historical contexts. Thus, styles are the product of cognition and culture, of the interaction between, on the one hand, human endowments that are based on the results of our evolutionary heritage and, on the other hand, specific historical events and developments. As human culture develops, we learn how to use those abilities in entirely new ways. We learn to investigate. Each style fixes, for its own domain, the meaning of the statements that belong to it. Certain statements can only exist within a certain style of reasoning. Style is the space of possibilities for the emergence of certain objects and concepts and, therefore, of statements that deal with them. But the style also establishes whether these statements can be candidates for being true or false. The emergence of a style makes certain statements positive. Thus, when talking about the probabilistic style, Hacking maintains: [...] the official statistics of every nation just did not exist at the beginning of the period under scrutiny, 1821. Not only were the sentences not uttered, but also they could not have been understood. We take for granted that most of the sentences are either true or false. No one will dispute the fact that sentences such as these were not inscribed in 1821. I urge that they did not have truth values. (Hacking 1992a: 143)

The idea of positivity is perhaps one of Hacking’s most frequent references when pointing out his debt to Foucault. Archaeological history allows us to establish what Foucault calls a positivity, a space in which it is possible to establish whether Buffon and Linnaeus were talking about “the same thing,” displaying “the same conceptual field,” opposing each other on “the same battlefield” (Foucault 1972: 126 [1969: 166]). Positivity is the historical-empirical substratum of discourses. It is the set of material conditions that make possible the existence of discourses as specific practices. A discourse always has material conditions of enunciation that go beyond its lexical or logical rules. These rules imply the mode of its existence, enunciability, transmission, appearance, and disappearance.

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This concept of positivity is not a transcendent principle, it is not Kant’s absolute a priori, whose conditions were universally applicable, necessary constraints for all possible experience. It is an a priori relativized by history. Its conditions are contingent on the particular historical situation and change in accordance with time and domains of knowledge. It is not a condition of validity for some judgments but a condition of reality for some statements; it is a condition for their emergence, their way of being, their transformation, their subsistence, their coexistence with others. It is a condition of a history that is already given, which is that of things actually said (Foucault 1972: 127 [1969: 167]). From this perspective, according to Hacking, a proposition can only be considered true or false when there is a style that helps determine its truth value. There are no statements already in possession of truth conditions, waiting for us to discover how to check them. Still, there are statements that have truth conditions regardless of style, for which a correspondence theory of truth will provide us with a clue to their meaning. Hacking does not object to a correspondence theory of truth whose terms designate basic-level concepts, which may be called pre-style statements. They are statements that are sometimes deduced from evidence and can be said to be true or false, sometimes just by looking. In contrast, there are a number of typically complex questions about which, as has already been said, it only makes sense to ask about them within acceptably reasoned modes of answering them. Hacking considers that there is no theory of truth, or semantics, that applies to the entire set of empirical sentences investigated in science. Each style determines the truth-telling criteria that apply within its own domains. Each style becomes a pattern of objectivity because it has the virtue of producing truth (Hacking 1992a: 135). Far from implying some kind of relativism, Hacking argues, that styles of reasoning are self-authenticating is part of an account of what he calls objectivity. Each way of investigating institutes its own criteria of evidence, proof, and demonstration. A style of scientific reasoning is not relative to anything. It does not respond to any preexisting criterion of objectivity nor does it determine the standard of objective truth. It is the norm. Despite Hacking’s claims, it is not clear that his styles of reasoning project do not imply relativism. The arguments about this issue are not unequivocal. Kusch (2010 and 2011), for example, understands that Hacking does not succeed in trying to distance his proposal from an epistemic relativism. I agree with him that Hacking’s first writings give an account of a proposal close to relativism, although in his later works he argues explicitly that his idea of styles does not lead to such a position. Kusch argues that the Hackinian proposal invites an epistemic relativism, understood as the view that at least some facts regarding epistemic justification are relative to different epistemic practices and that, despite the fact that different types of practices are developed, they are, in a certain sense, equally valid. In the same sense, Baghramian (2004) affirms that Hacking’s proposal is an example of relativism because what counts as evidence is internal to a given style of reasoning. For his part, Bueno (2012: 658) shows how Hacking would have resources to block this relativism, while his proposal allows the possibility that the same propositions be evaluated by different styles of reasoning. According to Bueno, at least in some cases

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there is a common standard between the different styles that would allow the analysis of said propositions. Research using multiple styles and common standards provides the precise context in which a choice can be made, precisely by invoking those relevant shared standards. Let us note that Hacking prefers to talk about reasoning and truthfulness, rather than reason and truth, because both rationality and truthfulness have a history, while the second pair lacks one. Hacking takes the notion of truthfulness from Bernard Williams (2002), who maintains that the concept of truth is universal. It has no history. Truthfulness does have a history. In history it becomes possible to tell the truth about new kinds of things, in new ways and to new standards. According to Hacking, Williams’ proposal can explain perfectly how styles originate, crystallize, and develop historically: a change of conception of what is telling the truth about X occurs in the Y century, and its icon is Z. Those who act according to the new style are no more rational or better informed than their predecessors. Those who stick to the traditional practice have neither the confused ideas nor the contrary convictions with respect to those of their successors. Applied, for example, to the laboratory style, it can be pointed out that there is a fundamental change in the conception of what it is to tell the truth about objects and structures that are normally inaccessible to observation (X) that occurred in the mid-seventeenth century (Y) and its icon is Robert Boyle (Z). This scheme introduces us to a final point: the crystallization of styles. In them coexist continuity and discontinuity. On the one hand, the styles are stable, cumulative, immune to any kind of refutation. They evolve, assimilate, and integrate. However, these long-term processes are interrupted by what Hacking calls crystallizations, radical changes that give rise to discrete periods within that continuity. Each style of reasoning has at least one moment of crystallization, a fixation point for how to proceed in the future, usually occurring after centuries of rudimentary precursors and tied to particular landmark events. Crystallizations are generally associated with iconic figures such as Pascal in the probabilistic style, Linnaeus in the taxonomic style, Galileo-Husserl in the hypothetical modeling style, Darwin in the genetic development historical derivation style, and Boyle in the laboratory style, although each of them is, at the same time, only a player in that way of life that is the style. Only when a style crystallizes is it understood how to investigate things using it.

The History and Philosophy of Science in Hacking’s Project Hacking respects his origins in the analytical tradition but does not accept its restrictions. As he himself points out (Hacking 1990b: 70–71), not only was he trained as an analytical philosopher but he has always considered himself as such, as someone interested in the clarity of concepts. However, he understands that regardless of how clear they are, it is not possible to use them properly if you do not know their trajectory. He holds that concepts do not exist prior to any use or independently of their interconnections, of what can actually be done with them. In that sense he sees no inconsistency between what he calls his analytical instincts and his

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allegiance to the imperative of seeking to understand thoughts and beliefs by accounting for how they originate. In this framework, Hacking has set himself the goal of building a bridge between analytical philosophy and continental philosophy without losing the strength of either current, showing that analytical philosophy and historical sensitivity do not have to be antithetical, but can be convergent. He points out that it is neither desirable nor necessary to speak of a reconciliation between the two because they are not antagonistic traditions. “I have no desire to make peace among different traditions. Attempts to reconcile continental and analytical philosophy are at best bland, lacking the savoir or pungency of either” (Hacking 1990b: 51–52). Hacking tries to read old philosophical texts in a new way. For him, concepts are, as has already been said, words in their sites. And the philosophical analyses that he carries out do not take the concepts in an abstract and timeless way but, on the contrary, are approaches from a historical perspective that helps to understand the actuality of the concept, how we think, and why we seem forced to think in a certain way. Hacking has insisted that Foucault’s work makes an unprecedented and unique attempt to highlight and make explicit the real and deep sources of the historiographic astonishment that occurs when reading texts from the past. Analyzing the words in their sites allows a more objective articulation of the knowledge of periods different from the current one, because in this way the deep order changes that made them possible and the real historical articulation with the schemes of concepts and practices overcome are revealed. “The history that I want is the history of the present” (1992b: 5), Hacking maintains, and this implies “[. . .] that we recognize and distinguish historical objects in order to illumine our own predicaments” (1992b: 5). If the current condition is the product of historical developments, then it is evident that its understanding can only be historical. For Hacking, concepts have a history; the objects of the human sciences have a history; the ways of telling the truth have a history; the ways of investigating have a history. The conditions of possibility have a history. Following Foucault, Hacking understands philosophy as “a way of analyzing and coming understand the conditions of possibility for ideas [. . .]” (Hacking 1981b:76). This interest in the analysis of the historical and situated conditions of possibility for the emergence of scientific concepts and objects, inherited from Foucault, but adapted by Hacking for his own purposes, underlies all of his work. His various projects can be better articulated and structured around the axis that makes up this interest, which appears with greater or lesser visibility in the different nodes that constitute his work – styles of scientific reasoning, probability, making up people, experimentation and scientific realism – but that is always present (Martínez 2021). According to Foucault’s historicized a priori, our thoughts and experiences occur within fixed but contingent categorical boundaries, products of our history, which change from one age and one domain of knowledge to another. “Where Kant had found the conditions of possible experience in the structure of the human mind, Foucault does it with historical, and hence transient, conditions for possible discourse” (Hacking 1981b: 79). In the Hackinian proposal, however, the historical character has the peculiarity of being a history that is not restricted to the limits of an

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era but goes beyond them and goes beyond the epochal conditions in the sense that Foucault confers on them, as shared for all the knowledge of an age. Likewise, it is a history that does not attend so much to regularity in the Foucauldian sense, but rather to what is specific to each history (of a concept or an object). The history of concepts and objects in Hacking are particular trajectories, although their emergence occurs within a specific context or style. It is in this framework that there arises this “new type of question,” to which Daston alludes in reference to the studies carried out by Hacking in The Emergence of Probability. It is a type of question that is reiterated in other of Hacking’s texts and projects, when, for example, in Representing and Intervening, he analyzes, on the basis of his emphasis on experimentation and manipulation, the historical and situated conditions of possibility for the emergence of phenomena in the laboratory or when, in The Taming of Chance, he shows under what conditions the emergence, the making of people, is possible. The growth of statistical analysis, the avalanche of census numbers, clearly exposes how, from new categorizations, it is possible to build objects that have a historical ontology. But also important are the books Rewriting the Soul and Mad Travelers (1998), in which he studies the concept of multiple personality disorder and its relationship with memory and childhood abuse and the historical and situated conditions of possibility for the emergence of the so-called compulsive travelers or fugueurs, respectively. On the other hand, it is the styles of scientific thinking and doing, which provide the conditions that make possible the emergence of those concepts, objects, and kinds, typical of each style, and that place, in my opinion, this project of styles as a central node in Hacking’s comprehensive proposal (Martínez 2021). To conclude this section, it is important to insist on the idea that although Hacking defines his project as philosophical, he bases and defends his philosophical reflections historically, from a perspective that is not a mere fitting together but an integration of history and philosophy. For the philosophical understanding of the present, history is indispensable. However, as Simos and Arabatzis (2021: 154) have pointed out, Hacking is not limited to making a philosophical use of historical data, but rather, based on history, he philosophically elaborates historiographical concepts, metahistorical ideas, stories, and facts. In Hacking, philosophical ideas are historically informed and the historical facts philosophically charged.

Conclusion This chapter has explored the idea that even though he defines his project as philosophical, Ian Hacking bases and defends his philosophical reflections historically, from a perspective that is not a mere fitting together but an integration of history and philosophy. With this objective in mind, the chapter analyzed, first, his idea, rooted in the Foucauldian history of the present, that concepts are situated words and that their philosophical analysis requires understanding not only what the concept is, but also its history. Second, the chapter addressed Hacking’s proposal of a historical ontology, considered as a way of thinking about the constitution of ideas,

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concepts, kinds, objects, practices, and even the organizing concepts used in epistemology, specifically analyzed by the so-called historical meta-epistemology. Third, it presented his idea of styles of scientific reasoning, heir to the styles of scientific thinking the historian Alistair Crombie, understood as an analytical tool to be used by philosophers and historians and providers of the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of scientific objects and concepts. Finally, we reflected on the relationship between the history and philosophy of science in Hacking’s project and the influence that Foucault’s thought has exerted in this regard.

Cross-References ▶ Gaston Bachelard and Historical Epistemology: A New Perspective for the History of Science in the Twentieth Century ▶ Lorraine Daston’s Historical Epistemology: Style, Program, and School ▶ The Beginning of the Epistemological History of Science: Gaston Bachelard’s Responsibility ▶ The French Style in the Philosophy of the Sciences

References Baghramian M (2004) Relativism. Routledge, New York Bueno O (2012) Styles of reasoning: a pluralist view. Stud Hist Phil Sci 43:657–665 Crombie AC (1988) Designed in the mind: Western visions of science, nature and humankind. Hist Sci 26(71):1–12 Daston L (1994) Historical epistemology. In: Chandler J, Davidson A, Harootunian H (eds) (1994), questions of evidence. Proof, practice and persuasion across the discipline. Chicago University, Chicago, pp 282–289 Daston L (2007) The emergence of probability: a philosophical study of early ideas about probability, induction, and statistical inference, by Ian Hacking. Isis 98(4):801–808 Foucault M (1966) Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Gallimard, Paris Foucault M (1969) L’archéologie du savoir. Gallimard, Paris Foucault M (1972) The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse of language. Pantheon Books, New York Foucault M (1980) Power/knowledge: selected interviews & other writings 1972–1977. Pantheon Books, New York Foucault M (1984) What is enlightenment? In: Rabinow P (ed) The Foucault reader. Pantheon Books, New York, pp 32–50 Foucault M (2005) The order of things. An archaeology of the human sciences. Routledge, London/New York Hacking I (1975) The emergence of probability. Cambridge University, Cambridge Hacking I (1979) Michel Foucault’s immature science. Noûs 13(1):39–51 Hacking I (1981a) How should we do the history of statistics? In: Burchell G, Gordon C, Miller P (eds) (1991), The Foucault effect. Studies in governmentality. Chicago University, Chicago, pp 181–195 Hacking I (1981b) The archaeology of Michel Foucault. In: Hacking I (ed) (2002a), Historical ontology. Harvard University, London, pp 73–86

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Hacking I (1982) Language, truth and reason. In: Hollis M, Lukes S (eds) (1982), rationality and relativism. Blackwell, Oxford, pp 48–66 Hacking I (1983) Representing and intervening. Cambridge University, Cambridge Hacking I (1984) Five parables. In: Hacking I (ed) (2002b), Historical ontology. Harvard University, London, pp 27–50 Hacking I (1990a) The taming of chance. Cambridge University, Cambridge Hacking I (1990b) Two kinds of new historicism for philosophers. In: Hacking I (ed) (2002c), Historical ontology. Harvard University, London, pp 51–72 Hacking I (1991) The making and molding of child abuse. Crit Inq 17:253–288 Hacking I (1992a) Statistical language, statistical truth and statistical reason: the selfauthentification of a style of scientific reasoning. In: Mullin EM (ed) The social dimensions of science. University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Ind, pp 130–157 Hacking I (1992b) ‘Style’ for historians and philosophers. Stud Hist Phil Sci 23:1–20 Hacking I (1995) Rewriting the soul. Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. Princeton University, Princeton Hacking I (1998) Mad travelers. Reflections on the reality of transient mental illnesses. University of Virginia, Virginia Hacking I (1999a) The social construction of what? Harvard University, Cambridge Hacking I (1999b) Historical meta-epistemology, Wahrheit und Geschichte. Ein Kolloquium zu Ehren des 60. Geburststages von Lorenz Krüger. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen, pp 53–77 Hacking I (2002) Historical ontology. Harvard University, London Hacking I (2007) Kinds of people: moving targets. Proc. Br. Acad 151:285–318 Hacking I (2010) Lecture I. methods, objects, and truth. [Unpublished]. UNAM, México Kusch M (2010) Hacking’s historical epistemology: a critique of styles of reasoning. Stud Hist Phil Sci 41:158–173 Kusch M (2011) Reflexivity, relativism, microhistory: three desiderata for historical epistemologies. Erkenntnis 75:483–494 Martínez ML (2021) The texture in Ian Hacking’s work. Michel Foucault as the guiding thread of Hacking’s thinking. Synthese Library, 435, Springer Nature Simos M, Arabatzis T (2021) Ian Hacking’s metahistory of science. Philos Inq 9(1):145–165 Vagelli M (2014) Ian Hacking. The philosopher of the present. Iride 27(72):239–269 Williams B (2002) Truth & truthfulness: an essay in genealogy. Princeton University, Princeton

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Development of a Style: “Historical Epistemology” as “History” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Imagination of Possible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History of Science Without Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Epistemology to the Ethos and Back Again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Scientific Self in Motion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: Historical Epistemology, Medicine, or Poison? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter explores the style of historical epistemology developed by Lorraine Daston. We show how the author elaborated a critical dialogue with the French tradition of historical epistemology (namely, Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Foucault) and with the field of science studies, intending to integrate the history of science into history tout court. Studying the series of collective books organized in the recent decades by the American historian and her institutional activities, especially in the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin, we slowly see the emergence of a new research program around historical epistemology and a school to disseminate it. We take her book Objectivity (with Peter

G. d. C. Ávila (*) Center of Arts, Humanities and Languages, Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, Cachoeira, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] T. S. Almeida History Department, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_11

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Galison) as an example of this way of writing history. Through this book, we outline some contributions of Daston’s thought to contemporary historiography and to the understanding of modern science. Keywords

Lorraine Daston · Objectivity · Historical epistemology · History of science · Historiography

Introduction Question: de l’écriture de l’histoire: ele aussi, ne devrait-on pas se demander si ele est remède ou poison? Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, p. 175

Over the last three or four decades, Lorraine Daston has blazed many trails in the history of science, expanding the habitable territory of the discipline into regions beyond its usual reach. Distrustful of the boundaries established by the tradition of our field, she proposed approaches and analyses that cross scientific disciplines and temporalities in search of layers of historicity that are invisible to the eyes of a historiography that has focused too much on the formation of different fields (such as the history of astronomy, biology, etc.) and in the processes of transformation and affirmation of science (the Scientific Revolution, theory of evolution, etc.). In search of more diffuse and subtle forms of experience, the work of Lorraine Daston turned the small field of the history of science into a magnificent laboratory of “applied metaphysics” (Daston 2000, p. 1). This “historiographical operation” is articulated around (and toward) the historical epistemology, patiently elaborated through collective projects led by the North American historian. L. Daston’s copious work is closely associated with her institutional role as director, between 1995 and 2019, of Department II, Ideals and Practices of Rationality, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. In June 2019, with the retirement of Professor Lorraine Daston from the chair position, the Department II ceased its activities (Ms. Daston remains attached to the MPIWG as an Emeritus Scientific Member until, at least, January 2027). But as a way of honoring the North American historian, it was transferred to the institution’s records as Department Daston. Through the series of research projects she coordinated, it is possible to form an overview of the interests and types of problems that Lorraine Daston addressed: the history of scientific observation, the relationship between science and art, between science and modernity, the role of beliefs in the constitution of knowledge, the history of the circulation of science, of the scientific persona, the history objectivity, etc. The books that resulted from these projects – often the result of thematic seminars – are examples of the interinstitutional and long-term articulation that the author promoted. This intense editorial activity reveals the effort to build

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a transnational research community capable of providing different points of view and approaches to the history of science. In this chapter, we offer a possible route through the many paths opened by the work of the North American historian. We do not intend to exhaust all of her production nor to carry out an intellectual biography. The purpose of this text is to situate Daston’s conception of historical epistemology in the panorama of the historiography of science and, from there, establish a critical dialogue with some of the elements that stand out and that collaborated for the renewal of the historiography of science. The focus of the analysis will be on the book Objectivity, published by the author in partnership with Peter Galison, a Harvard historian. We chose Objectivity for several reasons: it is an authorial work, not a collection of articles (although it is in partnership, which is no problem for our purposes here); it is one of the author’s “mature” works; it puts into practice much of what was prepared by Daston in earlier texts, as we shall see; last but not least, it is a masterful work with impacts already felt in the field of the history of science and surroundings. A greater focus on Against Nature (2019), for example, a product of deep reflection and intellectual refinement, would highlight another theme of the author’s predilection: the moral authority of Nature. This book seems like a preamble to Lorraine Daston’s avowed claim to write a history of the rules “everywhere and at all times.” While we wait, we can speculate how the author will use her historical epistemology to investigate the theme of rules and rule following. Our curiosity is heightened above all because it is a theme that occupied considerable space in the reflection of authors such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Thomas Kuhn, authors from whom Daston wanted to distance herself, as we will see later in this chapter. In this untimely meditation, the author directs her intelligence to the mission of historically understanding how Western culture attributed moral value to Nature: “How to make a moral order appear?” (Daston 2019, p. 66). From there arises a whole profound discussion – collected from multiple sources of European culture: theologians, naturalists, scientists, philosophers – about order and its multiples, the role of laws in the meaning of Nature and their implications for human conduct. “And there is no morality that does not conjure up an order, a bulwark against chaos” (Daston 2019, p. 67). It would also be possible to guide the analysis toward the geopolitical dimension of knowledge. Among all the barriers it broke and the borders she transgressed, the limits of the West and science carried out in Europe and the USA remained little problematized in Lorraine Daston’s research. A comparison with the work of the Indian historian Kapil Raj (2007, 2010, 2015, 2017), for example, could show that the critique of Eurocentrism and the adoption of a “subaltern” perspective implies a radical change in the conception of what is considered knowledge and science, their places of production, their forms of circulation, their metaphysical matrices – central themes to the historical epistemology program conceived by Lorraine Daston. Certainly, such an analysis has the potential to enrich the history of science by associating it with this critical countercolonial layer.

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The Development of a Style: “Historical Epistemology” as “History” In 1988, with the publication of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, Lorraine Daston presented to a broader public some of the traits that, in the following decades, would help to form a historiographical style that is now mature and widespread enough to deserve the name of “school.” Originally a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, the book testifies to the precocity of her preoccupation with the history of the ahistorical (Daston 1988). Its opening line – “What does it mean to be rational?” – is like a ground bass, a leitmotiv, which will be repeated throughout Daston’s fruitful and award-winning career. The history of the classical theory of probability was, for Daston, both a way of apprehending the transformations of rationality and an important case study for the history of quantification. This study helps us to understand the intellectual context of the formation of Daston’s historiographical perspective, as well as her innovative approach to the history of science, which she designated by an old name as early as 1994 when asked directly by James Chandler to which genre her “conceptual history” of facts and evidence belonged. I think the best label for what I attempt in this essay is ‘historical epistemology’. (. . .) I lay no claim whatsoever to originality in the genre of historical epistemology; not even the name is mine. (I confess I am not sure as to the provenance of the name, though it has a resonantly Hacking-esque ring). To my mind, the most able practitioners of historical epistemology these days are philosophers rather than historians – I think of the remarkable recent work of Ian Hacking and Arnold Davidson – although I think they, intellectual historians, and historians of science might well make common cause in such a venture. (Chandler 1993, p. 323)

In a confessional tone, that little sentence is quite revealing for an evidential historiography, as well as the names that Daston associates with historical epistemology. In a footnote, Daston specifically refers to Davidson’s article “The Horrors of Monsters,” which would later be republished in a collection with the revealing title: The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. Davidson’s readers know how much of his works are tributaries of the reading of the work of Georges Canguilhem and, mainly, Michel Foucault. There is, in Davidson, a very clear intention to associate his type of investigation with the French intellectual affiliation known as Épistémologie Historique and often explained by the trinomial Bachelard-Canguilhem-Foucault. As for Hacking, who also always recognized his immense debt to Foucault’s work, the case deserves even more attention due to the very importance that Daston attributes to him in her formation. “There are books that can change your life, and this is one of them,” said Daston, almost 20 years after the publication of his doctoral dissertation regarding Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction, and Statistical Inference. “By the time I had finished [sometime in the spring of 1975], I knew I would be writing my

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dissertation on the history of probability and statistics. It has taken me much longer, some decades, to digest what kind of history was being pursued under the quiet, precise declaration in the subtitle” (Daston 2007, p. 801). Many times, Daston paid her tributes to Hacking’s philosophical approach and contributions to philosophy and historiography of science, the area of inquiry that, in her eyes, he created by asking a new kind of question, the one about the preconditions for the emergence of a concept so indispensable to reasoning that we rarely think of it as historical, but it was not around before the mid-seventeenth century. And it is not without interest here that Hacking presented Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge as a major historiographical model of that kind of history. According to Daston, “along with Foucault’s theses on biopower, Hacking’s work made probability and statistics visible, ubiquitous, mighty, and sometimes ominous” (Daston 2007, p. 806). Hacking and Foucault were important to the trajectory of Daston’s historical epistemology since they provided it with a keen eye not only for detail but to the “invisible history of objects that had become inevitable,” to the “evidence for the history of the self-evident.” Twenty years after that first elaboration on the label that would best explain the kind of history of the sciences she practices, Daston has added another name to its genealogy. In the entry “History of science” of the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, she stated that her attempt to write the history of an apparently historyless entity like objectivity (she was speaking specifically of the book Objectivity) was tributary “to the remarkable studies of Georges Canguilhem and, especially, Michel Foucault, who challenged the universality and permanence of fundamental modern categories such as normality and sexuality” (Daston 2015, p. 246). Still according to Daston, wellknown studies about other “transhistorical entities,” such as the books Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution by Peter Dear, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England by Steven Shapin, and Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public by Theodore Porter, also bear traces of that influence of French philosopherhistorians. The intertextuality that explains the air de famille between the books of Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault; between their courses, studies and essays on medical ideology and technology or between the concepts of normalization and biopolitics has already been explored by the historiography of science (cf. Braunstein, Jean, 2007). In “Science Studies and History of Science,” Daston also spoke about this proximity, again emphasizing the contributions to the development of historical qepistemology: Foucault was himself trained by the French historian of science Georges Canguilhem, so there was a kind of prearranged harmony between the topics Foucault originally set out to historicize so radically – madness, natural history, biopower – and the traditional preoccupations of historians of biomedicine. But the shock waves triggered by Foucault’s concerted attempts to write the history of the ahistorical – sexuality, the self, truth itself – reached far beyond the human and life sciences. Topics like proof, experience, and objectivity, which historians had previously assigned to the timeless contemplations of the philosophers,

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suddenly seemed fair game. Moreover, the Foucauldian mode of historical investigation of these ethereal abstractions was painstakingly concrete, dovetailing with the new disciplinary consciousness of historians of science. (Daston 2009, pp. 809–810)

The expression was put into circulation again after the creation of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in 1994 (Van Damme 2014, p. 12). Lorraine Daston is invited to be one of the directors of the newly created institute, together with Jürgen Renn and Lorenz Krüger. The first annual report states that “the development of a ‘historical epistemology’ is a central research goal. It should comprise a historical understanding of the development of fundamental categories of scientific thinking” (First Annual Report 1994). Likewise, in one of the first texts published by the institute, Jürgen Renn (1994) proposes an understanding of science that effectively integrates the cognitive and social structures that make up science. That task would fall to historical epistemology. The author criticizes the supposed interdisciplinarity of what has been designated as “history and philosophy of science,” asserting that despite attempts, the two fields remain isolated (Thomas Kuhn had already formulated the same criticism in the late 1960s). Historical epistemology would be this effectively interdisciplinary endeavor, which considers the complexity of science. For the author, this new “historical theory of scientific knowledge” would be more competent to interpret the reality of the sciences at the end of the twentieth century and would collaborate to reverse the trend of philosophical studies that think about science independently of its context of production and emergence (Renn 1994). Thus, it would not propose to combine history (to explain social structures) and philosophy (to explain cognitive structures) but would carry out an analysis that takes these two sets into account, understanding them as part of the same framework. The tensions between internalist and “contextualist” analyses (the author’s term) would be overcome by a theory that deals with “the emergency of scientific thinking within its cultural and social contexts” (Renn 1994, p. 4). The attempt still preserves much of the vocabulary of the currents it intends to overcome. As we can see, this is an action collectively organized around the Max Planck Institute. A more recent example shows the vitality and breadth of this project, which continues to be actively embraced by the Max Planck Institute. In a book on the history of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century, originally published in 2010, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (who was, at the time, director of the institute) argues that the main characteristic of this discipline over the last century was precisely the historicization of epistemology. In such a way that, for him, epistemology can be defined (without any appeal to adjectives) as “reflection on [. . .] the historical conditions under which, and the means by which, things are transformed into objects of knowledge” (Rheinberger 2014, p. 5). Not coincidentally, the essay was originally titled “On historicizing epistemology.” The effort to consolidate a research program also appears in one of the first texts by Lorraine Daston on the history of scientific objectivity, in which the author proposes a definition of historical epistemology. In 1992, Daston and Galison jointly published their first text on the subject. Both would occasionally return to dealing with the issue individually, until they returned to the problem to work on what would become Objectivity. Despite this, Daston’s position is significantly different from that of her colleague.

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What I mean by historical epistemology is the history of the categories which structure our thought, which shape our conception of argumentation and proof, which organize our practices, which certify our forms of explanation and which endow each of these activities of symbolic meaning and emotional value. This historical epistemology can (and in fact must) refer to the history of ideas and practices, as well as to the history of meanings and values that constitute the moral economies of science. (Daston 2008, p. 367)

This long quotation sums up in an exemplary way the program carried out by the new historiography of the sciences. In it, historical epistemology clearly appears as history, a history that aims at the thought but also at practices, which encompasses reason and affection, which is concerned with materiality and meaning. In 1996, François Hartog and Roger Guesnerie coordinated a seminar in Paris, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, entitled “Études sur les sciences, Études sur les techniques.” The purpose of this meeting, said its organizers, was to hear from some specialists in the history of sciences and techniques what would be the liveliest points of the ongoing debates in those disciplines. About 30 researchers participated in the seminar, including speakers and debaters, such as Dominique Pestre, Fernando Gil, Roger Chartier, Bruno Latour, and Yves Cohen. Crossing all the speeches, two ideas were recurrent: the “crisis” of the history of sciences and techniques (particularly in France) but also its “recomposition,” now based on a “reconfiguration” of the problems traditionally addressed. The titles of the tables, such as “Intellectual history and sociology of sciences,” “Cognition, scientific traditions and cultures,” “Epistemology and social history,” or “Technique and material culture,” give clues to the new elements of this configuration. It was at the table “History of scientific objectivity” that Lorraine Daston systematically presented the “historiographical program” that she called “historical epistemology,” which was, at that time, still considered a program “very young and that has not yet given sufficient evidence that it can be qualified as a school” (Daston 1998, p. 115). Daston was not unaware of the unusual situation: “I am aware that the term ‘épistémologie historique’ received a very different meaning in French in the past, in the continuity of Bachelard’s work,” she added. Hence, she clarifies her position: What I understand by historical epistemology is the history of the categories that structure our thinking, that shape our conception of argumentation and proof, that organize our practices, that certify our forms of explanation and that endow each of these activities of a symbolic meaning and an affective value. This historical epistemology can (and must) refer back to a history of ideas and practices as much as to the history of meanings and values that constitute the moral economies of the sciences. But it poses questions of a different kind: (. . .) not the historical judgment that this or that discipline achieved objectivity and, if so, when and how, but rather a historical exploration of the manifold scientific meanings and manifestations of objectivity. (Daston 1998, pp. 116–117)

We like to think of this situation – on the one hand, the delimitation between her program of historical epistemology and Bachelardian épistémologie historique and, on the other hand, the recognition of the importance of the Canguilhem-FoucaultHacking affiliation for the development of her approach – as a sign of the displacement caused by Daston’s work in the history of historical epistemology. Canguilhem

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(2000, p. 9) once wrote that “from the moment that, in his little corner of investigations, discontinuity in history is recognized, it would be frowned upon to refuse discontinuity in the history of history.” Extending the analogy between the history of science and the history of historiography, we believe it is possible to employ here Bachelard’s proposition, according to which changes in the current form of science often imply a new history for that science. Since Daston defined her program as a historical epistemology, associating the names of Ian Hacking and Arnold I. Davidson, no one else has thought of this history and definition similarly. Thanks to Daston, “historical epistemology” came to be thought of historically. Among the most radical consequences of this historicization of historical epistemology is the fact that it ceased to mean a French national school of philosophy, for which the history of science was a task – undoubtedly important, but still secondary – to become a component of what Daston called “the new disciplinary consciousness of historians of science.” Braunstein proposed that we call it style, resuming both the “thought styles” of Ludwik Fleck and Hacking and his “style for historians and philosophers,” which Daston herself used as an example of research in historical epistemology.

The Imagination of Possible The transformation brought about by Daston’s work made researchers of the historiography of science more attentive to the differences between the works of Bachelard and Canguilhem, which were often minimized in the name of the cohesion of the “school.” This does not make Daston an anti-Bachelardian author: the references to La formation de l’Esprit Scientifique in “The moral economy of science” and in the introduction to Biographies of Scientific Objects seem good indications of this. But neither does it seem to us that the difference proposed by Hacking between the works of Daston and Bachelard, which made him suggest that the works of the historian are much more a “historical metaepistemology,” is the most important. For Hacking, this difference resides in the fact that Daston and the new historical (meta)epistemologists “do not propose, defend, or refute theories of knowledge. They study epistemological concepts as objects that evolve and mutate. (. . .) Where Bachelard insisted that historical considerations are essential to epistemology, the historical meta-epistemologist examines the trajectories of objects that play certain roles in thinking about knowledge and belief” (Hacking 2002, p. 9). It seems that the real displacement operated by Daston concerns her efforts to overcome the limitations of the historical, philosophical, and sociological approaches to the history of sciences, in response to a disciplinary context very distant and different from that of Bachelard. If Bachelard’s historical epistemology turned against the naive realism of logical positivism – which, not coincidentally, was also Fleck’s target – Daston’s had as its main target the false opposition between the rational and the social.

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The two problems are not entirely unrelated. In “The coming into being of scientific objects,” introduction to the collective book Biographies of Scientific Objects, Daston takes as a problem how “whole domains of phenomena – dreams, atoms, monsters, culture, morality, centers of gravity, value, cytoplasmic particles, tuberculosis – come to be and disappear as objects of scientific investigation” (Daston 2000, p. 1). Daston knows how this perspective differs from traditional approaches to research in the history of science. Her proposal intends to position itself orthogonally to the plane of the debate between realists – those who see scientific objects as discoveries, things that wait to be brought to light – and constructionists, who defend that scientific objects are eminently historical and not real. “Applied metaphysics,” says Daston (2000, p. 3), “claims that scientific objects can be simultaneously real and historical.” Thus, the book Biographies of Scientific Objects would be, in the words of Daston (2000, p. 14), “an attempt to revive ontology for historians.” It is easy to trace this idea from Hacking to Foucault and from Foucault to Bachelard, with his concern with the ontological status of the reality of scientific objects and his innovative concept of phenomenotechniques. But this should not minimize the difference represented by the new importance given to the question of “non-science,” particularly of the “social,” within historical epistemology, that is, of the recognition of its properly epistemological functions in the historical constitution of the sciences. It is true that in Le materialisme rationnel, Bachelard stated that contemporary scientific objectivity is based on a tripod formed by rational objectivity, technical objectivity, and social objectivity. But the social here was much more concerned with the internal movements of the scientific community, with the cité des savants, while Daston seems to be much closer to Fleck’s thesis. Every epistemological theory is trivial that does not take this sociological dependence of all cognition into account in a fundamental and detailed manner. But those who consider social dependence a necessary evil and an unfortunate human inadequacy which ought to be overcome fail to realize that without social conditioning no cognition is even possible. Indeed, the very word “cognition” acquires meaning only in connection with a thought collective. (Fleck 1979, p. 43)

The centrality of this thesis in Daston’s work rewrote a new chronology and a new geography for historical epistemology, in such a way that Fleck himself can now be included and brought closer to Canguilhem’s research on normalization and his denunciation of the sterility of the opposition between “internalist” and “externalist” postures, which had in common a lack of understanding about the nature of the object of the history of science, confused by the defenders of both models with the very object of the sciences of which history is made. The interpretation of historical epistemology as a “style,” essentially historical and to which Lorraine Daston made major transformative contributions, helped to eliminate an old difficulty for historians of ideas, that of the supposed unity of thought often expressed in terms such as “tradition” or “school,” allowing to establish new connections in the broad framework on which the transnational movement of historicization of epistemology unfolded (cf. Rheinberger 2014).

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Among commentators on Canguilhem, hitherto marginal texts, such as the conference presented on “Objectivité et historicité de la pensée scientifique,” at the event organized by the magazine Raison Présente, on the eve of May 1968, gained centrality in explaining its historical-epistemological approach as they showed attention to the historicity of objectivity, a central theme in Daston’s work. In this text, Canguilhem states: Therefore, there is not, a priori, any incompatibility between the introduction, in the history of science, of a certain vision of coherences or structures in the scientific mentality of an era, and the recognition of the objectivity of knowledge at a given historical moment. (Canguilhem 1968, p. 40)

There is no doubt that the idea of the historicity of objectivity in Canguilhem is quite different from that proposed by Bachelard, who assumed abstraction as a value from which he could judge the advances in Physics and Chemistry. There is also no doubt that Canguilhem would accompany Daston in her bewilderment at “this strange but widespread idea that historicizing is equivalent to invalidating” (Daston 2017b). The interest that Daston aroused in the history of objectivity and the historiography’s concern to situate it about its gestures of recognition with Canguilhem’s work led commentators of the French historian to realize that in texts such as La formation du concept de reflexe, he adopted the perspective according to which progress is the passage from one value to another, from one objectivity value to another, from one truth value to another. There, Canguilhem shows how the terrain for determining the status of “scientificity” and proof of the objective validity of a concept elaborated within a reflection on life cannot be anything other than the clinic, promoting an inversion in the epistemological relationship between science and technique. With these new elements, Braunstein was then able to perceive in the works of Canguilhem and Daston, now mutually enlightened, “the same kind of problematic,” and that both in one and the other, “it is about seeing how metatheoretical, metaepistemological, let’s say, like objectivity, they are notions that have a history” (Braunstein 2007, p. 112). But with all this, what good is historical epistemology? As we said, Daston sought to answer this question, right in the first presentations of her new program, comparing historical epistemology to psychoanalysis, “releasing us from our bondage to the past by hauling that past into conscious view.” (This approximation of historical epistemology with psychoanalysis also has a certain Bachelardian tone. The French philosopher proposed a “psychoanalysis of the scientific spirit” or “psychoanalysis of the scientist” as one of the tasks of his epistemology.) There is, since Daston’s first texts on historical epistemology and the history of objectivity, a balance between the alert – constantly repeated, as if she feared being confused – that “historicizing is not identical to relativizing, much less to debunking” and the assertion that, faced with absolute certainties and unshakable foundations, historical epistemology can “open up conceptual windows that may significantly transform the debate.” These two positions undoubtedly meet in the history of objectivity and the study of another constant theme in Daston’s work: the moral authority of nature.

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To present the style that the author has developed in more detail, we must see it in action. To do so, we will take a closer look at the book Objectivity, the fruit of a long collaboration with the great historian Peter Galison and one of the most original contributions to our field in the present century. The book is ambitious in its pretensions. It intends to carry out a history of an “epistemic virtue,” objectivity, and also a history of the “scientific self” over more than two centuries. The book wants to show how these two topics are objects of the same history by tracing “how epistemology and ethos emerged and merged over time and in context” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 363). At the same time, it manages to cut very clearly within a theme that seems infinite. Its sources are the images produced for the atlases (from different disciplines, from botany to astronomy) and how epistemic virtues and the scientific self modify the production of the images that make up these atlases. “We want to show, first of all, how epistemic virtues can be inscribed in images, in the ways they are made, used, and defended against rivals,” says Daston and Galison (2010, p. 42). It is already clear that we are facing many difficult problems, difficulties that will not stop the authors from pursuing these problems for more than 400 pages. We will follow down some of these difficulties trying to show how this narrative deals with the historicity of science. One key is in the conception of science as a series of disciplinary devices, in a Foucauldian manner, that constrain its practitioners and forge a collective identity and form of subjectivity. The authors highlight the role of the production and circulation of images, but we could point to a similar process focusing on other scientific practices: experimentation, writing of books, articles, and theses, etc. The shift to practice – a highly publicized feature of the new historiography of science since the mid-1980s – allows authors to narrate the history of a concept that seemed immune to corrosion by temporality, such as objectivity (Golinski 2005). More than that, objectivity is not treated just as a concept but as a set of gestures, techniques, habits, and temperaments created and reinforced by daily training. Objectivity is reconstructed from the bottom up; it is the end point of a chain of relationships and not the operationalization of an abstract conceptual apparatus.

History of Science Without Structure At this point, we interrupt the work description to make a first detour. This digression will be based on the following question: With which historiographical traditions do the authors dialogue to elaborate their reflections? The authors are part of a generation of historians of science formed under the decisive influence of the science studies, for the good or the bad. Both have initial training in scientific areas and have already dedicated themselves to history in postgraduate studies (which is nothing new in our field). Their first relevant publications appeared in the mid-1980s, and in the following decade, the two emerged as important names in the historiography of science. While Lorraine Daston was dedicated to subjects such as natural history in the early modern era, the emergence of probability, and the moral authority of nature;

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Peter Galison (cf. 1997, 1999) turned his attention to twentieth-century particle physics history, to the material culture of science, and to Big Science. These singular trajectories find, in Objectivity, a favorable field for the fertilization of crossreferences. Moving from the trajectories to the references cited in the book, we will find more elements. The enormous quantity and diversity of “primary sources” stand out: manuals and atlases produced in different places and periods (from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century), memoirs published by scientific academies across Europe, correspondence, vast iconographic material, field notebooks, and classical philosophical texts (Kant, Descartes, Goethe, Bacon, etc.). The secondary bibliography and theoretical references are also impressive in volume and diversity (which shows the time invested in preparing the text). Philosophical and historical references – classic and contemporary, canonical and “marginal” – dealing with topics such as observation, the role of “visuality” and image in science, discipline (with a notable presence of Foucault and Pierre Hadot), the psychology of the self and its formation, the construction of the scientific persona, any discussion around objectivity and subjectivity. To capture and evaluate the dialogues that the book establishes with different intellectual currents, it is not enough to introduce the authors’ trajectory or leaf through the bibliographic references. This kind of history of science is not intended to offer a global model for the development of science; it is not a theory of science. Even in a dense and deep book like Objectivity, the authors are cautious about the universality of the argument: The scope of this book is broad, but it is not comprehensive. It does not encompass all science, all scientists, or even all scientific images for the places and periods it treats. It is about a particular class of images in the service of a particular aspect of science: scientific atlases as an expression of historically-specific hierarchies of epistemic virtues. (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 48)

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison were rehearsing this new program in isolated ways. Objectivity appears as a privileged place to perceive it in action. The book proposes to carry out a history of objectivity as an exercise in historical epistemology that theoretically informs the option of dealing with the intertwining between ethics and epistemology, of perceiving the moral connotation associated with cognitive practices, and of relating these topics to the production of a historically located scientific self; the cultural history of science will manifest itself in the choice of images as a place to look for these theoretical questions and in the treatment given to iconographic sources. It is the stated intention of the authors to show the items of knowledge as subject to historical dynamics, to the erosion of temporalities. Part of the argument defended by Daston and Galison is that epistemology cannot give up historicity, on pain of missing a fundamental part of its explanation. Objectivity is a product of history, as are other fundamental epistemological categories. The authors argue that epistemology was conceived to oppose “epistemic vices”; its primary function is to create strategies to combat obstacles to knowledge (DASTON and GALISON, p. 377).

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All epistemology begins with fear – fear that the world is too labyrinthine to be threaded by reason; fear that the senses are too feeble and the intellect too frail; fear that memory fades, even between adjacent steps of a mathematical demonstration; fear that authority and convention blind; fear that God may keep secrets and Demons deceive. (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 372)

This negative epistemology will create different devices; it will imagine different epistemic virtues for each specific type of threat to knowledge, for each obstacle épistémologique. “Objectivity fears subjectivity, the core self” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 74); it reacts to the horror that individual idiosyncrasies impede the straight path of reason. History provides different perspectives and poses new problems. At a distance, not being involved in the fight against errors that block the advance of knowledge, history can perceive the ongoing dispute, can point to the different configurations that this dispute has already assumed, and can perceive the evolution of temporality as a construction of alternatives.

From Epistemology to the Ethos and Back Again To better understand how authors historicize epistemology, we must briefly retrace the history narrated in Objectivity. This path will allow us to point to some of this interpretation’s characteristics and draw some historiographical implications from them. Before the emergence of objectivity, other personality traits were valued and perceived as relevant to portraying nature and describing the world. Before objectivity, there was truth-to-nature. “Truth-to-nature, like objectivity, was historically specific. It emerged in a particular time and space and made a particular kind of science possible – a science about the rules rather than the exceptions of nature” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 68). Objectivity does not define science; it is not a necessary condition for producing scientific knowledge; its emergence was not inevitable. Science became objective in the mid-nineteenth century in response to specific demands that can be located and explained. Truth-for-nature – present in the practices of naturalists, anatomists, botanists, and various types of science practitioners of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century – was “the rigorous and progressive tradition of scientific research and representations” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 197). The emergence of a new epistemic virtue does not mean the failure of the previous one to produce scientific knowledge, but a failure to produce meaning in a new historical configuration. The truth-to-nature preached a kind of representation of the natural world based on the search for idealized archetypes, the pure and perfect phenomenon. For example, particular specimens of a plant or an animal were full of imperfections and particularities that did not match the search for an essence in nature. The variability and irregularities of nature were considered deviations and were a source of concern and “epistemic anxiety” (Daston and Galison 2010, pp. 66–67). Thus, the activity of naturalists could involve deliberately correcting and modifying the imperfections of

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the specimens they described, for the good of science. Describing nature faithfully, realistically, required going beyond observing a particular human skeleton (for example) and reaching the typical, characteristic, essential skeleton. That skeleton could never manifest in a particular specimen (and probably would not). This did not mean ignoring observation but exhaustively improving it through repetition and comparison so that it was possible to perceive what was typical and what was accidental in a given object. The image was deliberately rationalized. For an intellectual culture shaped by objectivity, it is difficult to conceive a position that pretends to be both realistic and idealistic, that seeks fidelity and perfects what it describes. This position seems contradictory. Objectivity’s challenge is to show how this kind of scientific practice was not only possible but plausible, provided that it is understood within a specific historical framework. Truth-fornature will be contested and fought with the advent of this new epistemic virtue, objectivity. As we have already seen, this emergence does not extinguish the old model – despite constituting itself in opposition to it. What happens is a transformation of truth-to-nature in the panorama of epistemic ways of life. Its functions, strategies, and the place it occupies are displaced in the confrontation with objectivity (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 113). During the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, this new “regulatory ideal” will structure the activity of scientists in different areas. Mechanical objectivity – the name given by the authors to this version of the epistemic virtue that strives to nullify the effects of the subject in the production of knowledge – is an unfinished project. It is a constant search, a source of debates and tensions. Mechanical objetivity was a point of reference that guided epistemological convictions, image production practices, and the moral behavior of scientists (Daston and Galison 2010, pp. 115–123). “Objectivity was a desire, a passionate commitment to suppress the will, a drive to let the visible world emerge on the page without intervention” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 143). It aimed to silence the observer so that nature could be heard. “‘Let the nature speak for itself’ become the watchword of the new scientific objectivity” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 120). Objectivity is a novelty of the nineteenth century. It emerges as a counterpoint to certain aspects of the self. It is conjured up to fight subjectivity, perceived as dangerous for the production of scientific knowledge. As the authors explain, objectivity and subjectivity are inseparable, forming an interdependent conceptual pair. The history of terms is retraced, returning to the emergence of the binomial in the late Middle Ages scholastic. From this period to early modernity, they meant almost exactly the opposite of their contemporary meaning. Subjective referred to things in themselves, while objective referred to how they presented themselves to consciousness (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 29). The transformation of the medieval meaning and the approximation with what we give to these words today are due to Kant, who took them out of the ostracism to which they were relegated together with scholasticism and put them again in use in modern philosophy. The considerable strength of Kantianism in nineteenth-century European intellectual life helped to spread the concepts in their new definitions (Daston and Galison 2010, pp. 28–31; 205–207). Scientists of enormous influence,

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such as Claude Bernard, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Hermann von Helmholtz, appropriated the subjective and objective pair and used them as instruments. Indeed, using these concepts as operators of an abrupt cut between the mind and the world, between the empirical and the rational, or between the exact and the uncertain was far from the subtleties of Kantian philosophy. It was an adaptation to the purposes of science in the period (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 205–210). This interpretation tended to fuse epistemology and ethics: “It was seen – and felt – to evolve a battle of the will against itself” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 210). The same subjectivity fought in science was celebrated in other contexts, as in nineteenth-century art, where the expression of individual personality traits, the manifestation of uniqueness, was seen as a laudable trait. Objectivity thus fulfills a series of specific functions perceived as relevant and necessary for the production of scientific knowledge. The main one was to prevent personal aspects from disturbing science, compromising the result of a research. To apprehend the world “as it is,” the subject must annul himself. The novelty of objectivity as an epistemic virtue and of the kind of science that demands it and is made possible by it should not lead to the interpretation that previous science was not objective because it had not discovered this possibility. In other words, the emergence of objectivity should not be seen as progress toward a more realistic and accurate world description. Objectivity, truthfor-nature, and trained judgment (which will emerge in the mid-twentieth century) are historical ways of articulating ethos and episteme. They depend on the availability of materials to be built and choices. So, for example, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison will show how some of the features that make up objectivity were already available before its emergence as a fully articulated epistemic virtue. The idea – central to objectivity – of a mimetic description of nature, of a representation of the object exactly as it appears, without retouching or refinement, was well known in the eighteenth century. “There were eighteenth-century representatives of naturalistic alternative in anatomical illustration, but it was considerations as much of aesthetics as of accuracy that determined their quite explicit choices” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 75). The authors are not so concerned with how objectivity can be defined, but with how it is practiced, how it manifests itself in producing scientific knowledge, and how it shapes a historically contingent scientific self. Thus, the emergence of procedures and protocols, the use of machines, and the automation of human gestures through training and repetition will be highlighted; as well as the technologies of production of the self, the techniques of construction of a certain type of scientist, the discipline, and Foucauldian “care of the self.” A few decades after its emergence, objectivity is at the core of the definition of science and its practices. “By the late nineteenth century, mechanical objectivity was firmly installed as a guiding if not the guiding ideal of scientific representations across a wide range of representations” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 125). One of the central elements for this process was the increasing use of machines to carry out scientific work. Given this important role of machines, Daston and Galison will call this first phase of objectivity mechanical objectivity. Mechanical instruments were reliable and indefatigable, did not succumb to human temptations, did

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not yield to interests, and did not slip into impartiality. They mirrored a series of virtues considered important for producing objective knowledge. The virtues of machines were an example of how scientists should act. Although, of course, machines could not be morally valued for these characteristics; been a virtuoso was not a matter of choice for them. Even so, they served as a metaphor for human procedures, which should be automated (Daston and Galison 2010, pp. 138–140). Mechanical objectivity is a historical phenomenon produced at a time of reconfiguration of what counted as good science and what should be valued in the formation of the scientist. The elimination of human agency from the knowledge production process was the aim pursued by those who professed this ideal and who imbued their practices with it. It is not, however, the end point of this story, nor the only possible form of objectivity. Throughout this process, objectivity expands its semantic field and goes beyond the metaphor of the mechanism. It starts to encompass phenomena and areas of science that were not contemplated when it was formulated, phenomena that are not, strictly speaking, in the sphere of the visible. Hence, structural objectivity arises, an extension of the idea of objectivity to the study of invariant structures that underlie objects in mathematics, logic, linguistics, psychology, and even philosophy (Daston and Galison 2010, pp. 253–257). Mechanical and structural objectivity are not extensions of the same notion; they differ in many ways. Structural objectivity is a product of the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It guided the scientific practice of important scientists and philosophers of the period, such as Bertrand Russell, Max Planck, Henri Poincaré, Gottlob Frege, and Rudolf Carnap – authors affiliated with different philosophical traditions that are regrouped around a heterodox approach based on the use of epistemic virtues, which creates a different historical arrangement from what usually organizes narratives in the history of science and philosophy. The authors even wonder if Einstein was a structural objectivist (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 305). And they answer both “Yes” and “No.” He incorporated and defended some aspects of this epistemic virtue (such as the search for structures that condition the senses) and deplored other aspects (such as the logical reduction of a theory, preferring a more holistic version). For proponents of structural objectivity, scientific objectivity was not in the exact reproduction of the world as it is. This was an impossible claim to achieve due to the very limitations of the human sensory apparatus. This “imageless objectivity” must have aspects quite different from mechanical objectivity. Galison and Daston highlight how structural objectivity cultivates and combats different aspects of the self in relation to its counterpart. While the latter was opposed to the interference of human action in reality and intended to annul its individuality and let nature speak for itself, the former tried to preserve awareness and reason, including the excesses of nature and the particularities of sensory experience itself, in search of fundamental structures. These structures do not resemble the essences sought by naturalists guided by truth-for-nature. The difference in the aspects of personality that must be tackled can be understood as a result of how structural objectivity redraws the dividing line between subjective and objective, how it diversely maps the territory of both sides. The sensations are

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put under suspicion, and the facts apprehended by the experience are taken as dependent on the particular subjective characteristics of each observer (Daston and Galison 2010, pp. 257–260). The differences between mechanical and structural objectivity did not mean abandoning their assumptions, but for many of its practitioners, a radicalization of the notion of what it means to be objective. “Structural objectivity was, in some senses, an intensification of mechanical objectivity, more royalist than the king” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 259). This had consequences for the discipline of the self that accompanied this epistemic virtue; it took the repression of subjectivity to extreme degrees and incorporated an ascetic posture concerning the production of scientific knowledge. Objectivity, according to structuralists, was not about sensations or even about things; it had nothing to do with images, made or mental. It was about enduring structural relationships that survived mathematical transformations, scientific revolutions, shifts of linguistic perspective, cultural diversity, psychological evolution, the vagaries of history, and the quirks of individual physiology. (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 259)

The fear of individual variation led this aspect of objectivity to postulate a strictly abstract knowledge, indifferent to concreteness. A truly objective science would be practically confined to logic and its formal relationships, communicable with any rational being. This poses problems to the empirical dimension of science, as the connection with reality becomes increasingly tenuous and narrow. It is no accident that the authors will use the philosophy of the Vienna Circle as an example of this epistemic virtue. Neopositivists aimed to treat science as a set of atomic and logically reducible statements, debug the scientific language of any authorial or metaphysical trait, and transcend the idiosyncrasies of individual human experience. Neopositivism is also called logical empiricism, given its effort to preserve the relationship with experience. This relationship occurs establishing protocol sentences, the simplest way of expressing an empirical fact, devoid of value judgments, modulators, and any indicators of singularities. (This definition is mainly based on the philosophy of Moritz Schlick (1959). However, it is not possible to treat all members of the Vienna Circle homogeneously. The definition and role of protocol sentences in structuring objective knowledge were the subject of intense debate in the group, generating disagreements between Schlick and Otto Neurath (Ávila 2012; Condé 1995). The idea of carrying out a logical analysis of language, bringing it to the heart of the problem of knowledge, is shared by the group.) Science would not be much more than the logical enunciation of empirical facts linked and related through attributions of causality. About the issue addressed by Galison and Daston, it is important to highlight that for the Vienna Circle, the problem of the foundation of knowledge is shifted to language (Schlick 1959). Thus, neopositivism keeps the problem of objectivity limited to logic and the correlation of fundamental structures, without losing contact with reality. Structural objectivity was a radical attempt to eliminate any feature that could be considered local, particular, or specific from science. Only logical forms were

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capable of unrestricted communication; they were free from misunderstandings caused by subjective distortions. It was a search for the absolute that required, or was so discursively portrayed, an enormous sacrifice of discipline of the senses and cultivation of reason toward the logical structures underlying the phenomena. “The structural objectivists were suspicious of an objectivity grounded in reference and experience; they preferred relations bound into structures that could be unproblematically shared.” Emerging in the final decades of the nineteenth century, structural objectivity had an echo in various fields of science and philosophy throughout the twentieth century. However, there are scientific disciplines for which this model is impossible, which depend on the large-scale production, circulation, and consumption of images. It is with these sciences that the authors of Objectivity are concerned, with this broad field that they called epistemologies of the eye. These sciences also saw the emergence of a new epistemic virtue throughout the twentieth century. Mechanical objectivity was complemented by a new way of producing and interpreting scientific images: trained judgment. This new epistemic virtue rejects mechanical rules and procedures that guide the scientist’s work. Emerging throughout the first decades of the twentieth century and spreading to a diversity of scientific fields at an ever-increasing rate, trained judgment is based on the skill of the specialist, on the exhaustive repetition of an operation that cannot be formalized but must be performed, acquired at the expense of a different form of cultivation of the scientific self. It approaches in many aspects what Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge.” Structural objectivity is the response of physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers to what they saw as limitations of mechanical objectivity. Trained judgment is also a reaction to this epistemic virtue, a reaction that comes, this time, from within the community of empirical scientists. Great scientific accomplishment was no longer essentially a matter of patience and industry, but neither was it a Promethean gift of divine fire. Although brilliance could not be taught, intuitive thinking could, even if no one understood exactly how it functioned. (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 312)

The trained judgment put the passivity of mechanical objectivity under fire in the face of the phenomena portrayed. For this new epistemic virtue – which generated new needs, desires, and anxieties – the very mechanization of scientific production demands a specialized look. Unlike the procedures for reproducing simple objects and relatively close to everyday experience, whose transposition from nature to paper was seen as not very problematic, the complex elements, produced by sophisticated machines, required a considerable capacity for interpretation on the part of the scientist. Machines and mechanical procedures are still present in the trained judgment; more than that, their use intensifies and diversifies. However, to correctly interpret what was produced by these instruments, this scientist must become an expert in a certain type of phenomenon or representation technique. In this new configuration, the production of scientific knowledge through the image is completed in the image reader. Passivity in the face of what has been

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produced – present both in truth-for-nature, with its defense of the cognitive authority of a perfected image that exhibits a truth that would otherwise remain hidden, and in mechanical objectivity, which claimed to annul the participation of the human agent to let nature speak for itself – is no longer possible. A more active posture is needed, a conscious hermeneutic exercise (although not formalizable) on the part of the one who receives an image produced based on this criterion. To read an X-ray, an electroencephalogram, or a sunspot map, the scientist must master vocabulary and grammar that allow him to decipher the images; he must be equipped with a repertoire built during his training, his education, which enables him to see aspects that are invisible to the layman’s eye . In addition to the new machines, which produce images irreducible to appropriation by the passivity of mechanical objectivity, the beginning of the last century was also a period of enormous growth in the number of people involved in the production of science (Daston and Galison 2010, pp. 326–327; Hobsbawm 1995, pp. 521–538). Quoting Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes: “In 1910, all the German and British physicists and chemists put together amounted to perhaps 8000 people. In the late 1980s, the number of scientists and engineers actually engaged in research and experimental development in the world was estimated at about five million” (Hobsbawm 1995, pp. 522–523). This created a series of unprecedented problems, especially for training new scientists. The brutal increase in the training scale required a transformation in the model of scientific pedagogy. This indicated, among other things, “new ways of training advanced science students to see, manipulate, and measure – a calibration of head, hand, and eye perhaps unprecedented in its rigor and range” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 326). The collective standardization of an increasing contingent of people builds a different, historically specific mental, and bodily discipline and molds a self from the cultivation of different skills, which has a more active posture in front of scientific images. Interestingly, part of the history and sociology of science produced in this period incorporated these characteristics as an essential part of science. Polanyi’s already mentioned emphasis on tacit knowledge, but also Fleck’s and Thomas Kuhn’s analyses of pedagogy and the training of scientists, the centrality of the concept of expertise for Harry Collins, for instance. These approaches, among many others, use metaphors and assessments that seem very close to what Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston identify as trained judgment. An epistemic virtue whose point of emergence can be historically located in the twentieth century: a specific way of relating to the objects of nature, of producing and consuming scientific images, of training scientists, of disciplining the gaze and the mind. Perhaps curiosity is explained precisely by the scientific origin of most authors in the history and sociology of science. By being exposed to this type of pedagogy throughout their training, they naturalized some of its traits as essential to the training of scientists at any time, under any moral and cognitive regime. By linking these characteristics to the long history of epistemic virtues, Daston and Galison open the way to new reflections on scientific education and pedagogy. We will not explore this field. After retaking the history of epistemic virtues as told in Objectivity, we will move on to more general

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considerations about the concept, in an attempt to understand how it occupies a central place in historical epistemology. “Epistemic virtues are properly so called: they are norms that are internalized and enforced by appeal to ethical values, as well as to pragmatic efficacy in securing knowledge” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 40). Thus, the authors challenge the separation between facts and values, between reason and emotion, to show that science depends on a specific constellation of historically determined emotions. They do not limit themselves to saying that values can motivate scientific work, or that emotions can surreptitiously infiltrate the products of reason and distort it. They try to show how different codes of conduct in the face of knowledge affect the selection of research objects, the limits of the representation of nature, the methods of investigating a problem, the criteria for evaluating results and everything related to what counts as “good science,” or even what can be considered science. When dealing with epistemic virtues, values, and emotions, ethics and norms of conduct must be considered as an integral and important part of the production of scientific knowledge – not as a static essence, but as a series of historically dependent relationships. The norms here do not work as they do for Mertonian sociology, which considered that they were part of the behavior of scientists and enabled them to produce scientific knowledge. Still, they could say nothing about the type of knowledge produced. For Robert Merton, norms were part of the “social dimension” of science, of its “external factors,” and the most it could do was facilitate or hinder the production of this knowledge. Another point distances the epistemic virtues of Mertonian norms: their historicity. While the American sociologist proposed a set of transhistorical values that should be shared by any scientist interested in producing relevant scientific knowledge at any time, Daston and Galison will show that these norms are dynamic and change in virtue of new contexts and new demands. Indeed, Lorraine Daston already signaled this approach in an article published in 1995. At the time, the author talked about a moral economy of modern sciences. In this text, Lorraine Daston already lists objectivity as an example of moral economy, along with quantification and empiricism. The notion of mechanical objectivity that would be developed later also appears here. By following the author’s bibliography on the issue of objectivity (many of them already in partnership with Peter Galison), it is possible to perceive the permanence of certain interpretations and the emergence of concepts and arguments. In the early 1990s, the author spoke of an “aperspectivist” objectivity (aperspectival) and already points to a moral history of objectivity (Daston 1992). In a conference given in Portugal in the second half of the 1990s, the author already speaks of various forms of objectivity, including “mechanical objectivity” and already refers to “epistemic virtues”; she also already uses images as sources to research these themes (Daston 1999). Other authors, such as Robert Kohler (1999), also used the concept of moral economy to study the history of science. Kohler, however, takes the expression from the work of E. P. Thompson and gives it a meaning close to what Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer call social technology. Its meaning is very close to what the epistemic virtues express a decade later. As Daston puts it,

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A moral economy is a web of affect-saturated values that hold together and function in a well-defined relationship [. . .] a balanced system of emotional forces, with balance points and constraints. Although it is a contingent and malleable thing, without necessity, a moral economy has a certain logic in its composition and its operations. Indeed, not all combinations of affects and values are possible. (Daston 2014, p. 23)

The connections intended to be established to explain science are no longer those between theory and experience (which are not abandoned but resized according to new interpretations) but between ethics and epistemology and between morality and scientific practice. Epistemology needs an ethics, say the authors. But they make an almost Popperian caveat: “It is perhaps conceivable that an epistemology without an ethos may exist, but we have yet to encounter one” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 40). Even mechanical objectivity, with all its talk of neutrality, suppression of values, and passivity in the face of facts, has a robust moral code. It constrains scientists to behave in specific ways and rages vigorously when deviant behavior is caught. The authors make a conceptual distinction between ethics – a normativity more linked to a collective form of life and a way of being in the world that is part of the habitual disposition of a group – and moral-specific rules that can be adopted or transgressed and for which there are certain social sanctions, but they go beyond this distinction and often use morals and ethics interchangeably. In any case, using a moralized epistemology provides an exciting key to understanding the discussion around the moral authority of nature and the scientist. The ethos of science and its historical transformations are studied through analyzing the production of atlases and manuals. They are not seen as finished products but in action. There is a shift toward scientific practice. Practice is not understood as a consequence of specific moral ideas or certain principles that guide an epistemic virtue, nor as its manifestation. Symbolic and material elements are not isolated as linear steps in a process. An epistemic virtue results from a symbolic and material co-production; it arises from the intersection of moral precepts and concrete forms of action in the world. In effect, the material and the symbolic dimensions engender each other simultaneously, as they constitute a form of science. This makes the relationships between knowing and doing, between representing the world and acting in it more complex (Maia 2015, pp. 89–130).

The Scientific Self in Motion In Objectivity, the authors deal directly with representations and practices, with the anthropological perspective of culture (Chartier 1994; Pickering 1992). Scientific practices are not confined to the application of the “scientific method” (an expression practically absent in the book) but refer to the various “ways of doing” that institute science in its relationship with the material dimension and engender the operations of the symbolic field. Scientific practices alter cultural identities, transform social relations and the material environment, disaggregate the world, and rebuild it as they produce facts and artifacts. The practices of production, consumption, and

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dissemination of scientific images engage in a historical relationship of reciprocal construction with epistemic virtues and the scientific self. Practices shape the self and are shaped by it, as do epistemic virtues. Similarly, the representations of science are not limited to the realistic description and objective explanation of nature, encompassing different “ways of seeing.” Images (as well as graphs, formulas, texts, diagrams, etc.) are an integral part of the “scientific way of life.” The different ways of representing (and seeing) nature are related to ways of being in the world. Under any epistemic virtue, the images produced by science aim at a faithful representation of nature. According to the authors, there is no doubt that nature plays a role in this process. This does not mean that nature represents itself, while all the apparatus set up by science only serves as a transparent medium for transmitting natural phenomena and their underlying laws. Scientists are not just spokespersons for nature; they construct representations from historically contingent cultural frameworks. More than that, the different ways of seeing the world are deeply inscribed in how the scientific persona is constituted. The authors emphasize interweaving between practices, representations, and the self. “Producing a scientific image is part of producing a scientific self” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 363). This same process also constitutes the scientific self. Like any moral code, the epistemic virtues require a discipline that profoundly marks the knowledgeproducing subject. A fundamental part of the book’s argument stems from the link between self and epistemology. “Epistemic virtues earn their right to be called virtues by molding the self, and the ways they do so parallel and overlap with the ways epistemology is translated into science” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 41). The self is the protagonist of Objectivity. The epistemic virtues and their vicissitudes, the atlases and regimes for the production of the scientific image, the investigation practices of the natural world, the correlation between epistemology and ethos, and everything that the authors manage to mobilize are organized to tell the story of the transformations, of the multiple crises and stabilizations of “ways of being in the world.” Locating their research within the investigations of the self carried out by historians, philosophers, and anthropologists, the authors state: “We are only interested in a specific and localized segment of this rich and vast history, namely, the manifestations and mutations of the scientific self between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly in Western Europe” (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 198, authors’ emphasis). The scientific self, however, is not formed in a vacuum and is not immune to other forms of structuring the individuality and the subject. It changes according to local accents and suffers from class and gender inflections (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 202). Such an investigation will be carried out from the lessons of Arnold Davidson, Pierre Hadot, and Michel Foucault on subject formation, discipline, “self-care,” and “self technologies.” Contrary to the examples analyzed by these authors (such as the case of ancient, Stoic, or religious philosophers), the scientific self is not cultivated and defended for the sake of selfknowledge but knowledge of the world (Daston and Galison 2010, p. 39). This story is not told as if the self were our “ingenious gentleman,” voraciously consuming scientific atlases, its imagination filling itself to the brim with everything

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it reads in books, becoming so enmeshed in this literature that it becomes confused with it and running all over the world fighting the giants of subjectivity. As if objectivity were a mirage that should be denounced and banned for its dehumanizing power, a madness of some Austrian logicians. This story, however, would have a happy ending since the self is a redeemed Don Quijote and conquers honor and epistemic virtue, a valuable item of distinction. Objectivity is not the philosopher’s stone of scientific knowledge either, capable of transforming impure and imprecise metaphysical speculation into the purest and most precious epistemological gold. No, this is not how Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison narrate the adventures of the self in the land of science. There is no ready-made, previous self that, placed in contact with objectivity, takes on the values it transmits. The self is not a container that can be filled with different contents of a moral, epistemic, or aesthetic nature, a tabula rasa on which new norms of behavior are inscribed. The self is not the effect of a cause, the invention of objectivity, or the idea of justice, for example. The explanation that the authors seek does not take the form of cause-and-effect relationships, which presuppose a clear distinction between its elements. The cause must be distinct from the effect not just temporally (i.e., it must be prior) but as a separate entity. The authors intend to broaden and deepen the understanding of the history of the sciences from “patterns that connect dispersed elements in a coherent whole” (DASTON and GALISON, p. 36). The different configurations of the self emerge as it participates in the construction and emergence of epistemic virtues, the production of scientific images, the stabilization of discourses, the standardization of ways of seeing and representing, etc. The self is the product of a set of forces that it does not dominate, that are beyond its reach, a series of events that are not inscribed in its destiny but that mark its horizon of expectation and affect it. But it is also the product of circumstances to which it collaborates while structuring itself. Practices modify what we are so deeply that there is no room left for a primordial self, for the human essence. The self is historical, which seems to be its only essential feature. The self does not belong only to the sphere of “spirit.” Its history is wholly imbued with materiality. The self does not have a body; it is a body that thinks and acts.

Conclusion: Historical Epistemology, Medicine, or Poison? We intend to conclude this text as we started it, as an open discourse. “Começo, meio e começo” (“Beginning, middle, beginning”) (Bispo Dos Santos 2019). This opening is an invitation to a more fruitful dialogue with the author’s work, to explore its possibilities and the paths it proposes. Lorraine Daston’s vast work is just beginning to be received in our community with due attention to its potential. The reading circuit we develop in this chapter started from an attempt to understand the formation and intellectual maturation of the notion of historical epistemology in Lorraine Daston’s thought. The creative tension between the French tradition – Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault – and the Anglophone historicist philosophy of Arnold Davidson and Ian Hacking marks the consolidation process of a distinct way of

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writing the history of science. Then, we show the solid institutional performance of Lorraine Daston, especially in the commitment to the development of historical epistemology in the MPIWG (a mission inscribed in the institution’s regulations) and editorial, with the organization of important collective works covering a vast historical period and a vast range of themes. A brilliant, solid career, accumulating awards and garnering recognition. Working for a long time in two institutions, half the year at the University of Chicago and the other half at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Daston crossed the North Atlantic, Chicago, and Berlin, creating bridges between institutions, historiographies, and intellectual traditions – a cross-fertilization that resulted in a new kind of history. The result was historical epistemology and its objects that cause estrangement to what seemed more familiar, intimate to scientific culture in the Modern West, like the history of observation or scientific objectivity. We give special attention to Objectivity, a book in which the authors deftly handle their tools perfected over many years of dedication to their craft. These works provided an original key to understanding science as a cultural and historical phenomenon. They moved the history of science even further into the disciplinary continent of history, claiming the place of our field (“our tiny field,” as Daston puts in the Dan David Prize warning lecture at Tel Aviv University) in history tout court. We know that the history of science was historically constituted as an area closer to the natural sciences and philosophy than to disciplinary history, not only because of the need for scientists to control the narratives about the past of their sciences – which proved to be an essential pedagogical resource for the transmission of scientific cultures – but also because of the uncritical acceptance, by professional historiography, of an image of “Science,” in the singular and with a capital letter, averse to the corrosion of temporality. The truth, after all, being the coincidence between language and the world, would not exactly have a history (Ávila 2019; Condé 2017; Kuhn 1970; Maia 2013). History would play a secondary, accessory role. Lorraine Daston’s work and institutional activity consciously flow in the opposite direction. One of the explicit goals of her program is integrating the history of science into history. Thus, throughout this chapter, we could trace the main lines of the program carried out by Lorraine Daston. A program that was denoted in the critical appropriation of themes central to modern science and, at the same time, considered alien to historicity, and that found an institutional locus for its development in the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and that was expressed in the form of a series of large institutional research projects involving dozens of researchers. This extensive network coordinated by Daston covered a long period, from the last centuries of the Middle Ages to the last decades of the twentieth century, and a vast territory encompassing Western Europe and the USA. She established a group engaged in historicizing epistemic practices that – layer after layer, over hundreds of years – shaped what was called science. We also explored Lorraine Daston’s style and how she put her theoretical principles into motion. Through a thorough analysis of the book Objectivity, we unravel the author’s contributions to the historiography of science. This work builds on two decades of work by Daston and her partner Peter Galison on the subject of the history of objectivity. Framed as an epistemic virtue, scientific objectivity emerges in

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history as an element in the formation of the scientific self, as a distinctive trait of the scientific identity or persona that emerges in a given context. Objectivity is not a logical precondition to scientific practice; it does not define science. Science existed before its emergence and can continue to exist after its demise in the horizon of epistemic virtues. This is, therefore, the double task that historical epistemology has inscribed in its name: to practice a history of science that is full history and, at the same time, take scientific products and practices as its legitimate objects. Tasks for which Lorraine Daston’s work has become both a map and a treasure.

Cross-References ▶ Gaston Bachelard and Historical Epistemology: A New Perspective for the History of Science in the Twentieth Century ▶ Historical Epistemology: A German Connection ▶ Historiography of Science and the Relationship Between History and the History of Science ▶ Ian Hacking’s Contributions to Historical Reflection on Science ▶ The Beginning of the Epistemological History of Science: Gaston Bachelard’s Responsibility

References Ávila GC (2012) Como conferir historicidade à ciência? Um retorno às contribuições de Ludwik Fleck e Karl Mannheim. In: Mollo HM (ed) Biografia e História das Ciências: debates com a história da historiografia. EDUFOP, Ouro Preto, pp 30–60 Ávila G d C (2019) Ciência, objeto da História. Alameda, São Paulo Bispo Dos Santos A (2019) Colonização, Quilombos: modos e significações. Ayó, Brasília Braunstein J-F (2007) Canguilhem: histoire des sciences et politique du vivant. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris Canguilhem G (1968) Objectivité et historicité de la pensée scientifique. Raison présente 8:39–41 Canguilhem G (2000) Idéologie et rationalité dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie. Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris Chandler J (1993) Proving a history of evidence. In: Chandler J, Davidson A, Harootunian H (eds) Questions of evidence: proof, practice, and persuasion across the disciplines. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 319–342 Chartier R (1994) A história cultural entre práticas e representações. Companhia das Letras, São Paulo Condé ML (1995) O Círculo de Viena e o empirismo lógico. Caderno de filosofia e ciências humanas 5:15–36 Condé ML (2017) Um papel para a história. O problema da historicidade da ciência. Editora da UFPR, Curitiba Van Damme S (2014) Lorraine Daston et la nouvelle histoire intellectuelle des sciences. In: Daston L (ed) L’économie morale des sciences modernes. Jugements, emotions et valeurs. Éditions La Découverte, Paris Daston L (1988) Classical probability in the enlightenment. Princeton University Press, Princeton Daston L (1992) Objective and escape from perspective. Soc Stud Sci 22:597–618

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Daston L (1998) Une histoire de l’objectivité scientifique. In: Guesnerie R, Hartog F (eds) Des sciences et des techniques: un débat. Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, pp 115–126 Daston L (1999) Imagens da objectividade: a fotografia e o mapa. In: Gil F (ed) A ciênci tal qual se faz. Edições João Sá da Costa, Lisbon, pp 79–103 Daston L (2000) Introduction: the coming into being of scientific objects. In: Daston L (ed) Biographies of scientific objects. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 1–14 Daston L (2007) Review of the history of emergences, by Ian hacking. Isis 98(4):801–808 Daston L (2008) Une histoire de l’objectivité scientifique. In: Braunstein JF (ed) L’histoire des sciences. Méthodes, styles et controverses. Vrin, Paris, pp 359–382 Daston L (2009) Science studies and the history of science. Crit Inq 35:798–813 Daston L (2014) L’économie morale des sciences modernes. Jugements, emotions et valeurs. Éditions La Découverte, Paris Daston L (2015) History of science. In: Wright JD (ed) International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, vol 21. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp 241–247 Daston L (2017b) Uma história da objetividade científica. In: Historicidade e objetividade. LiberArs, São Paulo, pp 69–78 Daston L (2019) Against nature. MIT Press, Cambridge Daston L, Galison P (2010) Objectivity. Zone Books, New York First Anual Report (1994) Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte: Berlin Fleck L (1979) Genesis and development of a scientific fact. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Galison P (1997) Image and logic. A material culture of microphysics. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Galison P (1999) Culturas etéreas e culturas materiais. In: Gil F (ed) A ciência tal qual se faz. Edições João Sá da Costa, Lisbon, pp 395–414 Golinski J (2005) Making natural knowledge. Constructivism and the history of science. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Hacking I (2002) Historical ontology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Hobsbawm EJ (1995) The age of extremes. The short twentieth century (1914–1991). Abacus, London Kohler R (1999) Moral economy, material culture, and community in Drosophila genetics. In: Biagioli M (ed) The Science Studies Reader, pp 243–57 Kuhn T (1970) The structure of scientific revolutions. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Maia CA (2013) História das Ciências: uma história de historiadores ausentes. EdUERJ, Rio de Janeiro Maia CA (2015) História, Ciência, Linguagem: o dilema realismo x relativismo. Maida X, Rio de Janeiro Pickering A (ed) (1992) Science as practice and culture. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Raj K (2007) Conexões, Cruzamentos, Circulações. A passagem da cartografia britânica pela Índia, Séculos XVII-XIX. Rev Hist Ideias Cult, Número especial: A Cultura Intelectual das Elites Coloniais:331–370 Raj K (2010) Relocating modern science: circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, New York Raj K (2015) Além do Pós-colonialismo. . . e Pós-positivismo. Circulação e a História Global da Ciência. Rev Maracanan 13:164–175 Raj K (2017) Thinking without the scientific revolution: global interactions and the construction of knowledge. J Early Mod Hist 21:445–458 Renn J (1994) Historical epistemology and interdisciplinarity. Preprint, vol 2. Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, pp 1–13 Rheinberger H-J (2014) Introducion à la philosophie des sciences. Ed. La Découverte, Paris Schlick M (1959) The foundation of knowledge. In: Ayer AJ (ed) Logical Positivism. The Free Press, New York, pp 209–227 Schöttler P (2013) Scientisme. Sur l’histoire d’un concept difficile. Rev Synth 6(134):89–113

Part II Concepts and Conceptions in the Historiography of Science

The Historiography of Scientific Revolutions: A Philosophical Reflection

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Brief History of the Concept of Scientific Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Overview of the Main Philosophical Analyses of Scientific Revolutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Unit of Analysis Reconsidered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scientific Development Reconsidered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Single-Line Versus Multiline Models of Scientific Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Web of Scientific Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Scientific revolution has been one of the most controversial topics in the history and philosophy of science. Yet there has been no consensus on what is the best unit of analysis in the historiography of scientific revolutions. Nor is there a consensus on what best explains the nature of scientific revolutions. This chapter provides a critical examination of the historiography of scientific revolutions. It begins with a brief introduction to the historical development of the concept of scientific revolution, followed by an overview of the five main philosophical accounts of scientific revolutions. It then challenges two historiographical assumptions of the philosophical analyses of scientific revolutions. Keywords

Scientific revolution · Theory · Paradigm · Exemplary practice · Unit of analysis · Scientific development · Web model Y. Shan (*) Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_12

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Introduction Scientific revolution has been one of the most controversial topics in the history and philosophy of science. The pattern, nature, and implications of scientific revolutions have been widely debated by historians and philosophers of science. What is a scientific revolution? Why and when does a scientific revolution occur? Does a scientific revolution mark a rational and progressive shift? In short, there is no consensus on what is the best way to characterize the unit of analysis in the historiography of scientific revolutions. Nor is there any agreement on what best explains the emergence of scientific revolutions. This chapter provides a critical examination of the historiography of scientific revolutions. The structure of the chapter is as follows. Section “A Brief History of the Concept of Scientific Revolution” offers a brief introduction to the historical development of the concept of scientific revolution. Section “An Overview of the Main Philosophical Analyses of Scientific Revolutions” provides an overview of the five main philosophical accounts of scientific revolutions. Section “The Unit of Analysis Reconsidered” revisits the unit of analysis in the philosophical examination of scientific revolutions. Section “Scientific Development Reconsidered” examines another historiographical assumption concerning the model of scientific development.

A Brief History of the Concept of Scientific Revolution Before the seventeenth century, “revolution” was primarily an astronomical or astrological concept, referring to the motion of celestial bodies turning through 360 . (A well-known example is the title of Copernicus’s book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published in 1543.) At the time, the general or nonscientific sense of the word “revolution” was pretty close to its astronomical meaning. For example, in A Table Alphabeticall, the first monolingual dictionary in the English language, “revolution” was defined only as “turning back to the same place” (Cawdrey 1604). In Queen Anna’s New World of Words, an Italian/English Dictionary published in 1611, “revolution” was defined as “a turning backe to the first place, a revolution of celestial bodies or spheres” (Florio 1611, 449). I. Bernard Cohen (1985, 66) also notes that “in a dictionary of 1611, ‘revolution’ was defined only as ‘a full compassing, rounding, turning backe to its first place, or point; the accomplishment of a circular course.’” Since the second-half of the seventeenth century, “revolution” had been gradually used to describe some political changes such as what we now call “the glorious revolution” in 1688. For example, Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) offers three definitions of revolution, one of which is in a political sense: “1. Course of any thing which returns to the point at which it began to move,” “2. Space measured by some revolution,” and “3. Change in the state of a government or country. It is used among us ϰατ’ ἐξoχὴν [par excellence], for the change produced by the admission of king William and queen Mary.” Similarly, in the first edition

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of Encyclopaedia Britannica, three senses of revolution are identified: political, geometric, and astronomical. REVOLUTION. in politics, signifies a grand change or turn in government. In which sense, the revolution is used, by way of eminence, for the great turn of affairs in England, in the year 1688, where king James II. abdicating the throne, the prince and princess of Orange were declared king and queen of England. In geometry, the revolution of any figure, is its motion quite round a fixed line, as an axis. The revolution of a planet, or comet, round [the sun], is nothing but its course from any point of its orbit till its return to the same. (Encyclopaedia Britannica 1771, 3:550)

Arguably, the first time that the term “revolution” was borrowed to describe scientific change was also in the seventeenth century. Sir William Temple (1628–1699), in an essay entitled “Of Health and Long Life,” regarded the development in the history of medicine from Hippocrates to William Harvey’s work on the circulation of blood as the “great changes or revolutions in the physical empire” (Temple 1731, 280). (It is argued that the essay was probably written before 1686 (Woodbridge 1940, 212).) Since the eighteenth century, it has become more and more popular that breakthroughs in science are characterized in terms of revolution. The famous book Principia Mathematica [by Newton] marked the beginning of a great revolution in physics. (Le fameux livre des Principes mathematiques de la Philosophie naturelle [de Newton] a été l’époque d’une grande revolution dans la Physique.) (Clairaut 1754, 465) (Clairaut’s paper was read on November 15, 1747.) We are on the verge of a great revolution in the sciences. Given the taste people seem to have for morals, belles-lettres, the history of nature and experimental physics, I dare say that before a hundred years, there will not be more than three great geometricians remaining in Europe. The science will stop short where the Bernoullis, the Eulers, the Maupertuis, the Clairauts, the Fontaines and the D’Alemberts will have left it. . . . We will not go beyond. (Nous touchons au moment d’une graunde révolution dans les sciences. Au penchant que les esprits me paroissent avoir à la morale, aux belles-lettres, à l’histoire de la Nature & à la physique expérimentale, j’oserois presque assurer qu’avant qu’il soit cent ans, on ne comptera pas trois grands géomètres en Europe. Cette science s’arrêtera tout court, où l’auront lassé les Bernoulli, les Euler, les Maupertuis, les Clairaut, les Fontaine & les d’Alembert... On n’ira point au-delà.) (Diderot 1754, 5) It is not worth while, nor of use for our purpose, to trace the history of learning thro’ its various revolutions in the later ages. (MacLaurin 1748, 39) The very high character of Mr Lavoisier as a chemical philosopher, and the great revolution which, in the opinion of many excellent chemists, he has effected in the theory of chemistry, has long made it much desired to have a connected account of his discoveries, and of the new theory he has founded upon the modern experiments written by himself. (Lavoisier 1790, v) There have been few, if any, revolutions in science so great, so sudden, and so general, as the prevalence of what is now usually termed the new system of chemistry, or that of the Antiphlogistians, over the doctrine of Stahl, which was at one time thought to have been the greatest discovery that had ever been made in the science. (Priestley 1796, 35)

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For we by no means find, even in those practical discoverers to whom, in reality, the revolution in science, and consequently in the philosophy of science, was due, this prompt and vigorous recognition of the supreme authority of observation as a ground of belief; this bold estimate of the probable worthlessness of traditional knowledge; and this plain assertion of the reality of theory founded upon experience. Among such discoverers, Copernicus must ever hold a most distinguished place. (Whewell 1847, 2:208)

In the nineteenth century, scientific revolutions and political revolutions were often analyzed and examined together. For example, Henri Saint-Simon (1858) suggested that scientific revolutions often alternate with political revolutions in history, while Charles Renouvier (1864) argued that scientific revolutions and political revolutions are analogous in the sense that both occur in order to clarify social contracts. As Warren Schmaus (2023, 8) points out, we can often find “the analogy between scientific revolutions and political revolutions” in the nineteenthcentury writings. In the first half of the twentieth century, the concept of the scientific revolution was introduced to designate a series of scientific changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (e.g., Robinson 1921; Burtt 1925; Smith 1930; Koyré 1939). Martha Ornstein was probably the first to explicitly use the term “the scientific revolution” in such a way. The first half [of the seventeenth century] seems more like a “mutation” than a normal, gradual evolution from previous times. It accomplished through the work of a few men a revolution in the established habits of thought and inquiry, compared to which most revolutions registered in history seem insignificant. (Ornstein 1913, 30) I spoke of two groups of reformers who produced the scientific revolution of 1600–1650, the scientists and philosophic propagandists. (Ornstein 1913, 51)

In the following four decades, there was an increasing interest in the scientific revolution among historians, especially historians of science. Herbert Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science 1300–1800 (1949) and A. Rupert Hall’s The Scientific Revolution 1500–1800 (1954) were among the most influential works on the scientific revolution at the time. Meanwhile, the concept of scientific revolution (or “revolutions in science” in Cohen’s words) was slowly developed in various case studies (e.g., Randall 1926; Dampier 1929; Koyré 1939). Nevertheless, it is worth noting that, as Cohen (1985, 400) indicates, “[d]espite the frequent occurrence of the theme of revolution, it should not be concluded that, during the first half of the twentieth century, historians, historians of science, and scientists generally came to recognize the existence of the Scientific Revolution and to use it as an organizing principle, or that they all conceived of scientific change in terms of revolution.” It is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) that made the concept of scientific revolution generally accepted within and beyond the history of science. Kuhn’s concept of scientific revolution is broader than his predecessors’, such as Butterfield’s and Hall’s. “Scientific revolution,” for Kuhn, refers to any radical scientific changes in history rather than a particular historical episode. This is

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one of Kuhn’s important contributions to the historiography of science: “transforming a growing scholarly concern for a single-scale Scientific Revolution into a research program directed toward individual smaller-scale revolutions in the sciences” (Cohen 1985, 403).

An Overview of the Main Philosophical Analyses of Scientific Revolutions One of the most influential philosophical accounts of scientific revolutions was developed by Karl Popper in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery. (The book was originally published by Springer in German in 1935, which was entitled Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft. It was translated into English and published by Hutchinson & Co. in 1959.) For Popper, a scientific revolution is a process of the falsification of a theory and its replacement by another. Scientific theories here are defined as “universal statements” (Popper 1959, 59). In other words, a scientific revolution is basically a shift from a “theoretical system” (i.e., a system of universal statements) to another (Popper 1959, 71–72, 86–87). Popper (1963) maintained that a scientific revolution from a theory (t1) to another (t2) marks a better approximation to truth, in which t2 has a greater verisimilitude than t1 in one of the following senses: (a) the truth-content but not the falsity-content of t2 exceeds that of t1, (b) the falsity-content of t1, but not its truth-content, exceeds that of t2. (Popper 1963, 233)

As a contemporary of Popper, Ernest Nagel also viewed a scientific revolution as a shift from a theory to another. He also regarded scientific theories as systems of statements (Nagel 1961, 88–89). In addition, both Nagel (1961) and Popper (1963) contended that in a scientific revolution from a theory (t1) to another (t2), t2 typically has a greater explanatory power than t1. Nevertheless, Nagel’s account of scientific revolutions differs from Popper’s in one crucial aspect: Nagel argued for the reductive nature of scientific revolutions. [I]n any case, the phenomenon of a relatively autonomous theory becoming absorbed by, or reduced to, some other more inclusive theory is an undeniable and recurrent feature of the history of modern science. There is every reason to suppose that such reduction will continue to take place in the future. (Nagel 1961, 336–37)

For Nagel, a scientific revolution is basically a process of the reduction of a theory (t1) to another (t2) in the sense that all the laws of t1 are logically derivable from the laws of t2. Nagel distinguishes two types of inter-theoretic reduction: homogeneous reduction and heterogeneous reduction. The former happens when the reduced theory does not contain any term which is not employed in the reducing theory (e.g., the shift from Kepler’s law to Newton’s laws), while the latter occurs when the

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reduced theory contains some terms which are not employed in the reducing theory (e.g., the shift from thermodynamics to statistical mechanics). Kuhn (1962, 1970b) challenged these theory-based analyses and developed an alternative approach to scientific revolutions. (It should be noted that neither Popper nor Nagel explicitly spoke of “scientific revolution” despite their important work on the nature of scientific change. The concept of scientific revolution achieved general acceptance in the thinking of philosophers of science only after the publication of Kuhn’s book.) He paid more attention to the detail of the history of science. Kuhn characterized scientific revolutions as paradigm shifts. A paradigm, in a broad sense, is defined as a disciplinary matrix shared by a scientific community, usually encompassing universal generalizations, models, values, and exemplars. (Kuhn (1970b, 181–91) distinguished two senses of paradigm. A paradigm in a narrow sense means an exemplar, which is defined as a puzzle solution.) The main task for scientists working in a paradigm is puzzle-solving. Kuhn (1970a) argued that the new paradigm typically has a greater puzzle-solving power than the old one after a scientific revolution. He also argued that different paradigms often differ radically in their universal generalizations, models (or ontological commitments), values, and exemplars as well as research problems and methods. Due to these differences, there is a difficulty of comparing two successive paradigms in a scientific revolution (This is Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis (For an in-depth analysis of Kuhn’s incommensurability, see Sankey (1994)).). Thus, an important consequence of the incommensurability thesis is that the new paradigm sometimes loses certain puzzlesolving capacities, even though it in general solves more puzzles than the old one. For example, in the chemical revolution, the oxygen theory failed to offer a good explanation of the common feature of metals, which could be well accounted for by the phlogiston theory. (Such a phenomenon is called Kuhn loss.) As Yafeng Shan argues (2020b, 383–86), Kuhn’s approach to scientific revolutions was novel at the time in at least two ways. First, it was really novel to analyze and examine the history of science in a way which is not framed by theories. Without argument, philosophers such as Popper and Nagel used to analyze scientific knowledge and the history of science in terms of theories. Theories were taken for granted a unit of analysis to examine scientific revolutions. It is Kuhn who first made philosophers seriously reconsider the legitimacy of the use of theory as the unit of analysis in the philosophical examination of the history of science. Kuhn (1970b, 182) insightfully pointed out that “scientific theory” is not an ideal conceptual tool to study the history of science, because it “connotes a structure far more limited in nature and scope than the one required.” Second, it was novel to highlight the discontinuous and nonrational elements of scientific revolutions in terms of incommensurability. Kuhn challenged the once received view that two successive paradigms in a scientific revolution can be simply comparable. For example, Popper (1963, 233) assumed in the definition of verisimilitude that “the truth-content and the falsity-content of two theories t1 and t2 are comparable,” while Nagel (1961, 345) was explicit on the point that theories in a reduction are comparable in the sense that they “must be available as explicitly formulated statements, whose various constituent terms have meanings unambiguously fixed by codified rules of usage or by

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established procedures.” However, these claims were questioned by Kuhn. He doubted that scientific terms (e.g., caloric) in an old paradigm can be neatly translated into a new one without any loss. Kuhn was also skeptical of the view that scientific revolutions can be simply explained by some universal standard of rationality (e.g., Popper’s falsifiability criterion and Nagel’s criteria of reduction). (It is worth highlighting that one should not confuse irrationality with nonrationality. Kuhn (1970b, 175) explicitly denied that he tried to argue that science is “a subject and irrational enterprise,” though he highlighted the role of nonrational factors in the history of science.) Under the influence of Kuhn’s work, philosophers began developing more historically informed accounts of scientific revolutions. Imre Lakatos (1968, 1978) developed an account of scientific revolutions in terms of research programs, illustrated by two historical examples. For Lakatos, a research program basically consists of a (theoretical) hard-core and a set of auxiliary hypotheses. A scientific revolution is just a process of “one research programme superseding (overtaking in progress) another” (Lakatos 1970, 99). Lakatos argued that the superseding research program (P1) should be more progressive than the superseded one (P2) in the sense that P1 generates more novel and corroborated predictions than P2. Thus, a scientific revolution, for Lakatos, is a both rational and progressive move. To some extent, Lakatos (1978, 89–93) synthesized the Popperian falsificationism with the Kuhnian historiography of science. On the one hand, he defended the Popperian view that any scientific revolution has been and should be fundamentally a rational shift. On the other hand, he agreed with Kuhn on the role of nonrational factors in the history of science. He also shared with Kuhn the view that the unit of analysis in the philosophical examination of scientific change is something much more complicated than a theory (as a set of universal statements). In his words, “the basic unit of appraisal must be not an isolated theory or conjunction of theories” (Lakatos 1970, 99). Despite the substantial differences between their philosophical analyses, there are still two central theses concerning scientific revolutions shared by Popper, Nagel, Kuhn, and Lakatos. T1. The nature of a scientific revolution is a process of the replacement of some scientific consensus by another. T2. A scientific revolution is ipso facto a progressive process. Larry Laudan (1977) rejected both by offering a novel account of scientific revolutions in terms of research tradition. A scientific revolution occurs when a research tradition, hitherto unknown to, or ignored by, scientists in a given field, reaches a point of development where scientists in the field feel obliged to consider it seriously as a contender for the allegiance of themselves or their colleagues. (Laudan 1977, 138)

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A research tradition is defined as “a set of general assumptions about the entities in a domain of study, and about the appropriate methods to be used for investigating the problems and constructing in theories in that domain” (Laudan 1977, 81). Laudan’s “research tradition” differs from Kuhn’s “paradigm” and Lakatos’ “research programme” in one significant way: even some of the most basic elements of a research tradition can change. For both Kuhn and Lakatos, if there are some fundamental changes of a paradigm or of the hard core of a research programme, it leads to the establishment of a different paradigm or research program and symbolizes the emergence of a scientific revolution. However, for Laudan (1977, 98), it is a “misleading” way to characterize these changes as examples of scientific revolutions. Laudan believed in “a natural evolution in the research tradition”: “the core assumptions of any given research tradition are continuously undergoing conceptual scrutiny” (Laudan 1977, 100). (Note that Laudan did not deny that a research tradition has some “essence” or “nonrejectable elements,” but he tried to emphasize that “the elements constituting this class can shift through time.” (Laudan 1977, 99–100). This view, he argued, better captures the history of science.) Contra his predecessors, Laudan did not construe the nature of a scientific revolution as a shift of scientific consensus. For Laudan, a scientific revolution means that there is a new research tradition which cannot be ignored and has to be taken seriously by the scientific community. But it does not imply that the old research tradition must be abandoned or replaced by the new one. In addition, Laudan doubted that a scientific revolution is inherently progressive. For him, whether a scientific revolution is progressive is historically contingent: “Scientific revolutions can occur even when it is entirely irrational or nonrational considerations which bring a new research tradition to everyone’s attention” (Laudan 1977, 138). The 1960s and 1970s are the heyday of the philosophical debate over scientific revolutions. Since the 1980s, philosophers of science have become more interested in other topics such as scientific realism and scientific explanation. That said, scientific revolution is still an important issue in contemporary philosophy of science. There have been some attempts to examine and explore the pattern, nature, and implications of scientific revolutions for the past few decades (e.g., Kitcher 1984; Darden 1991, 2005; Chang 2012). (I do not have room to discuss these accounts in detail here, unfortunately. Most of these new accounts can be construed as revised or integrated versions of some earlier accounts discussed in this section. Philp Kitcher (1984, 1989), for example, developed a reductionist account of revolutions in genetics by incorporating some elements of Kuhn’s approach (e.g., the significance of problems). Lindley Darden’s analysis of the molecular revolution (2005) can be viewed as a variant of the application of Laudan’s account of scientific revolutions, while Hasok Chang’s account of the chemical revolution (2012) is to a great extent Kuhnian.) As yet it has been no consensus on what is the best way to characterize the unit of analysis in the historiography of scientific revolutions (for a list of main philosophical accounts of the unit of analysis, see Table 1.). Nor is there a consensus on what best explains the pattern and nature of scientific revolutions. The historical and philosophical implications of scientific revolutions are under debate (for a list of main philosophical accounts of scientific revolutions, see Table 2.).

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Table 1 Main accounts of the unit of analysis in the philosophical analyses of scientific revolutions Thought styles (Fleck 1935) Theory (e.g., Popper 1959; Nagel 1961; Darden 1991) Paradigm as disciplinary matrix (Kuhn 1962, 1970b) Research program (Lakatos 1968; Musgrave 1976) Research tradition (Laudan 1977) Field (Darden and Maull 1977; Darden and Craver 2002; Darden 2005) Practice (Kitcher 1984, 1989) Style of reasoning (Hacking 1994; Crombie 1994) System of practice (Chang 2012, 2014) Scientific perspective (Giere 2006; Massimi 2018) Exemplary practice (Shan 2020a, b) Table 2 Main philosophical accounts of scientific revolutions Consensusshift

Theory shift

Paradigmshift Research program shift Explanatory schema shift Consensus recognition

Research tradition recognition Field recognition

Theory falsification (Popper 1959) Theory reduction (Nagel 1961) Incommensurable replacement (Kuhn 1970b) Program replacement (Lakatos 1978) Explanatory extension/ unification (Kitcher 1984, 1989) Tradition acceptance (Laudan 1977) Field discovery (Darden 2005)

Rational and progressive Rational and progressive Rational in general but with some nonrational factors and progressive Rational and progressive Rational

Contingently rational

N/A

Despite the substantial differences, most philosophical analyses share some historiographical assumptions about the unit of analysis and the pattern of scientific development. In the remaining of this chapter, I would focus on scrutinizing these historiographical assumptions.

The Unit of Analysis Reconsidered Despite the substantial differences, the philosophical accounts all assume that scientific revolutions are basically about the changes of scientific consensuses: either the replacement of a scientific consensus by another or the recognition of a scientific consensus. In other words, the unit of analysis in the philosophical examination of scientific revolution is a scientific consensus. Thus, in order to examine the nature

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and pattern of scientific revolutions, it is an indispensable task to provide an account of scientific consensus. As I have shown in the previous section, theory (as a unit of analysis) was taken for granted to describe scientific consensus until the 1960s when philosophers began realizing that scientific revolutions also involve significant nontheoretical changes (e.g., problems, methods, and experimental procedures). Thereafter, new units of analysis have been developed in order to capture the nontheoretical elements of a scientific consensus: paradigm, research program, research tradition, field, system of practice, etc. It is worth noting that these units of analysis all assume that the essential elements of a scientific consensus consist of something general or universal, invariantly shared by the members of a community. For example, a paradigm consists of some universal generalizations, while a research program has a hard core. I call these essential elements “macro-scientific consensus.” However, there is a persistent problem for these units of analysis, namely, the problem of identification: it is a difficult task to identify macro-scientific consensus in the history of science. Let us consider an example. It is widely received that Mendelian genetics is the first consensus in the history of modern genetics (e.g., Darden 1991; Waters 2004; Shan 2021), but it is not easy to identify the essential elements of Mendelian genetics. As Darden (1991) and Shan (2020a) have shown, there were so many radical theoretical and nontheoretical developments that very few was invariantly shared from Mendel’s theory of hybrid development (1866) to Morgan’s theory of the gene (1926). Thus, it is difficult to identify the macroscientific consensus that essentially constitutes Mendelian genetics, whether it is characterized in terms of theories, paradigms, or research programs. It should be highlighted that the problem here is not that it is misleading to characterize scientific revolutions by examining the changes of scientific consensuses. Rather, I argue that it is misleading to characterize scientific revolutions by focusing on macro-scientific consensuses. A simple solution to the problem of identification is to shift attention from macro-scientific consensuses to, what I call, micro-scientific consensuses, which is something local and context-dependent. Mendel’s work on the development of pea hybrids (1866) is such a good example of micro-scientific consensuses. It was widely accepted by early Mendelians in the 1900s and 1910s. As Shan (2020a, b) argues, what was accepted is Mendel’s particular way of problem-defining, problem-refining, problem-specification, experimentation, conceptualization, hypothesization, and reasoning in the study of pea hybridization. All the early Mendelians accepted that Mendel’s work provided a reliable framework for further investigation of the problem of heredity, though many of them were still skeptical of the generality of Mendel’s laws of development or his concept of dominance. And I argue that most scientific consensuses are in this micro sense rather than the in the macro sense. I would like to emphasize that I am not denying that there are some macro-scientific consensuses in the history of science. Newton’s three laws of motion are such examples. However, I have to note that in most cases, it is difficult to formulate a version of macro-scientific consensus which is widely accepted by the members of a scientific community. For example, it is plausible to identify the theory of natural selection by evolution as a macro-scientific consensus in the twentieth-century evolutionary studies, but it is extremely difficult

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to articulate or formulate the theory of natural selection by evolution in a way that biologists all accepted throughout time. As Laudan (1977, 74) indicates, it is a historical fact that “the fundamental assumptions of every [scientific consensus] are debated within the scientific community.” Even if in some cases, we can roughly distinguish two macro-scientific consensuses in a scientific revolution, we still have to recognize that the distinction is not a clear-cut. For example, as Chang (2012, 19–22) points out, the phlogistonist and oxygenist systems share some important research problems, though they differ in some. Therefore, I argue that a unit of analysis focusing on macro-scientific consensus is not very helpful to analyze and examine the nature and pattern of scientific revolutions in history. In contrast, I argue that one ought to analyze and examine the nature and pattern of scientific revolutions by focusing on micro-scientific consensuses rather than macro-scientific consensuses. As Shan (2022) argues, scientific change is better analyzed in terms of exemplary practices. An exemplary practice is defined as a particular way of problem-defining and problem-solving, typically by means of problem-refining, conceptualization, hypothesization, experimentation, and reasoning (Shan 2020a, b). Accordingly, I propose that exemplary practice can be adopted as a new unit of analysis in the philosophical examination of scientific revolutions. Such an approach has an obvious advantage over the traditional ones with a focus on macro-scientific consensuses: it better captures the complexity and nuance of the history of science. In particular, it is not undermined by the problem of identification. As I have shown in Mendel’s case, it is not very difficult to identify the microscientific consensus among the members of Mendelian genetics. Early Mendelians did differ in the formulation and interpretation of the Mendelian laws, but they all accepted Mendel’s exemplary practice, which provides conceptual tools, experimental guidelines, and research problems for the study of heredity. Thus, I call for a modification of the historiographical assumption concerning the unit of analysis: we ought to shift our attention from macro-scientific consensuses to micro-scientific consensuses.

Scientific Development Reconsidered There are two models of scientific development underlying the philosophical analyses of scientific revolutions. In this section, I argue that neither provides a good historiographical framework to examine scientific revolutions.

Single-Line Versus Multiline Models of Scientific Development Most philosophical analyses of scientific revolutions (e.g., Popper 1959; Kuhn 1962; Kitcher 1989) assume a particular model of scientific development, what I call the single-line model. According to the single-line model, the development of science is a process of alternating one episode with another, and scientific revolutions are just episode shifts. (Many discussions in the philosophy of science rest on this model. An

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obvious example is the debate over scientific realism and anti-realism. One of the central issues in that debate is whether there is any theoretical component which is preserved throughout theory change (e.g., Laudan 1981; Worrall 1989; Psillos 1999; Stanford 2006). Both realists and anti-realists implicitly agree on a historiographical assumption that scientific development is a process of alternating one theory with another, though they differ in the question of whether there is something substantial preserved in theory change.) As illustrated in Fig. 1, the development of science is a lineage of episodes E0, E1, E2, . . ., En. For instance, the development of genetics in its early period is often characterized as the lineage from Mendel’s theory (1866), de Vries’ theory (1900a), and Bateson’s theory (1902) to Morgan’s theory (1926). One key feature of the single-line model is the dominance of one consensus in the “normal” period. For example, in Kuhn’s account (1962), when a scientific revolution is over, a paradigm dominates in the sense that most of the scientists in the field tend to work within it and other lines of inquiry either die out or are marginalized. In other words, the single-line model eliminates the possibility of coexistence of two or more consensuses in the long run. However, counterexamples abound in the history of science. For examples, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were over 20 theories of heredity and none of them dominated the study of heredity (Delage 1903). As Laudan (1977, 74) observes, “Virtually every major period in the history of science is characterized [. . .] by the co-existence of numerous competing [scientific consensuses], with none exerting hegemony over the field” (Lakatos (1978, 69) made a similar point: “The history of science [. . .] has not been and must not become a succession of periods of normal science.”). Other philosophical analyses of scientific revolutions (e.g., Lakatos 1968, 1978; Laudan 1977) assume an alternative model, what I call the multiline model. According to the multiline model, scientific development is a process of the evolution of multiple consensuses, as illustrated by Fig. 2.

Fig. 1 The single-line model of scientific development

Fig. 2 The multiline model of scientific development

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A crucial difference between the single-line model and the multiline model is that the multiline model is open to the possibility of the coexistence of multiple consensuses in the long run. However, the multiline model is still problematic, from a historical point of view. It is not unusual for coexistent consensuses to interact with each other. The development of coexistent theories is not independent of each other. Sometimes coexistent consensuses integrate, while they even diversify at other times. Consider the case of the origin of genetics. As many (e.g., Olby 1985; Bowler 1989; Müller-Wille 2021) have shown, the development of genetics, even if we only focus on the theoretical aspect, is more like a web of interacting consensuses than a lineage of successive consensuses. Although Gregor Mendel is widely regarded as the founder of genetics, his theory of hybrid development is not the only origin. The problem of heredity was Charles Darwin’s central concern, because he was looking for a mechanism of heredity to account for the reservation of the favored traits by natural selection. Darwin’s theory of pangenesis was one origin of the mainstream study of heredity in the second half of the nineteenth century, which heavily influenced Hugo de Vries’ work on pangenesis (1889). The development of cytology in the nineteenth century provides another origin for the study of heredity. Initially inspired by Darwin’s theory, August Weismann’s germplasm theory (1892) made an incorporation of the study of the cell and of heredity, which influenced Correns’ reformulation of Mendel’s rule (1900). In the first decade of the twentieth century, the newly established Mendelian theory of heredity, mainly developed by Bateson (1902), was rivalled with the Biometrician theory of heredity, initially proposed by Francis Galton (1889) but mainly developed by W. F. R. Weldon (1905) and Karl Pearson (1903), which nevertheless was synthesized into the study of heredity in the modern synthesis decades later. At the same time, the development of the chromosome theory provides another important source for T. H. Morgan and his associates to develop a much more sophisticated theory of inheritance in the 1910s and 1920s. Thus, the development of early genetics involves the interaction of various consensuses across different areas. In other words, the multiline model still fails to capture the complexity and interactivity of scientific development.

The Web of Scientific Development I argue that the pattern of scientific development is more like a synthesizing web. Reconsider the origins of genetics. De Vries’ theory (1900b) incorporated the parts of Darwin’s and Mendel’s theories. Bateson’s theory was developed based on de Vries’ and Correns’ theories. Morgan’s theory was somehow a synthesis of the chromosome theory and the Mendelian theory. Overall speaking, the pattern is more like a synthesizing web than a lineage or multiple lineages. It should be noted that synthesizing is not a simple process of integrating consensuses. As Shan has shown (2020b), what de Vries learnt from Mendel were the focus on a pair of differing traits, the conceptions of dominance and recessiveness and their

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Fig. 3 A partial picture of the origins of genetics

statistical relation, the morphological-cellular correspondence, and the mathematical approach. In addition, de Vries’ synthesis of Darwin’s and Mendel’s was more than a theoretical integration. It encompassed a creative and selective attempt to introduce a new way of defining and solving the problems of heredity on the basis of Darwin’s and Mendel’s exemplary practices. Accordingly, as Shan (2020a) argues, Mendel’s contribution can be well characterized as the introduction of an exemplary practice, whose components were selectively adopted with modifications by de Vries, Correns, and Tschermak to develop their exemplary practices. Thus, the origins of genetics are better characterized as a web of synthesizing exemplary practices, as illustrated in Fig. 3. Moreover, I contend that not only is the development of early genetics, but also scientific development in general is better characterized as a synthesizing web. It is clear that the web model is better than the single-line and the multiline models in the way that its two-dimensional structure better captures the complexity of scientific changes in history. Moreover, it does not assume, like the single-line and multiline models, a dominating scientific consensus typically prevailing in any period of the history of science. Rather the web well characterizes the plurality and interactivity of scientific inquiries in any given period. (Some may notice that Kuhn’s late writings of scientific change also suggest a nonlinear model of scientific development. Most famously, as Brad Wray (2011, 124) elaborates, “the history of science consists of periods of normal science punctuated by either (1) episodes of theory change, that is, scientific revolutions, or (2) episodes of specialty formation, where a new branches off from a parent field.” Surely this late Kuhnian specialization model is more sophisticated than both the single-line and the multiline models. However, the specialization model has two problems. Firstly, it implies that there is a “common ancestor” of all scientific theories. This is really dubious. Secondly, the specialization fails to well account for the multiple roots of a historical episode. The late Kuhn is correct that specialization is an important type of scientific change. However, the specialization model does not articulate the process and mechanism of specialty formation. In contrast, the web model provides a good framework to analyze the mechanism of specialization. And the specialization model can be viewed as a special case of the web model.) Therefore, I argue that a good philosophical examination of scientific revolutions should assume the web model of scientific development.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I have reviewed the historical development of the concept of scientific revolution and the five main philosophical accounts of scientific revolutions. Moreover, I have revisited two historiographical assumptions behind these accounts. I have argued that the historiographical assumption concerning the unit of analysis is flawed in the way that it pays too much attention to macro-scientific consensuses. I have also argued that neither the single-line nor the multiline models of scientific development provide a good framework to analyze scientific revolutions. I proposed that the unit of analysis should be a description of micro-scientific consensuses rather than macro-scientific consensuses, as the former better captures the complexity of the history of science. In addition, I suggested that a good philosophical examination of scientific revolutions should abandon the single-line and multiline models of scientific development and assume the web model.

Cross-References ▶ Ludwik Fleck: Thought Style and Thought Collective in the Historiography of Science ▶ The Origins of Alexandre Koyré’s History of Scientific Thought ▶ Thomas Kuhn’s Legacy for the Historiography of Science Acknowledgments An early draft of this chapter was presented at Evidence Seminar, University of Kent on 24 May 2022. I thank the audience there for the helpful comments and discussion.

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Historical Epistemology: A German Connection

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Juan A. Queijo Olano and Antonio A. P. Videira

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Return of the Philosophy of Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Science and History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History and Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Structural Continuity of Scientific Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Thomas S. Kuhn gave a lecture on November 19, 1991, at Harvard University entitled “The Problem with the Historical Philosophy of Science” in which he analyzed the evolution of philosophy of science and its connection with history of science 30 years after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s verdict ought to be understood as the explicit exposition of his viewpoint on a problem raised by his masterpiece, the legitimization of relativism, seen as the central element in the historic and sociological approaches. Since the mid-1960s, many philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science have sought to overcome such resistances, seeking narratives that promote integration, like historical epistemology. Despite resorting to numerous sources and immersed in the historicist tradition, historical epistemology consciously intends to avoid a relativistic interpretation of the construction and definition of scientific J. A. Queijo Olano Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay e-mail: [email protected] A. A. P. Videira (*) Universidade do Estado de Rio de Janeiro, CNPq, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_13

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knowledge. Our contribution has two main objectives. First to (re)introduce historical epistemology in the context of discussions that began in the 1960s, a time when relativism “invaded” the domains of philosophy, history, and sociology of science, not leaving them since then. In other words, we intend to analyze whether or not the goal of proposing rational reconstructions of the scientific past is actually achieved as advocated by historical epistemology. The second central theme we discuss concerns the formulation of a critical analysis as built from a Latin American perspective on historical epistemology in order to contribute to the development of a practice in history of science more suited to our realities. Keywords

Daston, Lorraine · Historical epistemology · Historical ontology · History and philosophy of science · Lorenz Krüger · Thomas S. Kuhn · Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Introduction The history of science is a field of ongoing academic dispute over methodologies, problems, and authorities whose participants often propose different strategies and perspectives to supersede those of their predecessors. Essentially, this is how we can understand the inclusion of an endeavor like historical epistemology into the history and philosophy of science. Located within the broad label called historical epistemology (Although this chapter focuses on the approach to historical epistemology taken at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science since the 1990s, the historiography of science has a long tradition of historical epistemology (Gingras 2010; Queijo Olano 2019). In fact, one of the directors of the New Berlin Institute was Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, who brought back this “alternative” tradition of the philosophy of science, of French origin (Rheinberger 2010). Other chapters of this book complement our focus of study to give a broader understanding of historical epistemology), the new program initiated in the 1990s at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin has generated a significant flow of academic output. What kinds of problems are of interest to historical epistemology? Before answering this question, we must first accept that this is a heading that can encompass a range of different philosophical and historical approaches to the sciences. Even so, although it is interesting to find differences and similarities between them, we shall not focus on the trend that has fostered a new debate about the relevance of a historical–philosophical analysis, developed now along particular lines in Germany. What issues are of interest to this program? The purpose of this chapter is to show that although historical epistemology continues to be one of the most important and widely discussed Kuhnian themes, it is now being reformulated under new precepts. We understand that the question of scientific change, understood within Kuhn’s idea of scientific revolutions, can be shown to have an unbroken connection to the concern of historical epistemology: How can the emergence of the new (or the

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novel) in the natural sciences be explained? These concerns are related to the questions raised by Kuhn in a bid to understand how the discovery of what is new in scientific research drives change in the theories and paradigms constructed from it. The issue that historical epistemology tackles is how to maintain this concern with the new, the emergent, and its place in the history of science without committing to an idea of radical incommensurability (The notion of radical incommensurability stems from the various ways in which Kuhn defined paradigms in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Masterman 1970), but two aspects of that definition seem to contradict each other: on the one hand, the idea of paradigm as a way of seeing the world; on the other, the idea of a scientific tradition committed to solving the puzzles it frames as problems. In summary, the tension is whether these “puzzles” that the community solves are defined by that worldview or whether they stay the same throughout revolutions and what actually changes is the strategy employed to solve them. Authors such as Fuller (1991, 149–174) or Rouse (1991, 141–162) subscribe to an interpretation closer to the former, recognizing that there is insurmountable incommensurability between paradigms). The objective here is not to formulate new comments on the work of Thomas S. Kuhn but to concentrate on one particular aspect of his work related to the problem that his definitions of paradigm and scientific revolutions raised for a conception that stands by the existence of continuity and progress in science. To do this, we shall begin at the end. In November 1991, Kuhn gave a lecture in which he delivered harsh criticism of the strong program in the sociology of scientific knowledge, calling it an “example of deconstruction gone mad.” However, the most interesting thing for our purposes is not so much this term as the reflection that comes later: (. . .) the more qualified sociological and historical formulations that currently strive to replace it are, in my view, scarcely more satisfactory. These newer formulations freely acknowledge that observations of nature do play a role in scientific development. But they remain almost totally uninformative about that role – about the way, that is, in which nature enters the negotiations that produce beliefs about it. The strong program and its descendants have repeatedly been dismissed as uncontrolled expressions of hostility to authority in general and science in particular. For some years I reacted somewhat that way myself. But I now think that easy evaluation ignores a real philosophical challenge. (Kuhn 2000, 110–111, emphasis added)

These statements have always been problematic for the sociological construction of scientific knowledge, because Kuhn had been one of the main authors responsible for showing that “observations of nature” were conditioned by what scientific communities determined at each paradigm stage (Shapin 1992, 333–369). Undoubtedly, multiple investigations in the history and sociology of science sprang from these precepts, revitalizing the debate on the relativism implicit to this type of approach, which was accused of being unscientific in its analyses (e.g., Laudan 1996). This has to do with what Kuhn intends to sustain, which is that nature “negotiates” with the “beliefs” that scientists approach it with. In other words, historical and sociological perspectives should be able to account for the role nature

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plays in the construction of scientific knowledge, thus preventing science from being turned into a mere act of social negotiation in communities in which the objects of nature do not seem to belong. This point is expressed in one of the last chapters of Kuhn’s seminal work – which went on to become an essential reference for historical epistemology – entitled “The Invisibility of Revolutions.” In this chapter, Kuhn aims to show that the (textbookbased) training of scientists never reconstitutes the revolutions the discipline went through in the past: “Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated” (Masterman 1970). This seems to be an important point for the discussion to which historical epistemology returns at a later date, and one that links it directly to Kuhn’s claims. In general, it is fair to say that the strategy the scientific community employs seems to overlook the tensions and negotiations that each discipline had to go through in its past. However, this does not mean that they never existed, just that they are made invisible and then forgotten as the community takes up the new challenges presented by its contemporary paradigms. Kuhn argues that by hiding the historical details of each scientific revolution, scientists acritically assume that their present is built upon the unbroken accumulation of previous actions. The task of making these past traditions visible within the different disciplinary fields is one that is both historical and philosophical in nature, concerning the history of science and the philosophy of science together. These considerations prompt the following interpretation of Kuhn’s work: (i) that the incommensurability of paradigms does not necessarily affect the idea of the continuity or progress of science, since just because past scientific revolutions are not seen does not mean the tensions and negotiations that sparked them have gone away; and (ii) that it is down to the history and philosophy of science to retrieve these tensions (defying the demand that new paradigms require old traditions to be forgotten) to be able to show that the organization of normal science through paradigms does not preclude the possibility of thinking of science as progressing and accumulating knowledge. These are the critical points that historical epistemology takes up, but in two different ways, one in reference to the guiding role of the natural and the non-natural in the historical construction of science, and the other taking a more historical perspective that recognizes the stability of science based on the existence of scientific concepts and problems that remain throughout the modern history of science. These are two lines of inquiry that allow us to link the problems addressed by historical epistemology with the problems addressed by Kuhn: first, the place of nature when conferring unity and autonomy to the natural sciences, putting restrictions on relativistic approaches in the history of science; and second, a long-term historical reconstruction that allows for a stable notion of science over time, even through scientific changes and revolutions. For these two approaches, we draw on the analyses of two authors, Lorenz Krüger and Lorraine Daston, and show how Kuhn’s influence can be felt in both.

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The Return of the Philosophy of Nature Lorenz Krüger was a German physicist and philosopher whose untimely death in 1994 prevented him from engaging in the aforementioned program at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Despite this, his thought served as a basis for this program. Krüger was trained in physics, mathematics, and astronomy at the University of Heidelberg (1959), earning his doctorate in theoretical physics. From this scientific background, he moved to philosophy, graduating from the University of Göttingen in 1972 with a thesis on the concept of empiricism in the work of John Locke (Krüger et al. 2005, 45). A key characteristic of Krüger’s philosophical approach can already be seen in these early works, particularly in the historical epistemology program that he goes on to develop at Göttingen, in which he questions those truths that we usually inherit in the field of philosophy, confirming or rejecting them on the basis of historical research based on the compilation of archival sources. This philosophical criticism takes shape within the history and philosophy of science when Krüger, after research fellowships in the 1970s at Berkeley, Princeton, and Pittsburgh, gets involved first-hand in the discussions this field of philosophy opens up, especially as of the work of Kuhn. It could be said that this direct contact with the issues associated with relativism – emerging especially since the appearance of the new programs in the sociology of science – allowed him to develop a way of understanding the philosophy of science and how history interplays with it. When, in 1990, he was invited to establish the Institute for the History of Science at the University of Göttingen, he began his inaugural speech with a reformulation of the famous quote of Kant paraphrased by Imre Lakatos: “History of science without philosophy of science is blind, philosophy of science without history of science is empty” (Steinle 1995). His attention to the difficult and contentious relationship between these disciplines was the hallmark of his philosophical output from the 1970s on, which included a German edition of Kuhn’s book The Essential Tension. In the 1980s, already based at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, he was responsible for an international project on the study of probability, whose results were published in the two volumes of The Probabilistic Revolution (Krüger et al. 1987). This book formed the kernel of the program in historical epistemology at the Max Planck Institute because it manages to condense many of the philosophical interests of Krüger and some of his contemporaries at this time (Reflections on the role of the concept of probability in modern scientific thinking led to works of great interest, such as the books The Emergence of Probability (Hacking 2006) and Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Daston 1995) and articles like that by Heidelberger (2001)). Krüger traveled to Princeton as a visiting scholar from September 1973 to the summer of 1974, on Kuhn’s invitation, to participate in a research seminar on the development of statistical physics (We owe this information to Professor Lorraine Daston and Christa Krüger, Lorenz Krüger’s widow, who kindly collaborated with us for this work. In the preface to The Probabilistic Revolution, Krüger mentions what triggered the idea of studying the rise of probability in the sciences: “The idea

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of assembling an interdisciplinary group to study the rise of probability in the sciences occurred to me as a result of a conference of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, held at Pisa in 1978, to which I was invited by Jaakko Hintikka. My understanding of the depth and the breadth of the problem grew in conversations with colleagues whom I met there, among them Ian Hacking and Nancy Cartwright” (Krüger et al. 1987, preface)). There, Krüger established a close relationship with Kuhn, which spawned a series of publications. Krüger brought up a number of issues in the German translation of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which Kuhn took on board and included in its later editions. Krüger was also put in charge of editing and writing the foreword for a collection of works on the history of science produced by Kuhn throughout the 1960s and 1970s, which was subsequently published in German under the title Die Enstehung des Neuen. Studien zur Struktur der Wissenschaftsgeschichte (The Emergence of the New: Studies on the Structure of the History of Science), and in translation into English and Spanish under the titles The Essential Tension. Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change and La Tensión Esencial. Estudios Selectos sobre la Tradición y el Cambio en el Ámbito de la Ciencia. The editing of this work allows us to reflect on two issues. The first has to do with its title: the book we know as The Essential Tension was based on a work called “The Emergence of the New.” A look at academic writings rooted in historical epistemology reveals that this title is aligned with the nomenclature of this school of thought. Phrases such as “the emergence of” or “the appearance of” gained currency in the type of history of science that focuses on the genealogical nature of history, referring in turn to intellectual traditions and philosophical ideas that pass through the French epistemological tradition and back to Nietzsche (A great many works bear the hallmarks of a historicization that has its roots in Nietzsche. In the tradition of historical epistemology, such works include The Emergence of Probability (Hacking 2006) and The Emergence of Sexuality (Davidson 2001). Both authors acknowledge the influence of Foucault on their thinking, and Foucault himself demonstrates his debt to Nietzsche in his historicist program (Foucault 1977)). Unlike historicization, which searches for origins and therefore suggests the idea of a historical continuity whose starting point can be known, historical epistemology reveals in the use of these expressions the significance and relevance of certain times and contexts as a condition of possibility for new knowledge to emerge. The decision to call Krüger’s collection of Kuhn’s works “The Emergence of the New” reveals the perspective he intended to take on this type of reflection, and in particular on the type of history that gave rise to an oeuvre like Kuhn’s. In the foreword to the German edition of The Essential Tension, Krüger analytically refines what is really at stake in the tensions in the disciplines in question, namely, what conditions are really necessary for philosophy and science to gain autonomy: The problem sparked in the dispute over rationality and progress can now be formulated in the following terms: Upon what are the singularity and autonomy of the scientific community based? What are the conditions for its creation and what are its limits? By answering

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these questions, the relationship between the social goals and demands of science and the cognitive process that occurs within knowledge itself, as it is also expressed in the series of theories produced, will play an important role. (Krüger 1978, 21; our translation)

The question about the conditions of possibility for the creation of knowledge immediately leads to the tools required to better conceive of how these conditions occur. If in his approach to this issue – in its broadest sense – Kant felt that the best tool was philosophy, in Krüger’s view – taking Kuhn’s historicist perspective – the great challenge was to understand that this task can no longer be tackled by a single discipline. To position oneself in favor of one discipline and against another, for example in favor of logic and against sociology or vice-versa, bears the inherent danger of leading the argument along erroneous lines. Ultimately, it is important to develop a deeper understanding of the sciences, and perhaps also a more mindful and appropriate approach to them. Here, the division of our research operations, how seriously we should take them to ensure the methodological coherence and reliability of scientific work, may ultimately be revealed contingent when compared to the problem. (. . .) If the rational reconstruction of science requires a genuinely historical component, then not only does the old problem (also repeatedly raised by Kuhn) of historical method become visible, but so also, and above all, does the problem, which is generally not seen equivalently with the same degree of clarity, of [how] knowledge emerges from the limited time and experience of an individual, community, or society, which nonetheless survives the contingent limitations of its origin and may, with justified claims, be transmitted to successors in the future. (Krüger 1978, 22–23)

This passage leads us into the midst of a big topic that, at the time when both men were working together, was shaping the academic agenda of epistemology. If the relationships between the philosophy of science, the history of science, and science itself were a matter of debate, especially as of Kuhn’s most important work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, from Krüger’s perspective these disciplinary concerns evaporate when the problem about the conditions of possibility of knowledge becomes central. And it is this nuance that marks the whole of the project of historical epistemology, which in Krüger’s version refers to historical ontology.

Science and History In 1978, Krüger published an article entitled “Does a Science Need Knowledge of its History?”; in 1984 came another called “Why Do We Study the History of Philosophy?”; and in 1988, a new paper, “How Philosophy and Science Came to Differ.” If we draw attention to these three works in particular, it is because they show us the reflections that, since the end of the 1970s, had been among Krüger’s philosophical concerns. These works also allow us to unpick further his philosophical position visa-vis the debates unleashed by the Kuhn “phenomenon.” Autonomy and its conditions of possibility: these are the great problems that Krüger intended to address. In his 1978 article, he points to the validity and

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legitimacy of knowledge offered by the history of science for science itself. To introduce the question, Krüger refers to Kuhn and the aforementioned chapter, “The Invisibility of Revolutions,” from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In this chapter, Kuhn wants to highlight the subtle and imperceptible character of revolutions from a procedure that implies desacralizing traditional scientific authority and replacing it with a new authority, which is presented in new textbooks and the corresponding scientific methods. Krüger is interested in highlighting one aspect: the fact that every revolution that seeks to establish a new “intellectual unity” has a cost attached to it: But there is a price to be paid for the reestablished intellectual unity: the distortion of its past history, e.g., the elimination of previously legitimate questions, the unadmitted reinterpretation of concepts and so on. In short, the scientist’s picture of his own discipline will necessarily be inadequate. The scientist as a research worker can at best be a pseudohistorian of his field. But this means that the reconstructions of science provided by the scientists on the one hand and by the historian of science or the historically conscious philosopher of science on the other would have to be different and at least partially incompatible with each other. Which of the two, then, will be right? (Krüger et al. 2005, 222)

The answer Krüger proposes for this dilemma is simple: if science claims to be a historical phenomenon, meaning that to truly understand it, its historical evolution must also be known, then how is it that science can be done properly without making any reference to said evolution? In other words, what Krüger tries to show is that this distinction enables access to two ontologically distinct types of knowledge: knowledge that refers to the human activity of doing science (the domain of what he calls actional sciences) and knowledge that refers to the object of study of a scientific discipline, an object that is independent of human activity and which we usually comprehend under the label of “nature” (domain of the natural sciences). This distinction implies two types of response to the question that heads his 1978 article, and which are based on a basic assumption that Krüger describes as follows: Roughly speaking, it [the distinction between natural sciences and actional sciences] relies on the assumption that – given the overall goal of dealing successfully with nature – a part of our cognitive activity is directed by nature and not by further goals of ours, whereas precisely this is different for the actional sciences. (Krüger et al. 2005, 224)

Thus, for Krüger, the actional sciences cannot be conceived without their own historiography, while in the case of the natural sciences, the relationship is different, depending on an ontological determination of nature to determine what role history can play. That is why Krüger, rather than preferring the expression “historical epistemology,” defines his proposal in terms of an “ontological” conception of the history of the natural sciences: Instead of an interaction between the object and the activity of research we have an essentially unidirectional, if you like “causal”, dependence (not necessarily unique determination) of research upon the object. The coherence of the discipline in question depends on the extent to which its history is conformable to the ontological structure of its objects.

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Correspondingly the metatheorical rule reads: no natural sciences without its ontological history. (Krüger et al. 2005 et al. 226; emphasis in original)

Some central aspects of this paper deserve closer attention. First of all, the question as to the relationships between science, history of science, and philosophy of science cannot be answered in a general way. Some disciplinary distinctions must be made, according to Krüger’s approach, which in a certain way chimes with what Ian Hacking later postulates with his separation of human kinds and natural classes (Hacking 1996, 59–71). In short, the conceptual content of the natural sciences allows us to determine the history of that discipline in a different way from what is established in the human, social, or actional sciences. Therefore, the historical task ahead consists of developing a perspective that does not differentiate between the gaze of the historian and philosopher of science and that of the scientist, much more determined by nature. Thus, as historical epistemology claims a few years later, does an ontological conception of history (It is possible that Krüger rejected this shift from an ontological to an epistemological conception of history, in that it obscured the fundamental distinction resulting from his analysis) become a means of scrutinizing scientific knowledge and allowing it to be explained in historical terms, showing its development throughout various epochs.

History and Philosophy This point allows us to bring up a substantive and distinctive aspect of Krüger’s approach to historical epistemology: his keen interest in reinstating philosophy as a tool for analyzing the past of science. It is not only about the ontological framework it grants to nature (the fact that nature determines the lines of inquiry that the natural sciences follow) but also that philosophy itself is a discipline of the natural sciences. The defense of this idea appears in an article from 1984, which once again demonstrates his characteristic way of posing the problems at hand in a simple and direct question: Why do we study the history of philosophy? Krüger wonders why philosophical training involves the study of the history of philosophy, but he also wonders why said training is given as it is, namely, by following the philosophical problems that have defined philosophy. Krüger poses the question as to why the history of philosophy is usually taught from the history of problems such as good, beauty, or knowledge. This history based on problems gave philosophy autonomy when it broke away from the natural sciences, which meant distancing itself from the old philosophy of nature. At the same time that the natural sciences were searching for the truth in their relationship with the world and its phenomena, philosophy established a number of problems that assured its autonomy but simultaneously distanced it from the issue of responding to the world and its phenomena. What Krüger proposes is a return to that tradition whereby philosophy deals with the truths of the world together with the natural sciences. And he does so for two reasons. As we have seen, scientists cannot explain (without the help of historically oriented philosophy) why the problems they deal with are substantive for

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the global construction of science. Meanwhile, philosophy, unfettered from the responsibility of speaking for the world (the job of the natural sciences), becomes a venture whose autonomy is based on its own internal leanings. History provides a strong basis for understanding why the problem of the search for a “lasting truth” has been fundamental in the disciplinary construction of philosophy, just as it has been for the natural sciences, because it is through this history that we can understand the conditions that enabled the autonomous development of the disciplines. The modern project for the autonomy of philosophy sought to make philosophical reason the ultimate and only prerequisite for solving philosophical problems, while rejecting any supplementary help from either cultural or social history or the natural sciences. If modernity allowed the autonomous development of the natural sciences by determining their object in nature, philosophy must find in reason the same basis for its own autonomy. Philosophy thus conceived became autonomous and selfcontained, developing its own history on the basis of making its object human reason. Krüger wanted to break down this whole conceptual edifice. For someone committed to a historicist idea of philosophy, it is necessary to dismantle these idealized constructs by showing their material genesis. Autonomy and its conditions of possibility must be traced historically to understand how they arose. Autonomy, in his view, has to do with the ability of disciplines to break with tradition, and this seems to be key to connecting his philosophical approach with Kuhn’s. Returning to the idea that making past revolutions invisible serves as a mechanism that operates on scientific communities when authority is sought for a new paradigm, what happens in modernity is also the construction of a paradigm that makes the past invisible. In this almost imperceptible movement, new narratives about the past are fashioned, new heroes are instated in the history of science, even while said past is held to be connected, albeit never very explicitly, with current practice. Both scientists and laymen take much of their image of creative scientific activity from an authoritative source that systematically disguises – partly for important functional reasons – the existence and significance of scientific revolutions. Only when the nature of that authority is recognized and analyzed can one hope to make historical example fully effective. (Masterman 1970)

Invisibly, scientific revolutions allow us to see that (i) a scientific authority is needed to instate a new program of normal science; and (ii) said authority must maintain “the modern pact” of sustaining the autonomy of science based on the study of nature. Although statement (i) was duly analyzed and justified by Kuhn, statement (ii) does not seem to be addressed in his 1962 book. And it is this point that Krüger wishes to focus on. Put very simply: if Kuhn’s historicism projects an image of science with discontinuities and incommensurability, Krüger’s historicism seeks to show that it is possible to distance oneself from paradigms to show continuity in science. I want to claim that the natural sciences not only have the property of local but also of ‘global historicity’. By this I mean that the discovery as well as the justification of an advanced theory requires the predecessor theory, or rather the chain or net of predecessor theories. (. . .)

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Only global historicity permits us to consider a new theory not as a competing alternative but as corrected continuation of former theories. (. . .) Only global historicity, then, provides the possibility of theoretical progress, since to assume progress excludes conceiving of theoretical change as simple replacement of one theory by another. (Krüger et al. 2005, 246–247)

Krüger seeks to restore continuity to science and show scientific accumulation and progress. Except that this movement is not based on overcoming, changing, and forgetting but on a form of historicization that understands theories not only as explanations of new phenomena but as containing in themselves the historical continuity of previous theories. If the Theory of General Relativity represents progress with respect to the Law of Universal Gravitation, it is not because it succeeds in supplanting it, but precisely because it can only be explained in a historical conception in which gravity is an object of study for three centuries, from Galileo, Newton, and Descartes to Einstein, at least. Addressing the core question of the article, Krüger argues that this way of conceiving of the natural sciences should show us how the history of philosophy has been understood. While the natural sciences aimed to discover an eternal and timeless order of nature, philosophy focused its concerns on responding to human reason in the same terms. However, as the historicist turn began to influence the kind of approach and questions about nature that the natural sciences asked, Krüger argues that this change had repercussions in philosophy. The historicization of philosophy must work “like a professionalized consciousness of the scientific-technological world” (Krüger is keen to distance himself from the “artifactual” nature of philosophy, as a Lebenswelt, as Heidegger understood it. Science – especially given its technological condition – impregnated the life of contemporary man: “Our life has become, as it were, soaked with science and technology. Not only are today’s dangers and promises, our fears and hopes, very different from what they used to be in earlier centuries, also beliefs, actions and life plans have changed fundamentally. It is therefore scarcely possible, nowadays, to separate the Lebenswelt from the world as viewed and formed by science. The starting point of philosophical analysis can only be a “scientific Lebenswelt” (Krüger et al. 2005, 251; emphasis in original)) (Krüger et al. 2005, 252), and as such it must be directly involved in the historical analysis of the natural sciences. This is a function that would allow philosophy to delve into the local and global historicities of the natural sciences – historicities that would also be part of the way philosophy itself was conceived. And what is distinctive, for Krüger, is that this way of understanding philosophy, as part of the scientific-technological world, could give it a specific role as the “conscience” of the world we live in (ibid.).

The Structural Continuity of Scientific Concepts The historian of science Lorraine Daston was trained in astronomy at Harvard but soon discovered her inclination for historical and philosophical reflection. During her PhD at Harvard, she studied philosophy of science at Cambridge under Mary

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Hesse (It is interesting to see how the disciplinary tensions that, we understand, historical epistemology seeks to resolve were also part of Daston’s own academic training at Cambridge (Daston et al. 2019, 160)). In 1987, she joined the group run by Krüger at Bielefeld dedicated to investigating the historical origins of probability. In 1994, when the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science was founded, Daston was chosen as one of the directors for the development of the historical epistemology program. Daston provides quite precise definitions of what the program of historical epistemology means. For example, in a 1994 article, she defines it as the history of the categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards of explanation. Historical epistemology can be (indeed, must be) instantiated by the history of ideas, but it poses a different kind of question: not the history of this or that particular use of, say, infinitesimals in the mathematical demonstrations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the history of the changing forms and standards of mathematical demonstration during this period; not the history of the establishment of this or that empirical fact in, say, in the physiology of the mid-nineteenth century, but rather the history of the competing forms of facticity – statistical, experimental, and other – in the physiological institutes and laboratories circa 1870; not the historical judgment as to whether this or that discipline has attained objectivity, and if so, when and how, but rather a historical investigation into the multiple meanings and scientific manifestations of objectivity. (Daston 1994, 282–283)

In a more recent text, Daston provides a more metaphorical definition of the levels at which historical epistemology operates in comparison with other levels of historiographic reflection: Imagine science developing according to three-time scales. The shortest time scale, the fastest time scale, is the time scale of the empirical discoveries and developments made weekly and monthly. So imagine the covers of scientific journals like Science and Nature. This is the fast pace of scientific discovery and invention. For those of you who are musical, let’s call this the allegretto tempo of science. There is another tempo – let’s call this the andante tempo, for those of you who are musical – which is slower. It proceeds on a scale of decades and centuries. Here we are talking about major breakthroughs in theoretical understanding. So, for example, Newtonian or Einsteinian physics or Darwinian biology; are ways of thinking which will shape the way science is done for decades or perhaps even centuries, in the case of Newton, to come. Below that – and this is the level of historical epistemology – is what we might call the legato tempo, because it is the slowest of all. It is the development of the fundamental categories of thought and practices that underlie all of science. So even after Newtonian physics is superseded by Einsteinian physics and Darwin’s work is often superseded by modern genetics, this bottom layer of the legato developments remains. You could think of it as the bedrock of the history of science. And the bedrock level is the level of historical epistemology. (Daston 2020, 35)

It might be imagined that the historiographical concern of historical epistemology is reminiscent of the concerns Ferdinand Braudel expressed when he advocated a long durée perspective. There is in fact interest in retrieving the legato tempo of science, the only way continuity in the scientific enterprise can be revealed, albeit without failing to recognize that it unfolds through paradigms and revolutions, and even sometimes through apparently completely opposing theories.

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In this respect it is worth looking at the connections that Daston draws out in Kuhn’s work in order to understand how the historiography of science proposed by historical epistemology can be understood as a direct descendant of his concerns. In a book published to mark the 50th anniversary of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Daston offers an interesting interrogation of the tension between the concept of structure and the historicism behind the idea of scientific revolutions. At the same time that concepts such as paradigm, normal science, and scientific revolution were becoming prominent in discussions on the history of science, the concept of structure fell into disuse, as witnessed by the most current trends in the historiography of science. According to Daston, this is something Kuhn himself was aware of, and in this sense the chapter on the invisibility of revolutions should be understood as a way of attenuating a particular understanding of how revolutions really take place when they are recomposed in the historiographical narrative (Richards and Daston 2016, 130). For Daston, the tension between the idea of structure and the historicism contained in the work triggers a series of consequences for understanding the perspectives taken by the history of contemporary science. The approach is based on three theses: first, that historicism has triumphed so completely over structures that the history of science may soon dissolve its own subject matter; second, that abandoning structure also meant abandoning close ties with both the philosophy and sociology of science, at least in the short term; and third, that there is nonetheless considerable potential in at least one of Kuhn’s structures to reconnect even a thoroughly historicized history of science with these oncekindred fields. But it may come at the cost of rethinking just what a structure is. (Richards and Daston 2016, 118–119)

The first thesis refers us to the triumph of historicism. In Daston’s view, the disputes over relativism in the history and philosophy of science that marked the literature of the 1970s and 1980s are already part of a past that is outdated in two respects. First, the training of science historians who hold posts in history departments; and second, as a consequence, the fact that the historiographical forms of the history of science drew on the methods and values of classic historiography, managing to make science plausible as a human activity of study like any other, and thereby obscuring the teleological claim that characterized the old history of science pursued by scientists and philosophers. It is above all thanks to the ideas of a science in context that the historicism derived from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions took on traits that even Kuhn did not expect, as witness the aforementioned lecture from 1991. Daston’s second thesis looks at the issue from a different angle: If historicism has triumphed, then who has lost? The impact of contextualized, practice-centered approaches to the history of science was simultaneously to make the history of science more like general history, just as Kuhn had hoped, but at the high cost of weakening its ties to sociology and philosophy of science, and indeed, to science itself. (Richards and Daston 2016, 121–122)

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Philosophy, sociology, and science itself lost out when the history of science came to be viewed as part of general history. This is something of a recurring theme in this period of Daston’s work, appearing, for example, in another article reviewing the role that science studies have played in the history of science “(Daston 2009) (now it is for the most part only the history of very recent science that still engages the attentions of sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, usually under the capacious roof of science studies” (Richards & Daston 2016, 122)). However, it is also interesting to see that this idea of subsuming the history of science to general history results in a loss of disciplinary autonomy, given history’s established status as a discipline. Finally, the third thesis is the one that aims to connect the concept of structure to historical epistemology, thus reinstating philosophy, sociology, and science itself in their original place. This retrieval of the idea of structure is inevitably linked to a new way of understanding the concept. If in the Kuhnian conception, a structure is linked to the idea of paradigm, which in turn is linked to the form of learning within communities based on exemplars, that is, sets of rules and practices absorbed from textbooks, what Daston suggests is that the role of structure could be interpreted differently by understanding the conditions that make it possible for these rules and practices to be plausibly adopted within new paradigms. These conditions on how the rules can be adapted refer to Daston’s own definitions for historical epistemology, namely, understanding how concepts such as reasoning, proof, or evidence are shaped throughout history. Admittedly, this is a tall order, and some might be inclined to say that it is as hopeless as trying to detect a backbone in a jellyfish. But this would be to assume what has yet to be proven, despite decades of effort: namely, that reasoning from exemplars can indeed be cashed out as rule-following. (Richards and Daston 2016, 121–122)

The idea, then, is to see that these perspectives within science studies have managed, according to Daston, to dilute the autonomy of the history of science. That is why historical epistemology is proposed as a way to bring together the three historiographical schools that have proved limited when applied to science: those of philosophy, sociology, and history. (. . .) I propose to investigate how another historiographic program – which is very young and has yet to provide sufficient proof to be qualified as a school – may simultaneously draw on these three schools and overcome the limitations of each one. Also in a systematic manner, these limitations may be summed up in the following terms: the schools of philosophy and sociology cannot satisfy the requirements of empirical proof, which is the particular question of the school of history; the school of history cannot explain how knowledge generated in a very local context can become universal, be generalized from one context to another. (Daston 2017, 71)

In any case, Daston’s work seems to present a new approach that provides clear strategies for the historical investigation of science without directly addressing questions related to the reason for such investigation. It does not seem to be a core

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concern of historical epistemology to concentrate on the types of questions that have always accompanied reflections on science: What role should science play in societies? What uses and objectives should scientific activity have? As seems clearly stated by Mendonça and Videira, There are no robust questions being asked about what science should be used to achieve. Notions of progress, for instance, seem to be based on the same ideas that have dominated European nations since the nineteenth century. This automatic acceptance of the values that determine and configure science means the prevailing conception of science is imported ready-made and taken on board without due criticism or reflection. Science is accepted as a universal “thing”. And if this is the case, how can anyone expect philosophy to be an “instrument” of transformation, as Daston urges? (Mendonça and Videira 2019, 378)

The historical epistemology adopted as a program at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in the 1990s, even considering the differences between Krüger and Daston, can be thought of as a program that seeks to respond to the issues raised by The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For both the authors the idea is to take account of a science which, despite undergoing revolutions and changing paradigms, should not automatically be understood as ridden with incommensurability. We have seen that Krüger’s way differs from Daston’s. For the latter, the aim is to show that science and philosophy should reconstitute the common space that characterized them in the tradition of the modern philosophy of nature, because this is the only way we can find the bases that (i) enable us to conceive of scientists and the relationship of their research with the world as the axis around which to define science; and (ii) make us understand that this autonomy of science can only be duly justified by philosophy. For Daston, the exercise of showing continuity and progress lies in the investigation of those scientific concepts, such as objectivity, evidence, and proof, that continue to be part of scientific activity if viewed from a long-time perspective. We could sum up these proposals with the idea of building a philosophy of a global nature. We can interpret historical epistemology as an attempt to bring back the old methods of inquiry characteristic of the philosophy of natural sciences at the dawn of modernity, now placed at the service of a contemporary academic research program. In a way, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science now fulfills the role of those scrutinizers of nature, institutionally assuming a task that was previously carried out by the great names of modern science. If the unstoppable processes of scientific specialization no longer engender such enlightened minds, it is still possible to create institutions that replicate those values, starting from the current conditions for the production of scientific knowledge. In 2019, Daston stated in an interview with Olano Queijo and Videira: At the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science I have been in a very fortunate position and was able to form this working groups – teams of scholars – to take a broader view of a big question: for example, Does scientific observation has a history? No one scholar could write that history but a collective of scholars can at least make a start. At least

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for me, such working groups have been enormously stimulating. It’s hugely enlarged my own intellectual horizons to be working with people who are experts on everything from natural philosophy in Ancient Greece to psychoanalysis in the twentieth century. And for all of us, the collective challenge of making sense not just of this or that case study but of all of them together. (Daston et al. 2019, 200)

At this point in the descriptions made, we should present some considerations on this program, from which we try to retrace the roots of its philosophical problems. Our first reflection has to do with the institutional and political aspects of historical epistemology. If historical epistemology as a program is, as we have seen, clearly reminiscent of the philosophy of nature, cornerstone of contemporary science (The overwhelming importance historical epistemology attributes to modernity in the construction of science today can be seen in works such as Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe: Jurisprudence, Theology, Moral and Natural Philosophy (Stolleis and Daston 2016) and the aforementioned Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Daston 1995)), it is important to note that these efforts are aimed at supporting science as we understand it today, that is, the scientific status quo. This seems to be a not inconsequential consideration given the philosophical, sociological, and historical discussions and traditions in which this program is embedded. A second point is that if historical epistemology is strongly oriented toward reworking the current discussion on science by retracing its historical bases, which would inevitably lead back to the precepts that identified it with the philosophy of nature, we cannot escape a conception of science that is defined by this very modernism. This point of arrival would prevent any reflection of a more plural – and thus more inclusive – nature in the manner of the social studies of science. Neither reflection seems to us to be inconsequential, insofar as we would position ourselves outside the narratives built from historical contexts and periods that come from times and places that are completely distant from us. One function for philosophy that we would advocate has to do with finding and bringing forth power relations where they seem hidden, making it crucially important to be aware that the defense of an idea of science born in Modern Europe has nothing to do with the traditions elsewhere on the planet where knowledge about nature was also developed. The work of historical epistemology that would settle the unresolved discussion on relativism has as its flipside the ability to block plurality in science studies, a central value for the philosophical conception of knowledge that we defend from our perspective in South America.

Conclusions Although the German historical epistemology program can be framed within an already established tradition, it appears in the 1990s with the aim of settling the discussions initiated by Kuhn. Its main proponents, such as Krüger and Daston, were

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involved in the American philosophical environment that engendered Kuhn’s proposal. Concern with reconciling historicism and philosophical analysis is one of the clear goals of this program, with the primary aim of offering a proposal that faithfully reflects Kuhn’s position, showing his care to maintain a distance from any proposal that could be described as relativist.

Cross-References ▶ Gaston Bachelard and Historical Epistemology: A New Perspective for the History of Science in the Twentieth Century ▶ Lorraine Daston’s Historical Epistemology: Style, Program, and School ▶ Thomas Kuhn’s Legacy for the Historiography of Science

References Daston L (1994) Historical epistemology. In: Davidson AI, Harootunian HD (eds) Questions of evidence: proof, practice, and persuasion across the disciplines by James Chandler. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Daston L (1995) Classical probability in the enlightenment. Princeton University Press Daston L (2009) Science studies and the history of science. Crit Inquiry 35(4):798–813 Daston L (2017) Historicidade e objetividade. Liber Ars, São Paulo Daston L (2020) Observar el conocimiento: el seminario. In: Queijo Olano JA, Wschebor I (eds) Lorraine Daston en Montevideo. AGU, Universidad de la Republica Uruguay, pp 35–40 Daston L, Queijo Olano JA, Videira AAP (2019) The power of History: an interview with Lorraine Daston. Contemporánea: Historia y problemas del siglo XX 10(10):197–202 de Mendonça ALO, Videira AAP (2019) Reinstating institutions: the return of natural philosophy in times of academic postmodernity. In: Ana Paula Bispo da Silva AP, Moura BA (eds) Objetivos humanísticos, conteúdos científicos: contribuições da história e da filosofia da Ciência para o ensino de Ciências. EDUEPB, Campina Grande Foucault M (1977) Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In: Bouchard DF (ed) Language, CounterMemory. Practice, Selected Essays and Interviews Fuller S (1991) Is history and philosophy of science withering on the vine? Philos Soc Sci 21(2): 149–174 Gingras Y (2010) Naming without necessity. Revue de synthèse 131(3):439–454 Heidelberger M (2001) Origins of the logical theory of probability: von Kries, Wittgenstein, Waismann. Int Stud Philos Sci 15(2):177–188 Krüger L (1978) Vorwort des Heausgebrs. In: Kuhn T (ed) Die Enstehung des Neuen. Studien zur Struktur der Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Suhrkamp Krüger L, Daston L, Heidelberger M (1987) The probabilistic revolution. Vols I and II. MIT Press Book, Cambridge, MA Krüger L, Sturm T, Carl W, Daston L (2005) Why does history matter to philosophy and the sciences? Selected essays. De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston Kuhn TS (2000) The road since structure: philosophical essays, 1970–1993, with an autobiographical interview. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Laudan L (1996) Beyond positivism and relativism: theory, method, and evidence. Westview Press, Boulder/Oxford Masterman M (1970) The nature of a paradigm. In: Latakos I, Musgrave A (eds) Criticism and the growth of knowledge

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Queijo Olano JA (2019) ¿Epistemológica o histórica? La Historia y Filosofía de la Ciencia en una nueva tensión. Epistemología e Historia de la Ciencia 6(1):88–104. https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/ index.php/afjor/article/view/29177 Rheinberger HJ (2010) On historicizing epistemology: an essay. Stanford University Press Richards RJ, Daston L (eds) (2016) Kuhn‘s’ structure of scientific revolutions’ at fifty: reflections on a science classic. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Rouse J (1991) Philosophy of science and the persistent narratives of modernity. Stud Hist Philos Sci Part A 22(1):141–162 Shapin S (1992) Discipline and bounding: the history and sociology of science as seen through the externalism-internalism debate. Hist Sci 30(4):333–369 Steinle F (1995) Lorenz Krüger. Oktober 1932-29. September 1994. NTM N.S (3):57–58. https:// doi.org/10.1007/BF02913693 Stolleis M, Daston L (eds) (2016) Natural law and laws of nature in early modern Europe: jurisprudence, theology, moral and natural philosophy. Routledge

The French Style in the Philosophy of the Sciences

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Jean-Franc¸ois Braunstein

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The “French Network” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For a History of the History of the Sciences: Auguste Comte and the French Style in the Philosophy of the Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . School, Tradition, or Style? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

French philosophy of science, exemplified by figures such as Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Foucault, is commonly characterized by certain features. It aims to be a philosophy of “the particular sciences” and not of “science in general.” It is also characterized by its historical character. But history is taken here in the very particular sense of a “critical” history and expands into a broader “history of rationalities.” A historical approach to this history of science should be very useful here. The importance of Auguste Comte’s work should not be underestimated. He plays an important role in the institutionalization of the discipline of the history of science. But he also gave it some of its most distinctive features: insistence on the diversity and irreducibility of the sciences; criticism of the notion of method, which is based on a critique of psychology; and relative indifference to the notion of truth. To speak of a “French school” of philosophy of science would undoubtedly put too much emphasis on an institutional approach, even if the importance of the Institut d’histoire des sciences is undeniable. To speak of a French tradition would underestimate the obvious differences between the authors and would lead to the adoption of an overly linear history. To speak of a French style would probably be more appropriate and would lead to examine J.-F. Braunstein (*) Université de Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_14

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less obvious aspects, such as the link with politics, which is essential in many of these authors and opens the way to what will be later called “historical epistemology.” Keywords

Auguste Comte · Gaston Bachelard · Georges Canguilhem · Michel Foucault · Abel Rey · History of science · Historical epistemology · Positivism · Antipsychologism

Introduction Seen from a distance, there seems to be a “family resemblance” proper to French philosophers of the sciences. For example, when Gary Gutting introduces Englishspeaking readers to the Continental philosophy of the sciences, he evokes a “French network,” which includes such figures as Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Michel Foucault (Gutting 1990). Similarly, when the Italian Pietro Redondi and the Indian P. V. Pillai edit great French texts in the history of the sciences for Indian readers, they refer to a “French debate” in the philosophy of the sciences (Redondi and Pillai 1989). Accordingly, it is common use to refer to the works of Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Foucault – and despite the fact that they belong to different times and that they all display specific personalities – as major achievements of the French philosophy of the sciences. However, one will insist on Canguilhem’s work, firstly because it is historically central and secondly because as it has been shown, it oscillates between “two poles,” that of his master Bachelard and that of his disciple Foucault, between institution and contestation, between the “positive” and “the negative,” between “rationality and Nietzscheism” (Dagognet 1997: 11). Canguilhem thus illustrates the various possibilities, or if one prefers, the various temptations typical of French epistemology. But Canguilhem is also, at least to a certain extent, responsible for the organization of the field of historical epistemology “à la française.” He is the one who discretely indicates that the historical origin of that epistemology is to be found in Auguste Comte’s works in the nineteenth century, and he is also the one who establishes, for his own period, the canonical lineage Bachelard-Canguilhem-Foucault. A short description of the history of the history of the sciences “à la française” will be provided, for it would be somewhat paradoxical that this subject could not be amenable to historical consideration. Such a historical retrospect, especially regarding the works of Comte, enables to take into account some features of that epistemology “à la française” that are often neglected. The permanency of a certain type of approaches, a certain way of practicing the historian of the science’s craft, suggest it would be appropriate to characterize French epistemology in terms of “style” rather than as a “school” or “tradition,” as it is usually done.

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The “French Network” It is possible to distinguish four essential features of the “French Network.” First of all, epistemology is to be reduced to the philosophy of the sciences. Secondly, the value of that philosophy of the sciences depends on its ability to become a history of the sciences. Thirdly, it is necessary to add that that history of the sciences is not a history in the usual meaning of the word, for it is a philosophical or critical history. Finally, in order to contemplate the consequences of such an approach, one must underline the fact that this French epistemology necessarily leads to a broader questioning regarding the historical dimension of rationality: “rational thought was put in question not only as to its nature, its foundation, its powers and its rights, but also as to its history and its geography” (Foucault 1978, X). • A Philosophy of the Sciences. First of all, for all these authors, epistemology is to be defined as a philosophy of the “sciences” and not as a philosophy of “science.” (“Epistemology” will be used here in its French sense, since Rey and Bachelard, of “philosophy of the sciences,” which moves further and further away from “epistemology” in its English sense of theory of knowledge (Wagner 2002: 37–42).) From this, it follows that, on the one hand, the philosophy of the sciences is an a posteriori reflection on the established sciences, and on the other hand, it insists on the diversity of the actually existing sciences and in no way intends to “unify” them. French epistemology, in its most common instances, is an a posteriori reflection on the established sciences. As it had been said from Bachelard, “he starts from the actual sciences, from the phenomenon of these sciences [. . .]. His epistemology is properly a genuine phenomenology of the natural sciences” (Hyppolite 1978: 2, 668). The philosophy of the sciences takes science as a given that is never to be discussed or founded. In this regard, there is no other authority than the sciences themselves as for what regards their history. That is what Canguilhem points out about Bachelard: “The only genealogical title, the only justification that this rationalist expects from reason is science and its history” (Canguilhem [1968] 1994a: 200). Bachelard criticizes philosophers who “always want to found once and for all” and intend to ruin the originality of the sciences (Bachelard 1953: 8). Similarly, Canguilhem claims that “it is not the task of the philosopher to settle beforehand the extension of the concept of science” (Canguilhem [1965] 2015: 1098). In that respect, the meaning of the French term épistémologie differs radically from that of the German Erkenntnistheorie and that of the English epistemology (Ferrier 1854), the latter referring to “theory of knowledge.” The other consequence of this conception of the philosophy of the sciences is that one should not talk of science in general, but of the “sciences” as irreducibly diverse. It is not the same philosophy that is operating in each scientific discipline: Bachelard considers mathematical physics, Canguilhem biology and medicine, and Foucault medicine and the human sciences. More broadly, the Bachelardian notion of “epistemological region” theorizes the idea that the forms of reason vary according to

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their field of application. Against “classical rationalism” and its bent for unity, Bachelard’s “applied rationalism” maintains that there exist “regions within the rational organization of knowledge” (Bachelard [1949] 1966: 119). • A Historical Reflection on the Sciences. Secondly, French epistemology consists in an a posteriori reflection on the sciences. Now, one may wonder how this epistemology may succeed in being more than an ill-informed repetition of science. It could very well be the case that the philosophy of the sciences adds nothing to science: Bachelard may fall prey to the threat of “scientism,” as Canguilhem – noticing what he deems a “difficulty” – remarks: “on the one hand, says Canguilhem, Bachelard does not endorse positivism. He does not consider his scientific philosophy to be a philosophical science. On the other hand, he sticks to science when it comes to describe and legitimate its progress”(Canguilhem [1968] 1994a: 200). In fact, it is its historical approach that enables French epistemology not to merely repeat the sciences: the philosophy of the sciences “à la française” is always a history of the sciences. Hence the label “historical epistemology” that is often used to characterize it. Canguilhem states very clearly this relation: “without a reference to epistemology, the theory of knowledge would be an empty meditation; without a relation with the history of the sciences, epistemology would amount to a completely superfluous doublet of the science it is supposed to discuss” (Canguilhem [1968] 1994a: 11–12). The relation between philosophy and the sciences can be fruitful only if it rests on the history of the sciences. French epistemology expects to find answers to some traditional philosophical problems, such as the problem of scientific objectivity or the question of truth and especially error, within the history of the sciences. Accordingly, but quite paradoxically, Canguilhem holds that historicity constitutes a genuine criterion of demarcation between what is scientific and what is not. The proof of the scientific nature of a discipline lies in its historical dimension: “a science deprived of history, that is a science within which the rejection of some conditions of objectivity at a given moment and their replacement by other conditions of objectivity more objectively defined had not taken place, such a science is not a science” (Canguilhem [1968] 2019: 300). Historicity is what distinguishes between “true sciences” and “false sciences,” such as astrology, whose proper feature is to have no history. • A Critical History: “Normativity” and “Recurrence.” However, and that is the third point, this history of the sciences is not a history in the classical sense of the word: it claims to be a “critical” or “philosophical” history and differs from traditional history in two main respects. On the one hand, this history does “judge” and “value” what it studies. On the other hand, it is a history that judges by way of “recurrence,” that judges the past in the light of the present.

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Bachelard claims, “against the prescriptions enjoining the historian not to judge, that one has to expect value judgments from the historian of the sciences” (Bachelard 1972: 141). It is the very point that distinguishes the history of the sciences from the “history of peoples and empires,” which “fairly endorses as an ideal the objective narrative of the facts” (Bachelard 1951: 24). According to Canguilhem too, the history of the sciences is a normative history, a “judgmental” history: “to the model of the laboratory, claims Canguilhem, one can oppose, in order to understand the function and meaning of the history of the sciences, the model of the school or the model of a Court of Justice, that is of an institution and a place where judgments are passed on the knowledge of the past.” Epistemology is the judge, “which is needed to provide history with a principle of judgment, by teaching it the latest language used by such and such science” (Canguilhem [1968] 1994a: 13). This conception, which assumes that one judges the past in the light of the present, is what Bachelard theorizes by way of the concept of “recurrence.” According to him, one has to “formulate a “recurrent” history, a history which is guided by the finality of the present, a history that starts from what is presently certain, and discovers in the past the progressive formations of truths” (Bachelard 1951: 2). It is in the name of the present state of science, of “fresh science” so to speak, that the past of science is judged. The present reconstructs and reorders the past of science. This notion of “recurrence” is one of the most characteristic features of French epistemology, but it raises a certain number of problems that are not without evoking the problems usually associated with the “Whig” conception of history in the English-speaking world. Canguilhem is undoubtedly more aware of these risks involved in the use of “recurrence” than Bachelard is. The first danger amounts to reconstructing the past in such a way that it foretells present truths. Accordingly, one is likely to fall prey to what Canguilhem calls, in a somewhat famous passage, the “search for the forerunner.” The “virus of the forerunner” is said to be the “more obvious symptom of an inability to epistemological critique” (Canguilhem [1968] 1994a: 13). Indeed, such a search for forerunners prevents one to grasp true historical novelty. But it also prevents one from understanding the meaning of a concept within a definite system or at a definite moment. When Lamarck is regarded as the forerunner of Darwin, both Darwin’s originality and Lamarck’s coherence are lost. Furthermore, the very notion of a forerunner is intrinsically contradictory, since a forerunner would be “a thinker belonging to different times, to his own time and to the time of those who are held to be his continuers” (Canguilhem [1968] 1994a: 13). Moreover, such a notion presupposes that history be linear, that its “course” be unique: “a forerunner would be a thinker, an investigator who would have walked part of the way more recently completed by another” (ibid.). Yet nothing tells us that the path is the same. A second problem raised by this notion of recurrence has to do with the tentative character it ascribes to the history of the sciences itself. Bachelard acknowledges this “ruinous element” which is said to derive from the “ephemeral character of scientific modernity” (Bachelard 1972: 144). One has to rewrite the history of the sciences each time an important discovery is made. Bachelard frankly acknowledges that

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consequence: “with each of its successes, science rectifies the perspective of its history” (Bachelard 1972: 144). Canguilhem also accepts such a consequence: for instance, his history of the concept of reflex integrates as one of its essential elements a “history of the history of reflex.” Furthermore, he agrees that his own works on vitalism are partly invalidated by the discoveries of molecular biology and that he certainly ought to rewrite them within that perspective. A third problem raised by the notion of recurrence concerns the very definition of the past it presupposes. It seems that the past itself is reconstructed, that it cannot be taken as given. Canguilhem remarks: “Taken in an absolute sense, the “past of a science” is a vulgar concept. The “past” is a catchall of retrospective inquiry” (Canguilhem [1978] 1988: 3). In a sense, the past of a science is something else and something more than a mere chronology. The very rhythm of the history of the sciences varies accordingly with the intensity of the periods or the richness of the fields studied: “the temporality of the history of the sciences cannot be reduced to a mere side-thread of the general course of time [. . .] the temporality of the advent of scientific truth, the temporality of verification, displays a liquidity and a viscosity that differ for each discipline considered at the same periods of general history” (Canguilhem 1994b: 19). This reconstruction of the past by epistemology therefore opens vast but hazardous perspectives for the history of the sciences, as Suzanne Bachelard, daughter of Gaston Bachelard, quoted by Canguilhem, remarks: “The fact that the historian’s work is retrospective establishes limits but also bestows certain powers. The historian constructs his objects in an ideal space-time. It is up to him to make sure that this space time is not imaginary” (Canguilhem [1978] 1988: 5). • The “History and Geography” of Rationalities. Finally, and fourth characteristic, the epistemology developed by these authors leads them to address the question of the development of reason, which is grasped only through the development of the sciences. A consequence of this view is that the different forms of reason are said to be dependent on historical or “geographical” conditions. Bachelard explains that, since “Reason, once again be it said, must obey science,” must follow the “dialectics of science”: “the traditional doctrine of an absolute, unchanging reason is only one philosophy, and it is an obsolete philosophy” (Bachelard [1940] 1968: 123). The new rationalism or “arch-rationalism” (surrationalisme) advocated by Bachelard is a perpetual conquest. Bachelard echoes here some of Abel Rey’s phrases who, in 1907, had evoked an “experimental rationalism,” “more flexible, more psychological, closer to the facts, in a word more positive” (Rey 1907: 149). Rey did not hesitate in that regard to talk of the “psychological history of reason” (Rey [1909] 1917: 191). To be sure, the debate opposing rationalism and irrationalism is, to a large extent, an out-of-date debate that remains circumscribed to the venerable sessions of French philosophical societies. Foucault, for instance, does not want to take part in it, at least “to play the arbitrary and tedious part of either the rationalist or the irrationalist”

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(Foucault [1981] 1994b: 135). On the other hand, he keeps in mind the Bachelardian and Canguilhemian lesson regarding the historicity of rationality and acknowledges the fact that he has benefited from Bachelard’s idea that “reason works on itself at the very moment it constitutes its objects of analysis” (Foucault [1980] 1994b: 56). What is at stake here is the constitution of “a form of rationality that is presented as prevailing and to which the status of reason is granted so as to make it appear as one of the possible forms of rationality at work” (Foucault [1983] 1994b: 440). Refusing “the blackmail that has very often been directed at any critique of reason or critical questioning concerning the history of rationality,” Foucault holds that it is possible to write “a contingent history of rationality” just as it is possible to attempt a “rational critique of rationality” (Foucault 1994b, 4: 440). If Foucault refers several times to Kant’s text “What is the Enlightenment?” it is because he reads it as the first attempt to “question the history and geography of reason, to question its immediate past and the conditions of its working, to question its moment, its location, and its actuality” (Foucault 1965: 5). Rationality, notwithstanding its claim to universality, adopts historically determined forms. But reason is also determined by its domain of application. Canguilhem thus distinguishes between “French classical rationalism,” the rationalism of “clear and distinct ideas” based on mathematics, and “vital rationalism,” grafted on to biology and proposing a brand new definition of reason: “if by reason one understands not a power of apperception of the essential relations included in the reality of things or of the mind, but rather a certain power to establish normative relations within the experience of life, then, in that sense, I can also declare myself rationalist or, more exactly, I can subscribe to the elegant formula of Mr Bachelard, in his book Water and Dreams (l’Eau et les rêves): “Rationalist? I’m striving to become one. . .” ” (Canguilhem [1947] 2015: 320). Furthermore, in Foucault, such a spatialization of reason enables one to establish a more obvious relation between knowledge and power: “as soon as one can analyze power in terms of region, domain, settlement, shifting, transfer, one can grasp the process by which knowledge operates as power, and reproduce its effects” (Foucault [1976] 1994a: 33). It is through this spatial representation that the well-known Foucauldian knot between power and knowledge is tied.

For a History of the History of the Sciences: Auguste Comte and the French Style in the Philosophy of the Sciences These characteristic features of French epistemology are quite well known. However, it is also usual to believe that this French epistemology has broken up with all the philosophy of the sciences that preceded it. In that respect, one may evoke an “Althusserian” interpretation of these authors which has long been dominant. Althusser proposed to speak of a “cut” rather than of a “rupture,” and his disciples, like Dominique Lecourt or Etienne Balibar, interpreted the relation between Bachelard and his predecessors in these terms. For them, the break with the previous philosophy of the sciences is complete; hence the label “anti-positivism” that is

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sometimes associated with that epistemology. On this reading, which emphasizes the notion of break or rupture, one considers as essential the opposition between the “continuism” of such authors as Duhem or Meyerson and the “discontinuism” proper to the works of Bachelard, Canguilhem, or Foucault. This distinction is perhaps not so essential: one could show that Canguilhem is far from being a straightforward “discontinuist,” as Bachelard is, since he claims – for example – that the Galilean Revolution itself has not been achieved without the conservation of a certain legacy: “the Copernican and Galilean revolutions did not sweep away tradition in one fell swoop” (Canguilhem [1978] 1988:15). In fact, if one wants to hold fast to the historical approach initiated by these authors, it would be appropriate to question the very history of French epistemology, something that has hardly been done so far. Accordingly, it would be relevant to outline a history of the history of the sciences “à la française.” Indeed, the philosophy and the history of the sciences do not start in France with Bachelard (or Koyré). In that respect, it would be interesting to pay attention to an institution that has played an essential part in that story and with which the main actors of the “French network” have been associated: namely, the Institut d’histoire des sciences et des techniques of the University of Paris, which has been chaired successively by Bachelard, Canguilhem, Suzanne Bachelard, and Dagognet. It would also be interesting to pay attention to Abel Rey (1873–1940), who founded the Institut in 1932 (Braunstein 2006). Moreover, one should go back even further, that is, back to Auguste Comte who is obviously the origin of the “French style” in the history of the sciences. In an article on “The Biological Philosophy of Auguste Comte,” Canguilhem points out that “his philosophical conception” of the history of the sciences is “the source of what has been and should remain, according to me, the originality of the French style in the history of the sciences” (Canguilhem [1968] 1994a: 63), namely, the idea that there must exist a link between the history of the sciences and the philosophy of the sciences. On this reading of Comte, some characteristics of French epistemology previously mentioned reappear. But other less apparent features may also be identified. Yet to go back to the Comtean origins of the French philosophy of the sciences does not amount to claiming that all this movement was already present, as in a germ, in the works of the founder of positive philosophy. But it enables one to disclose what makes the originality of such thinkers as Bachelard, Canguilhem, or Foucault. • The Institutionalization of the History of the Sciences. First of all, Comte is at the origin of the history of the sciences in France from an institutional point of view. In this regard, the beginnings of the history of the sciences in France are explicitly and deliberately associated with a certain political situation. Comte was the first, in 1832, to request from Guizot, then Minister of Public Instruction, the creation, in his words, of a “new and permanent chair dedicated to the general and philosophical history of the positive sciences,” whose teaching would be intended for “duly prepared intellects” (Littré 1863: 203). According to

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Comte, what mattered was to fill the unbelievable “gap” that characterized the historical sciences: “the study of the philosophical history of the sciences presents itself as an essential element within the larger whole of historical studies, which exhibits nowadays, in that respect, a fundamental gap that cannot fail to shock all the good minds (Littré 1863 : 205).” Comte maintains that the establishment of positive philosophy is the necessary condition for the writing of a genuine history of the sciences: “it is only today that such a chair can be properly established, since, prior to our century, the various fundamental branches of philosophy had not acquired their definitive features or had not manifested their necessary relations” (Littré 1863: 204). As it is well known, Guizot rejected Comte’s proposal. The latter concluded with resentment: “It only exists in Paris, either at the Collège de France or at the Sorbonne, four chairs dedicated to the history of what is officially called philosophy, that is four chairs exclusively dedicated to the minute study of the idle musings and aberrations of man through the course of the centuries” – that is philosophy – “whereas there does not exist, either in France or even in Europe, one single course of lectures to explain the formation and progress of our true knowledge, either with regard to the whole of natural philosophy or with regard to a specific science” (Tannery 1930: 144). However, the Third Republic eventually complied with Comte’s request, and Ferry and Gambetta had a chair of “the general history of the sciences” created at the Collège de France in 1892. This chair was offered to the main disciple of Comte, Pierre Lafitte, who had in fact no special expertise in the history of the sciences. This teaching was to serve as a foundation for the Republic. According to Léon Bourgeois, the Minister of Public Instruction, “there is no higher education worthy of that name if it is not capped with a scientific philosophy” (Tannery 1930: 144). In return for the opportunity given to him, Lafitte dedicated most of his inaugural lecture to underline the relation existing between the history of the sciences and the political situation of the time: he expressed satisfaction at the fact that “the creation of that chair had gathered the support of all the public powers of the French Republic” and that “it be in harmony with the political and social situation of France” (Laffitte 1892: 301). In a state characterized by the “disrepute of theology,” the remedy to preserve the social consensus amounts to generalizing science and promoting its “definitive extension to the moral and social domain.” Only the creation of the chair of the history of the sciences can “provide the direction of things and the government with its necessary generality” (Laffitte 1892: 308). In 1903, the chair is attributed to another minor positivist, Grégoire Wyrouboff, who is chosen by the Minister himself and, despite the opposition of the majority of the Collège de France’s professors, who wanted to elect the great historian of the sciences Paul Tannery, who is a sort of “martyr” of the history of science (Coumet 1981). However, it is quite puzzling to note that Tannery, notwithstanding his eviction for the benefit of a positivist, appeals to the Comtean doctrine: he endorses the Comtean idea of a “general history of the sciences” and acknowledges the fact that “he assimilated only one great philosophy” at the age of 22. Auguste Comte’s philosophy, and this influence “caused (his) works, whose goal was to check and clarify Comte’s ideas on the history of the sciences” (Tannery 1930: 134). Similarly,

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the first holder of the “chair of the history of philosophy with regard to its relations with the sciences” at the Sorbonne, Gaston Milhaud (1858–1918), dedicates an entire book to explain how he situates himself with respect to Comte’s philosophy (Milhaud 1902). It is also possible to disclose this positivist trend at the origins of the Institut d’histoire des sciences of the University of Paris in 1932, even if Rey also heralds certain characteristic features of the “French network” evoked above. Abel Rey refers to Comte as “the first who attempted to describe the evolution of thought, starting with the facts, that is its history, instead of resting his case on dialectical theories of knowledge, ideological psychology, or traditional logic” (Rey 1937: 1.10.11). But he rejects beforehand the conception of the history of the sciences as a “mere work of erudition” and proposes to develop “a philosophical history of the sciences” that he identifies by way of the positivist notion of “general history of the sciences.” Physics and chemistry are said to be “liberating” and to possess in themselves an “educational value.” • The Diversity and Irreducibility of the Sciences. As for Comte, one of the most characteristic features of his philosophy is that it is a philosophy of the “sciences” taken in their diversity. Comte hardly considers “sciences” in the singular, except when he wants to distinguish it from “action” or practice. He almost always uses the words “sciences” or “positive sciences.” Indeed, instead of considering science in general, Comte prefers to analyze at length each science as it has been historically established. His approach is contemporaneous with the “new scientific organization” of the beginning of the nineteenth century described by Thomas Kuhn (1977: 60–65) and which is characterized by a progressive specialization of the sciences, a movement that centers around the creation of periodicals, associations, academic curriculums, and laboratories. Comte is particularly aware of this specialization, of the irreducible diversity of the sciences, even if he is quite ambivalent about it. He appreciates the “invigorating influence of the division of inquiries,” but at the same time, he regrets “the irrational dispersion of scientific works,” which prevents scientists from entertaining any general view (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a, 2, 699). As it is well known, Comte suggests that “the study of scientific generalities becomes an additional specialty” (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a, 1, 31). Because intellectually shortsighted, traditional scientists should not be entrusted with this new “specialty” or discipline, a scientist of a new kind should take charge of it, namely, the positive philosopher announced by Comte. The positive philosopher is thus to be regarded as the specialist of scientific generalities. Therefore, it would be absolutely mistaken to regard Comte as a supporter of the “unity of science” thesis. And in fact, there lies one of the main differences between his positivism and that of the Vienna Circle. Comte refuses the “attempts at universal explanation of all phenomena by way of a single law” (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a, 1, 40). His thought is much closer to recent reflections on the “disunities of the

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sciences” than it is to attempts at unification in the way advocated by Neurath (Hacking 1996). Comte particularly focuses on the irreducibility of each science with regard to the preceding science in the positivist classification. Each science depends on the previous one but cannot be reduced to it: accordingly, Comte refuses any attempt at “reducing” biology to physics or chemistry. Furthermore, it has to be noted that all the French vocabulary associated with irreducibility has its origins in the works of Comte and his disciple Littré, the author of the famous Dictionnaire de la langue française. • Methods vs Method. The assertion of the irreducible diversity of the sciences goes like hand in glove with another characteristic feature of Comte’s philosophy of the sciences, namely, his rejection of any “general” concept of method whatsoever. According to him, “method cannot be studied independently from the inquiries within which it is used” (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a, 1, 35); it must be studied “as it operates” in each science, unless one wants “generalities so vague” that they be without any influence on the “intellectual régime.” Through such generalities, “method is far less grasped than by way of a somewhat elaborate study – even if it is deprived of any philosophical intention – of one single positive science” (ibid.). Unlike Descartes, Comte rejects the idea that there could be one unique method of “rightly conducting reason and seeking truth in the sciences.” Every science invents its specific “method of investigation” (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a, 2, 132). Evoking the case of physics, Comte remarks: “each fundamental science (. . .) will provide us with a few philosophical indications of its own” (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a, 1, 455). To understand these methods of investigation, one will always have to go back to their “source,” to their historical origin in this or that science. The six fundamental sciences each introduce a new type of reasoning: mathematics uses deduction, astronomy rests on observation, physics resorts to experimentation, chemistry is based on classification, biology proceeds by way of comparison, and sociology depends on history. However, each science always has the possibility to use the previous methods of reasoning in the classification; thus, biology invents the comparison but can also use the experimentation. Moreover, each type of reasoning presupposes a certain type of positivity: as Ian Hacking points out, “propositions cannot have “positivity” – be candidates for truth or falsehood – unless there is some style of reasoning which bears on their truth value and can at least in principle determine that truth value” (Hacking 1983 : 41). Furthermore, Comte maintains that one must distinguish between the “doctrine” of a science, which is the content of its propositions, and its “method,” its manner of investigating that can be reused by the subsequent sciences. According to him, it is “an obvious philosophical rule that any doctrine can be converted into a method with regard to those that follow it in the true scientific hierarchy” (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a, 1, 689).

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The positive method, if it existed, would amount to integrating these particular methods and could only be known a posteriori, as being realized in the sciences: “one can form a clear and exact idea of the positive method only if one studies successively and in the proper order its application to the main classes of natural phenomena” (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a, 1, 62). When Comte finally proposes “some kind of spontaneous equivalent to Descartes’ initial discourse on method” (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a, 2, 749), it is only at the very end of the Cours de philosophie positive, after he has reviewed the entire orb of the sciences. But it is not even sure that one could arrive at such a positive method. Comte is quite cautious in that regard: “I ignore whether, later, it will be possible to write a priori a genuine course on method absolutely independent from any philosophical study of the sciences; but I am convinced that it is unachievable today” (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a, 1, 35). And even if it were possible, “it would only be by way of the study of the regular applications of scientific procedures that one could succeed in forming a good system of intellectual habits; what is in fact the essential goal of the study of method” (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a, 1, 35). Accordingly, Comte puts more emphasis on the actual diversity of methods than on the potential unity of the positive method to come. One of the best connoisseurs of Comte, John Stuart Mill, remarks that the more Comte progresses in the Cours, the more he is adverse to the very idea of method: “towards the end of the work, he assumes a more decidedly negative tone, and treats the very conception of studying Logic otherwise than in its application as chimerical” (Mill 1866 [1865], 56). Indeed, the criticism of the notion of method is not merely circumstantial; it points out an impossibility of principle. It is impossible to teach method, since it is, according to Comte, an art, and “no art properly speaking, be it the art of thinking, of writing, of speaking, of walking, or of reading, is capable of being genuinely dogmatically taught” (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a, 2, 741). This Comtean notion of the variety of “methods,” in the plural, is not without evoking, at least in certain respects, the notion of “styles of scientific reasoning” as it has been developed by Alistair Crombie (1994). Crombie identifies six styles of reasoning that appear with a specific science. But far from replacing one another, they are integrated in the course of historical evolution. The list of these styles of thinking partly overlaps the Comtean list, for Crombie identifies an axiomatic style, introduced by mathematics; an experimental method, on which classical science rested; a hypothetical and analogical style, illustrated notably by geometrical astronomy; a taxonomical style associated with natural history; a statistical and probabilistic style; and a method of historical derivation as exemplified by the works of Darwin. This hostility to the notion of method may be encountered in the writings of the majority of epistemologists “à la française.” For instance, Abel Rey, the founder of the Institut d’histoire des sciences, blames the “empty discourse” of the “theory of knowledge,” “of methodology”: “the theory of knowledge is merely a vague ideology or a dialectics of words, without the philosophical history of science” (Rey 1935: 8). In 1966, Bachelard assumes that “the time for a Discourse on Method has passed.” It can be of “no help”: the Cartesian method merely represents the

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“politeness of the scientific mind” (Bachelard 1972: 38–39). In fact, according to Bachelard, “the concepts and the methods, everything depends on the domain of experience considered” (Bachelard [1934] 1973: 139). Similarly, Canguilhem maintains that “to speak properly, there is no experimental method.” There is no unique “method,” “constituted by general principles, whose application only is to be diversified by the nature of the problems to solve” (Canguilhem [1968] 1994a: 167). • The Critique of Psychology. Another curious, but nonetheless central, feature of Comte’s philosophy of science is its violent critique of psychology. This critique is parallel to that of method, even if the former is more developed and even more radical. Commentators have usually tried to mitigate the scope of that proscription of psychology. However, the proscription is radical and unshaken, from the start to the end of Comte’s career, who, as soon as 1828, in a letter to his friend Valat, wanted to “kill (. . .) psychologism” (Comte 1973: 205). Furthermore, the importance of the critique of psychology is attested by the fact that in the first lesson of the Cours de philosophie positive, the first of the “four main advantages” associated with positive philosophy is the demonstration that there is no room for “this illusory psychology, the last transformation of theology, that a few vainly attempt to bring back to life nowadays” (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a: 1,33). The critique of psychology is not only the mere circumstantial rejection of a particular “false science,” namely, the “psychology” on which Victor Cousin and some of his disciples such as Jouffroy intended to ground their “Eclecticism.” It also indicates the kind of relations thought can, or rather cannot, have to itself: it is not possible, according to Comte, to grasp directly the “laws of the human mind.” Comte rejects the method of “inner observation” on which his opponents intend to found their psychology: such an observation is impossible. The “brain” – or the “individual” or the “mind” – cannot be divided in two to observe itself. Comte revives the ancient argument according to which the eye can see everything but itself: “by an invincible necessity, the human mind observes directly all the phenomena, except its own. For, who is to make the observation?” (Comte [1830–1842], 1975a: 1, 33). (The direct source of that critique is to be found in the works of the traditionalist philosopher Louis de Bonald (1754–1840). According to Bonald, one cannot “think oneself,” for it would put us in the situation of a man “willing to weight himself without scale or counterpoise” (Bonald 1838: 67). Now, “man is no more capable of thinking himself without a means to make himself sensible and, in a certain sense, alien to himself than the eye is able to see itself” (Bonald 1838: 343). This means of knowing oneself consists, according to Bonald, in the study of language, which is eminently social: one can only know the thinking man through the talking man. Accordingly, the critique of psychology and the emergence of sociology go like hand in glove in Bonald, just as it will be the case for Comte.) Comte holds that psychology has to be replaced by two sciences: on the one hand, by a science that would study the “organ of thought,” namely, the physiology of the brain or phrenology, and on the other hand, by a science that would study “the great results of human intelligence,” namely, sociology, which

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blends partly into the “philosophy of the different sciences.” Beyond Cousin, the target of that critique of psychology is Descartes. Comte objects to all attempts at grounding knowledge on consciousness. The error of Descartes consists in having grounded the synthesis on a “personal intuition,” namely, on the subject, whereas Comte maintains that one should search for an “objective” synthesis, grounded in the world. Such a violent critique of psychology cannot fail to evoke the famous critique of psychology that Canguilhem develops in an article entitled “What is psychology?” whose influence has been notable – either positively or negatively – on the French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s. Canguilhem’s anger against psychology, which he regards more as an auxiliary of the police than as a science, is partly motivated by ethical, and even political, reasons. According to him, psychology is a “school of subjection.” However, in other texts, Comte’s criticisms against inner observation are present to the mind of Canguilhem, and he points out the epistemological contradictions of psychology. According to him too, thought can be known only indirectly, through the analysis of its productions by the history of the sciences. Similarly, the importance of the criticisms – which resemble that of Comte – of psychology made by Foucault in his early writings is well known. Psychology has been continuously abused by French epistemology that prefers to study the mind through its achievements in the sciences. • A Relative Indifference to the Question of Truth. Another striking feature of Comte’s philosophy of the science is its indifference to the issue of truth. In his major work, the Système de politique positive, he only mentions truth once to define it as follows: “for us, truth always consists in the establishment of a sufficient harmony between our subjective conceptions and our objective impressions; such an equilibrium being itself subordinated to the whole of our private and public needs” (Comte [1851] 1929, 1, 554). What serves as substitute for truth is the notion of prediction. As it has been noted, according to Comte, “the main goal of science is forecast or prediction” (Laudan 1971). To the extent that these predictions can be tested, this predictive power of science is, in a sense, the “equivalent of a criterion of demarcation that enables one to distinguish scientific domains from non-scientific domains” (Laudan 1971). Comte regards prediction as what distinguishes science from “erudition”: “such a prediction, which is a necessary sequel of the constant relations discovered among phenomena, will enable one never to conflate genuine science with mere erudition, which mechanically accumulates facts” (Comte [1844] 1995: 73). This indifference to the problem of truth had already been underlined by John Stuart Mill who, while anticipating as early as 1868 the distinction between “context of discovery” and “context of justification,” remarked that Comte “mainly restricts himself” to the study of “methods of investigations,” whereas he takes no interest in “the requisites of proof” and “the mode of testing their evidence,” and consequently, “he supplies no test of proof” (Mill [1865] 1866: 54, 55).

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One can find the same indifference to the problem of truth in the authors of the “French network.” For instance, Abel Rey refers to Nietzsche when he explains that “truth is a value, just as the beautiful and the good; the search for truth, which is the aim of Science as well as Philosophy (. . .) is the search for a value” (Rey 1936: 3). According to Bachelard, the notions of “approximate knowledge” and “rectification” are fundamental, and the problem of error takes precedence over the problem of truth. As for Canguilhem, he endorses Nietzsche’s theses according to which “truth is a value that is to be situated among a plurality of values” (Canguilhem [1971] 2018: 409–409). Furthermore, he regards truth as a notion purely internal to the history of the sciences: “for science, what is true is what it defines progressively as being true independently of any relation to any being considered as a reference” (Canguilhem [1965] 2015: 1127). Finally, the radical critique of the notion of truth developed by Foucault is quite well known: he undertakes to write “a history of the will to truth” and attempts to establish a relation between “games of truths” and “relations of power.”

School, Tradition, or Style? • A French School? Now, one may wonder how to characterize the links between these different authors. Firstly, one might talk of a French “school” in the philosophy of the sciences. The emphasis would then be put on the importance of a few institutions involved in the training and practice of these philosophers of the sciences as well as the very strong similarities existing among them. To be sure, the chair at the Collège de France and especially the Institut d’histoire des sciences et des techniques were at the heart of the philosophy of the sciences “à la française.” Abel Rey, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Suzanne Bachelard, and Dagognet all have chaired this institute, whose students have included Foucault, Michel Serres, and a few good disciples of Althusser. The curriculum of the institute under Abel Rey, the list of speakers, as well as the articles of the Institut’s review Thalès all display an essentially historical conception of the philosophy of the sciences. It is also true that such a figure as Canguilhem has played a considerable part in the French philosophical institution: first as a Ministry of Education Inspector for philosophy, supervising philosophy teachers in high schools, then as a Professor at the Sorbonne, as the head of the jury for the Agrégation concourse, as a highly influential figure at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and as the supervisor of many PhD theses. Accordingly, Michel Serres is not far from the mark when he claims that “the modern history of the sciences” invented by Comte is “the French university ideology” (Serres 1974: 185). Yet this institutional dimension should not be exaggerated. Firstly, the number of students entering the philosophy of the sciences’ option has never been very high. The Institut d’histoire des sciences has only started to operate under Canguilhem, whereas it was slumbering under Bachelard and never really operated under Abel

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Rey, as the small number of diplomas defended testifies. Similarly, the Institut’s review encountered recurring difficulties. In 1940, a report on the activity of the Institut, commissioned to René Poirier, was highly critical: “The academic activity is strictly null: no courses, no conferences, no auditors are planned.” The international activity “seems to be null.” The library “is composed of very little and does not allow any kind of work” (Poirier s.d.). Furthermore, the Institut had to face the concurrence of the “purely historians” of the sciences based at the Centre de synthèse of the rue Colbert. Moreover, one has to note that such an “institutional” perspective would lead to somewhat rare consequences. For instance, Foucault eulogistically pays tribute to Canguilhem who has supervised his thesis. The latter himself dedicates his thesis to his thesis supervisor, Bachelard, who also dedicates his thesis to his supervisor, Abel Rey. But if one goes a step further, one realizes that Rey’s thesis is dedicated to the famous French philologist and writer of the end of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan. That would amount to regarding, nonsensically, Foucault as a disciple of Renan. Such an analysis of institutional filiations is not sensitive enough to the primarily formal aspect of these tributes. Finally, one may wonder what the conception of the history of the sciences as the “development” of a preexisting germ in Comte and the history of ruptures and scientific revolutions in Bachelard or Foucault do have in common. Or what the common ground between the philosophy of progress endorsed by Bachelard and Foucault’s radical critique of the notion of truth is. Or what the relation between the “scientific humanism” of Rey and the political radicalism of Canguilhem and Foucault is. • A French Tradition? Accordingly, to talk of a French “school” in the philosophy of the sciences is unwarranted. Many commentators have preferred to talk of a French “tradition” in the philosophy of the sciences (Lecourt 1975; Redondi 1978). Such a notion presupposes a conscious and deliberate recovery of a certain number of themes and problems addressed by previous thinkers. The notion of tradition implies a certain linearity and a certain continuity. This representation in terms of tradition is also the one which is the most often resorted to by Canguilhem when he promotes Bachelard as the founder of this “epistemological history” that amounts to associating the history and the philosophy of the sciences. He presents himself as a follower of the latter, since he introduces his work on the history of the concept of reflex as an essay in “recurrent history” in the manner of Bachelard. Moreover, Foucault is Canguilhem’s favorite disciple. Canguilhem acknowledges the fact that “the reading of Madness and Civilization has impassioned him whilst revealing to him his own limits” (Canguilhem [1986] 2018: 1042). Such a representation is also to be found in Foucault: he includes himself in the lineage of Bachelard and Canguilhem when he identifies, within French contemporary philosophy, an intellectual watershed with, on the one hand, “philosophy of experience, of sense, and of subject” and, on the other hand, a “philosophy of knowledge, of rationality, and of concept” (Foucault

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1978: X); on the one hand, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; on the other hand, Cavaillès, Bachelard, Koyré, Canguilhem and implicitly Foucault. Foucault traces. Foucault traces this divide back to the nineteenth century, back to Maine de Biran on the one hand and Comte on the other hand. This representation of the canonical lineage Comte-Bachelard-Canguilhem-Foucault, notwithstanding its appeal, is in many respects inaccurate. One should not overestimate Comte’s influence, which only operates directly on Rey’s works and, to some extent, on Canguilhem’s. As for Bachelard, his work is certainly not properly captured by the “canonical” reading inherited from Canguilhem. Canguilhem has a certain tendency to present himself as the heir of Bachelard and insists on the similarities between them, whereas they disagree on many important issues, for instance, that of “ruptures” or that of the “use of recurrences.” Canguilhem thus presents Bachelard as a historian of the sciences, whereas the latter regarded himself much more as a philosopher of the sciences. Canguilhem also greatly underestimates the importance of such authors as Brunschvicg or Hamelin in the formation of Bachelard’s thought. Regarding Canguilhem himself, it is possible to show that the fundamental intuitions of his thought, which are at the root ethical and political, were formed before his encounter with Bachelard, through reflections on technique and medicine considered as an “art.” Alain and Bergson have played an important part in the formation of his thought, and the first references to Bachelard only appear later in his works (Limoges 2019). Finally, regarding Foucault, there is no doubt that his reading of Nietzsche has played a more determining part in his formation than the reading of Bachelard or other French epistemologists; indeed, Foucault never considered himself as a “historian of the sciences.” There is obviously a certain amount of biased reconstruction in the establishment of such a tradition. For instance, it surfaces in the famous passage where Foucault distinguishes two trends within French philosophy. He there notes, somewhat treacherously – just as Canguilhem has done before him – that, unlike the philosophy of the subject, the philosophy of the concept, apparently more “theoretical,” is nonetheless the philosophy that “during the war, took part directly in the fight, just as if the issue of the foundation of rationality could not be dissociated from the questioning of the actual conditions of its existence” (Foucault [1985] 1994b: 765). This modification of the first tradition, much more critical of the first trend, and implicitly of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, accused of not having participated in the Resistance, was added to the French version of the 1978 foreword to the Normal. Obviously, the choice of the “fighting” trend is endorsed. • A French Style in the Philosophy of the Sciences. Instead of describing them in terms of “school” or “tradition,” it would be more judicious to describe the features common to these authors in terms of “styles of scientific thinking,” in the sense in which philosophers of the sciences such as Ludwik Fleck, Alistair Crombie, or Ian Hacking have defined them. There exist among these authors notable similarities, “family resemblances,” which go beyond conscious borrowings or explicit references. To talk of a “French style” in the

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philosophy of the sciences enables one both to identify common and massive features characterizing these authors and to acknowledge the originality of each of those who illustrate that style. It was indeed to this very notion of style that Canguilhem resorted when he underlined, with regard to the “philosophical biology of Auguste Comte,” that Comte, through his “philosophical conception of the history of the sciences,” had been “the source of what has been and should remain the originality of the French style in the history of the sciences,” this history being “not only ordered by the present, but also judged by it” (Canguilhem [1968] 1994a: 63). These authors obviously agree on a certain number of claims that we have previously described and that were already to be found in Comte: the idea according to which philosophy is indissolubly linked with the history of the sciences; the will to only take into account the philosophy of the sciences in their diversity and the refusal to consider the issue of the unity of science; the criticism of any general theory of method or knowledge; the correlative rejection of psychology and of any claim regarding the foundation of the sciences; and the indifference to the notion of truth. On all these points, Comte provided the first model of what Bachelard was to regard as a “non-Cartesian epistemology.” This criticism of Descartes is to be encountered, under different forms, more or less radical, in Bachelard, Canguilhem, or Foucault. Cartesianism is blamed for annihilating the originality of the sciences while attempting to found them. The concept of a knowing subject is refused by them all, as it is the case for the concept of an object of knowledge, particularly in Bachelard. However, besides these common assertions, there exist other features, more subtle, less conscious, which undoubtedly characterize this French style in the philosophy of the sciences. In a certain sense, these authors also hand down to one another the “knacks” of what Canguilhem considered a “craft” (un métier): “I can only consider my work as the trace of my craft,” as he once said (Cang 2018 [1990]: 1223). Here, “style” may primarily have a literary connotation. When Canguilhem talks of the “unusual, because not at all fashionable style” of Bachelard, of his “rough, plain, and subtle” style, he also talks, at least to a certain extent, of himself and of his own distrust of “fashionable” philosophy, of his own cautiousness and mitigations. But this literary style can also be associated to a socially determined style: it is the case when, for instance, Canguilhem talks about the “philosophical rural style” of Bachelard and avails himself of his own country origins (Canguilhem [1965] 2015). In 1926, he signs his first article as “Georges Canguilhem. Languedocian. Student at the Ecole normale supérieure, preparing for the agrégation in philosophy. In the country, ploughing, for the rest of the time” (Canguilhem 2011: [1926] 152). In this respect, a sociologist, disciple of Bourdieu, Jean-Louis Fabiani, in a book highly estimated by Canguilhem himself, has recovered Foucault’s two trends but to give them a sociological interpretation. He underlines the origins, either provincial or foreign, mainly middle class of French philosophers of science, for the majority of positivists, as opposed to French spiritualist metaphysicians, Parisian, and upper class (Fabiani 1988). To keep up with the institutional perspective, one may note another striking feature in most of these authors. They are both at the heart of the French university

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institution and, at the very same time, quite radical critics of it. They are rebels at Polytechnique (Comte), the Sorbonne (Bachelard, Canguilhem), or the Collège de France (Foucault; but it is also the case of Bourdieu, who constantly appeals to Canguilhem as a major influence). For instance, when Canguilhem pays tribute to Foucault, he quite naturally introduces him as a dissident, whose endeavor consists in searching “to know how and up to what point one could possibly think differently” (Canguilhem [1989] 2018, 1176). Canguilhem himself is both a very courageous résistant and a mandarin in the most classical sense of the term. More essentially, a quite distinctive feature of this movement is the political character of its historical investigations. The idea that the history of the sciences is determined by the present explains the vehemence and the usually polemical style of studies that are dedicated to apparently highly technical topics. For example, if Canguilhem chooses to write the history of the formation of the concept of reflex, it is to launch an attack, at a time when Pavlovian reflexology and Watsonian behaviorism are prevailing, on the model of mechanistic explanation of living beings, which are regarded as merely responding to their environment. Such an explanation is, according to Canguilhem, ethically unacceptable. In the introduction to his book, La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Canguilhem maintains that he intends to save man’s autonomy, “the eminent dignity that, rightly or wrongly, man ascribes to human life [. . .] The essence of dignity, it is the power to command, it is will” (Canguilhem [1955] 1977: 7). Of course, the same explanation holds for the critique of behaviorist psychology as it appears in what can be regarded as a purple passage of Canguilhemian history of the sciences, namely, the article “What is psychology?” Psychology wants to turn man into a tool and is, in that respect, a school of subjection. Furthermore, Foucault’s investigations on psychiatry and, more notably, on prisons are related to straightforward political considerations. It is this political dimension, when it comes to the human sciences exclusively, that explains why Foucault is closer to historical epistemology than to history of science in its classical sense (Braunstein 2017). But one must also remember that the entire work of Comte as a historian of the sciences, the entire Cours de philosophie positive, had for unique goal the foundation of a new science, sociology, which should have permitted a scientific “reorganization” of society. Even Bachelard seems to display such a bent, if one merely considers the importance of the issue of education and scientific ethics in his works.

Conclusion Accordingly, it is sensible to think that a certain number of features unite these French philosophers of the sciences. They always are historians of the sciences, or rather historians of a particular science: for instance, it would be possible to add to the list some other authors, such as Tannery, Duhem, Koyré, or Cavaillès. Yet for those that have been reviewed here, there also exist other characters, either explicit or implicit, that undoubtedly make them share some “family resemblance,” a distant relation to Auguste Comte, which direct in a certain way their works. At the same

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time, there exist a certain number of differences among them, which are partly due to the particular disciplines that each primarily considers. This explains the quite specific place of Bachelard in that series, for he acknowledges the fact that he gets his inspiration from “the history of a model science, namely the history of mathematics” (Bachelard 1972: 141). His rationalism is thus first and foremost a “mathematical rationalism.” On the contrary, Canguilhem starts from biology, a science in which it is difficult to single out any revolutionary conceptual break, and from medicine, within which the sciences and technics are intertwined. According to Canguilhem, “before applying Bachelardian norms and procedures to the study of this subject [living beings] one must ask when a conceptual cleavage occurred whose effects were as revolutionary as those of the introduction of relativity and quantum mechanics into physics” (Canguilhem [1978] 1988, 14). His rationalism can be therefore properly labelled a “vital rationalism” (Rabinow 1994). Finally, Foucault has never maintained that he was interested in something else than the human sciences, that is, disciplines that have not yet “reached the level of formalization” and have a looping effect on the subject they study, when they do not constitute it altogether. From Bachelard to Foucault, the question of truth becomes more difficult, and the problem of what they call “ideology,” the question of the relations between science and society, holds a more important place. These three examples enable one to realize that every science does not only inaugurate a new style of scientific reasoning but also induces a certain style in the philosophy of the sciences.

Cross-References ▶ Bourdieu and the Social History of Scientific Reason ▶ Gaston Bachelard and Historical Epistemology: A New Perspective for the History of Science in the Twentieth Century ▶ Pierre Duhem: Between the Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History ▶ The Case of Life in the Historiography of Modern Science: Canguilhem’s “Biophilosophy” ▶ The Origins of Alexandre Koyré’s History of Scientific Thought Acknowledgments Thanks to Vincent Guillin for his help with the translation

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The Beginning of the Epistemological History of Science: Gaston Bachelard’s Responsibility

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Origin of the Expression “Historical Epistemology” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Towards a Dialectic Between “Follow” and “Guide” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What History Teaches Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Towards the Unconscious of Scientific Practices and Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Between History and Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The “Phenomeno-Technology” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “All History Must Be Judged” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Canguilhem’s Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter seeks to show that the historicization of epistemology is a decisive moment in the transformation of twentieth-century French philosophy of science and that the “epistemologization” of the history of science is its counterpart. The main argument is that epistemological history cannot exist without historical epistemology. The lifelong work of Gaston Bachelard for a “new scientific mind” is at the origin of this important innovation both in epistemology and in the history of science. The current debate on historical epistemology can gain greater awareness about its origins by rereading Bachelard’s epistemological work and by considering its consequences in the French context (Canguilhem, Althusser, Lecourt, Foucault, Serres). The so-called French style in epistemology can enrich contents for both historical epistemology and epistemological history without separating them too precisely.

E. Castelli Gattinara (*) Ex Università La Sapienza and EHESS, Rome, Italy © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_16

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Keywords

Historical epistemology · Epistemological history · Rupture · Discontinuity · Science · Bachelard · Canguilhem · Abstraction · Truth · Phenomeno-technology

Introduction Is there a “historical epistemology” issue? Is there also an “epistemological history” issue? Cyclically, the definition emerges in the debates of historians of science and of philosophy regarding the role that general categories play in the construction of our knowledge (and not only scientific knowledge). What is the relationship between epistemology and history? Can history be neutral with respect to the scientific knowledge it studies? Do the categories used by historians for their subjects’ objects have an impact on their work? Do the concepts and ideas that epistemologists recognize as being at work in science have a historical dimension? Is the “development” of scientific ideas and practices continuous or discontinuous? And to what degree does it depend on historical conditions? Gaston Bachelard began in the 1930s to recognize an irreducible relationship between the history of sciences and epistemology. In 1969, Dominique Lecourt published a book in which the expression “historical epistemology” appeared for the first time. In 1994, Lorraine Daston also used the expression “Epistemological History” in the title of an article, while admitting that she did not know where it came from. The History of Science section of the Max Planck Institute (Max-PlanckInstitut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, MPIWG), under the guidance of J. Renn, L. Daston, and H.J. Rheinberger, was founded in the same year. Its purpose was clearly expressed: “It is dedicated to the study of the history of science and aims to understand scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena. Researchers pursue an historical epistemology in their studies of how new categories of thought, proof, and experience have emerged” (MPIWG 2021: Home page). Between 2008 and 2011, several English-language journals posed the question on what historical epistemology meant, as did the German journal “Erkenntnis.” Since 2015, a very solid research group at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris organizes each year an international symposium lasting several days and entirely devoted to historical epistemology. Therefore, the issue seems far from being resolved: it starts from the origin (ideal, epistemological, conceptual, and historical), not only of the expression, but also of its meaning and its practices.

The Origin of the Expression “Historical Epistemology” Georges Canguilhem is generally recognized as the first to have given a theoretical and practical status to what is known as historical epistemology. This is a practical approach to the history of sciences. It is based on a relationship between epistemology and history that is considered inevitable, where the practice of research corresponds to the

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theoretical intentions which guide it, but which, at the same time, allow these intentions to influence it within the framework of more or less general ideas which condition its development. Following this approach historical practice loses its innocence and its supposed quasi-inductive neutrality, since it always manifests an underlying epistemology. At the same time, epistemological ideas are strongly influenced by ideologies (political, philosophical, etc.) and – to some respects – by the results of practical research. This is why in 1976 Canguilhem wrote an essay (printed the first time in Italian), which has become the starting point for all those who deal with historical epistemology (Canguilhem 1976: 427–436). (This essay, Il ruolo dell’epistemologia nella storiografia scientifica contemporanea, has been later published under the title “Le rôle de l’épistémologie dans l’historiographie scientifique contemporaine” and used as an introduction to Canguilhem 2009 [1977].) One of its watchwords was “to substitute the history of sciences with the sciences according to their history,” since it was henceforth necessary “not to make a difference between the sciences and other aspects of culture” (Canguilhem 1976: 428). All science is always “epistemologically contaminated,” but epistemology, in turn, is influenced by the experimental and theoretical results of science, by the society to which it belongs, by the ideas which dominate and by the social, economic, and political context in which it is at work. According to an oral testimony that has never really received convincing confirmation, except to be quoted as such in a few critical articles on the origin of the expression “historical epistemology,” this very expression, which first appeared in the title of a book by Dominique Lecourt (Lecourt 1969), had been suggested by Georges Canguilhem, against the somewhat complementary expression of “epistemological history” that Lecourt had wished to use (Gayon 2003: 53; Gingras 2010: 4–5; Lecourt 2016 [2008]: 43; Wunenburger 2003:17). We do not know either why Canguilhem preferred the other formulation (especially given the fact that he was certainly more a historian of sciences than an epistemologist, at least if we stick to his institutional role) or why Lecourt, who completed his master’s thesis under his direction, agreed to change his own expression. Certainly, the philosophical education and attitude of Canguilhem, to which he remained faithful throughout his life and intellectual production, play an important role in this: with regards to the piece of work of Bachelard, who certainly did not devote his work to the history of the sciences, despite the importance it had in his philosophical reflection, the expression recommended by Canguilhem was more coherent. Bachelard was more on the side of the latter than on the side of epistemological history, since he always remained a philosopher, both in his research devoted to science and in that devoted to poetics and rêverie. But the expression initially proposed by Lecourt was certainly more faithful to Bachelard’s thought and works, in particular to those that can be found in his book on epistemological obstacles, La formation de l’esprit scientifique. Things are therefore not simple, nor does the division between the two formulations make it possible to choose easily between one or the other. Especially because talking about the “history of sciences” or “epistemology” is not self-evident and because we must always agree on what we intend to say by using these terms. Understanding and knowing the sciences according to their history implies a conception of history that is not limited to facts and situations, nor confined to

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political and military events and subject to the dictates of an ideology of progress. The historical milieu in which the sciences grow is made up of the economy, society, individual psychology, ethnic and anthropological configurations, languages, sensitivities, ideologies, religions and philosophies, geographical locations, mentalities and prejudices, and private or social expectations and dreams. Chance also plays its part, such as weather conditions, climate, and nature with its own cycles. This enlarged conception of history had been promoted in the late 1920s by a small group of combative and determined historians, geographers, sociologists, linguists, economists, and psychologists. The journal around which they gathered, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, the first issue of which came out in January 1929, was destined to be a great success and to engender – not without difficulties of all kinds – an irreversible innovation in historical studies all over the world. It is to this extended and complex history that Canguilhem referred in his remarks. In the same years, or shortly after, Gaston Bachelard was going to disrupt the history of science, thus opening the way to what has been called “the epistemological history of the sciences,” a direct consequence of what we call “historical epistemology.” It is due to epistemology having become historical that the history of sciences has been able to become epistemological, but at the same time, it is because we have begun to “epistemologize” the history of sciences that epistemology has been able to abandon its purely logical and abstract dimension by assuming its intrinsically historical dimension. It took a radical change of perspective and problematization to take the history of science away from its cumulative and scholarly isolation and to imbue epistemology with a historicity that was to give it a more concrete and changing status. Just as the researchers gathered around the Annales had the practical and theoretical goal of moving from histoire-récit to histoire-problème (“C’est que, poser un problème, c’est précisément le commencement et la fin de toute histoire. Pas de problèmes, pas d’histoire” (Febvre 1965:22).) (Febvre 1965: 22; Massicotte 1981), it was necessary for Bachelard to abandon the presumed certainties of a philosophy of the sciences that claimed to dictate its deterministic and causal laws, in order to open it up to the theoretical and practical problems that the sciences and mathematics had been posing for a long time (starting with those posed by geometry which discovered the limits of Euclidean postulates). So, historical epistemology without epistemological history is pointless, and epistemological history without historical epistemology is blind (to paraphrase a famous remark by Imre Lakatos).

Towards a Dialectic Between “Follow” and “Guide” The relationship between the history of sciences and the philosophy of sciences had been asserted in France since Auguste Comte, for whom the laws of human understanding, in particular the laws of scientific reasoning, could be apprehended only through their concrete historical manifestations, namely, through results, experiences, and positive human discoveries. G. Canguilhem and M. Foucault were very

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clear about this: there is a kind of direct line of descent (which however, like any real direct line of descent, also implies change and betrayal) from Comte to Bachelard, Koyré, Cavaillès, Canguilhem, Foucault, and what could be called the French historical epistemology, even passing through A. Rey and L. Brunschvicg. (But if this is true, we must nevertheless add A. A. Cournot alongside A. Comte. Cournot knew how to oppose the absolutes ideas of the latter thanks to the irreplaceable role of history: “C’est que la science, en tant qu’elle adjoint aux principes de la théorie des faits spécifiquement historiques, comporte une vérité qui n’a pas seulement pour objet le temps, canalisé en quelque sorte et défini par la régularité de son flux, comme le temps absolu de Newton et de d’Alembert. Elle a une vérité qui naît du temps, non encore apprivoisé et capté, rendu à la spontanéité de son cours naturel” (Cournot 1970 [1912] [1851]: 460).) J.-F. Braunstein, taking up an idea of I. Hacking who called it the “French style in epistemology” (Wagner 2002; Braunstein 2002). This style seems to be characterized by a dialectical and immanent relationship between history and philosophy of science, where the two are integrated so that one cannot prevail over the other, although philosophy is the one that dictates the direction of this dialectic. Now, if it is certainly true that both A. Rey and L. Brunschvicg claimed the importance of a “philosophical history of science” since the beginning of 1900 and that both had been Bachelard’s masters, it is also true that the latter has imparted a decisive and irreversible turning point on what will be called historical epistemology. Braunstein seems however a little too quick in designating a genealogy of the French “style.” The term “epistemology” was used only in a still approximate manner and designated, by Rey and Émile Meyerson (who was among the first to use it), as a philosophy of science that was still very philosophical and very little historical. The syntagma “historical epistemology” could only be formed afterwards and it could not be applied either to the ideas, or to the intentions, or to the works of authors that wrote before Bachelard and for whom history, although important, would never have been able to question the conceptual, logical, and abstract force of philosophy. Philosophical history is nobler than the event-driven history of scientific discoveries and theories because it is guided by philosophy, whereas historical or historicized philosophy was not “guided” by history but limited and in some way “concretized” by it. In the power relations between the faculties and the disciplines, it was always philosophy that should occupy the top position. With Bachelard it was not always so, even though the philosophical (and epistemological) approach often remains the most important for him. However, neither Brunschvicg nor Rey (nor, of course, Comte) could have written that in their time science did not yet have “the philosophy it deserves” (Bachelard 1953: 20). An assertion that implies the notation of an unjustifiable delay on the part of philosophy with regard to the sciences, their history, and their conceptual tools. The guiding role of philosophy is maintained by Bachelard, but with regard to the sciences it is valid only in the epistemological reduction of philosophy itself and must “follow” the historical development of these in a dialectic between “follow” and “guide” which no longer accepts any hierarchy between different forms of knowledge.

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This means that sciences now have their own philosophical and conceptual status, insofar as they know how to create new concepts, while putting into crisis some of the traditional philosophical concepts that would prove to be unusable, too generic, or obviously false. The sciences, in short, now have an autonomous philosophical status, emancipated from metaphysical doctrines and from the great unitary or absolute theoretical systems. Bachelard had learned well the lesson of Brunschvicg, according to whom the various philosophical systems became only secondary, compared to the sciences, which became more and more capable of exploring the facts and thus of coming closer and closer to reality in its intimate constitution. The history of science could prove it without fail: “The position of the philosophy of history has lost ground as the development of historical research has allowed for a more familiar exchange and closer contact with the true reality of history. In the same way, one could wonder if the evolution of contemporary physics hasn’t led to an increased distancing from speculation aiming to rediscover the universals of antique conceptualism.” (Brunschvicg 1922: 513 own translation). The absolutes, the universals, the origin, the idea, the substance, and even the categories (of Aristotle as much as of Kant) appear more and more outdated and useless philosophical problems, if compared to the questions posed by the sciences with urgency to thinking. Bachelard was the first, in France, to realize that sciences at the end of the nineteenth century, but especially those of the twentieth century, brought with them a new regime of truth, of other concepts, and of other reference points that were different from those on which philosophy had hitherto been based. He was the first one to call loudly for changing the conceptual language and softening the logic of philosophical discourse, in view of bending it to the new forms of truth, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, or biology, sociology, psychoanalysis, or linguistics were realizing. The technique of scientific discourse and the types of argument were radically changing the way of thinking about reality, the materiality of things, the human mind, and the cognitive systems. Certainties, instead of being “found” or “discovered,” had to be constructed; that is to say they had to be realized by a technique that fed on itself and its results. Sciences were no longer to be thought of as the auxiliaries of philosophy, which could use them to state its eternal truths, but as techniques capable of producing their own truths, even in spite of philosophy: if philosophy itself also did not become a technique, it was doomed to disappear (hence Bachelard’s call – as we will see later – to substitute phenomenology with a phénoménotechnique). Then the first task of the epistemologist, that is to say the philosopher who devotes himself to the critique of the sciences, is to define what a science is as a discursive technique of argumentation. Bachelard, from this point of view, while being one of the greatest innovators of what was to be called “epistemology,” remained attached to the traditional value of the disciplinary power attributed to philosophy. For that reason, he allowed himself to judge (and to attribute) the status of scientificity of the various forms of knowledge and scientific practices according to an axiological scale established on the basis of mathematical formalization (in the same way K. Popper was going to do it on the basis of the falsification

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method to discriminate between what was entitled to be regarded as science and what was not).

What History Teaches Epistemology Bachelard grasped the changes underway in the sciences of his time and, thanks to his “provincial” and often self-taught training, he kept a great intellectual freedom which enabled him to jump from science to art, from poetic and rural sensibility to the complexity of new microphysical theories. However, more than in the arts, music, or literature, he saw a radical change and innovation coming through the sciences (especially mathematics and physics or chemistry). These could emancipate the mind from its old structures. His training and his first professional experiences had taught him to keep firmly in consideration technical applications and their consequences. He was a tireless and voracious reader. His curiosity drove him to read everything he found, both in school libraries, where he went to teach in the first years, and in university libraries. His previous training in the exact sciences, and not in literature or philosophy, made him particularly sensitive and able to understand, for example, what was happening with relativity or microphysics. One could do philosophy – he wrote on several occasions – always and only of experiences whose reality, although formalized, was theoretically solid and coherent, but also technically applicable. Being a “late” philosopher (his training in philosophy followed his scientific training, a unique case in the French panorama of the philosophy of science at that time), he claimed that “science instructed reason” and philosophy always came “after,” to understand, not to determine. “Contemporary science allows humankind to enter a new world. If humans think science, they are renewed as thinking beings,” he wrote in his last book on epistemology (Bachelard 1953: 2 own translation). Philosophy therefore had to position itself so that it could learn from the sciences; in this way it would have been able to discover that one should never fix oneself (dogmatically) on given notions and concepts: one had to admit a fundamental indeterminacy which would have allowed transformation and growth. On the other hand, the sciences could obtain from philosophy a coherent and effective structure of thought, capable of renewing outdated conceptual categories outdated but still in use. In the last lines of his foreword to the Essai sur la connaissance approchée – thus at the very beginning of his epistemological adventure – we can read that “a philosophy of the inexact would confer (a) new meaning to the concepts of reality and truth” (Bachelard 1928: 8). Now, the theoretical foundation of scientifically acquired inexactitude was called “approximate knowledge,” unrelated to any appeasing principle of illusory exactitude. Bachelard was committed to explaining how the obsession with accuracy had harmed science, diverting it from its most important task (abstraction and rationalization). Precision never coincides with exactness and meticulousness of measurements; it is articulated differently according to the orders and the situations in which it is practiced. Accuracy would therefore stand to precision as illusion stands to critical consciousness: “A history of approximate knowledge is to the history of

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scientific systems as the history of the people is to the history of kings” (Bachelard 1928: 69 own translation). Epistemology must know how to follow all these articulations according to the various disciplines, the multiple planes of knowledge, the experimental practices, and the conceptualizations at work: it will have to assume the role of a “fragmented epistemology,” capable of adapting to the different contexts of its exercise, even within the same science. “Thus, even in the historical evolution of a specific problem, the real breaks and sudden mutations which ruin the thesis of epistemological continuity cannot be hidden” (Bachelard 1928: 270 own translation). Rupture becomes a key word for understanding what history teaches epistemology: the discontinuity in the development of scientific knowledge is a historical fact insofar as this knowledge refers to a real transformation of the concepts that guide it and sum it up. The most modern sciences (at the time when Bachelard was writing, namely, the 1930s) show us how to conceive reality quite differently. The previously available scientific instruments never remain the same throughout the history of science, because they must adapt themselves to the new conceptual tools that put them to work. There is no instrumental continuity, nor historical continuity or epistemological continuity in the evolution of sciences. On the contrary, there can only be ruptures, because theoretical concepts and categories, as well as judgments, tend to be conservative (in the sense that they determine knowledge in its internal organization and in its practical and instrumental constitution). Changing knowledge means changing concepts. Changing concepts provokes historical changes. Bachelard is very clear about this from the time of his “revolutionary” book of 1934, Le nouvel esprit scientifique (The New Scientific Spirit (In English “esprit” is translated both by Spirit and by Mind (Bachelard means mostly Mind).)). The title chosen already implies a stance: if the word “spirit” is retained, it is on condition of a novelty that characterizes it as scientific. The philosophy which awaits us is new insofar as it will be scientific, because it will be “impure,” contaminated by the sciences and their practices, namely, by a permanent and irreducible contact with an objective reality whose status is still to be determined (to be clarified, if not to be built). Scientific activity from this point on is in this situation: “Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation” (Bachelard 1934: 2–3). The philosophy that deals with it (and Bachelard is convinced that all philosophy, even the most speculative and supposedly pure, will henceforth have to measure itself with the sciences (This conviction is also shared by most philosophers of the time, from W. James to E. Husserl, E. Cassirer, or M. Heidegger. For a comparison between Bachelard and Heidegger, see Castelli Gattinara (2017: 77–93).)) will have to understand the complex dialectic between reality and reason, where the one exists only in relationship to the other. But the direction of this dialectic – this is why we must speak of the scientific “spirit” (mind) – “certainly goes from the rational to the real and not the other way round.” This means that what Bachelard calls “the epistemological vector” implies that science is already philosophy, that it poses real philosophical problems and allows us to indicate solutions (Bachelard 1934: 5). In mathematics, for example, “reality fulfills its true function: to provoke thinking,” just as in the physical sciences, “it is on the realization of the rational in physical experimentation that we must focus our attention”

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and which leads to a “technological realism: [. . .] it consist of realized reason” (Bachelard 1984: 5). “Scientific work makes rational entities real, in the full sense of the word” (Bachelard 1934: 13). In doing so, it builds its endless history. It will therefore be necessary to redefine what is meant by subject (the subject of knowledge) and what is meant by object, objectivity, and objectification. It will be necessary to question the new status of the real, deeply troubled by the acquisitions of physics (waves and corpuscles, matter, and radiation): “In fact, what is belief in reality? What is the idea of reality? What is the essential metaphysical function of the real?” (Bachelard 1934: 34). For this new epistemological perspective, it will be necessary to “open rationalism [and] discard this psychology of a closed reason, locked in immutable axioms,” as reason was still conceived by Kant (and founded effectively on Euclidean axioms) (Bachelard 1934: 19–20). A non-Cartesian epistemology becomes necessary, capable of grasping the lesson of history, which shows the sciences fearlessly and “polemically” going beyond all the convictions that we believed to be those most solid, and this has to be in discontinuity and in rupture with that which came before. What I am interested in emphasizing – apart from Bachelard’s well-known watchwords – is the formulation of the stances he took. The “psychology” of reason is what intrigues him (and what he wants to annihilate to oppose it with another psychology, as we shall see later): it shows us that the reason which remains in the axioms is closed and cannot go anywhere and that instrumental reality depends on this reason. The essence of the reason-reality dialectic, according to Bachelard, is always historically determined by the movement which characterizes it and which must be understood and problematized as a whole, without separating its terms (without separating, for example, the object from the instrument and from the theory that explains or conditions it). A “pedagogy of ambiguity” becomes necessary in order for the scientific mind to gain enough flexibility to understand the new scientific doctrines (Bachelard 1934: 51). (In fact, “c’est le réel et non pas la connaissance qui porte la marque de l’ambiguïté” (Bachelard 1934: 51).) “The philosophy of science is, I believe, in need of genuinely new principles. One such principle, for example, is the idea that the characters of things may be essentially complementary, a sharp departure from the tacit (philosophical) belief that being always connotes unity. If being-in-itself is a principle that communicate itself to the mind (much as the concept of field defines the relation between a material particle and the space in which it moves), then being is nothing but a symbol of unity. What would be needed, then, would be an ontology of complementarity less sharply dialectal than the metaphysics of the contradictory” (Bachelard 1934: 16).

Towards the Unconscious of Scientific Practices and Theories This new, non-Cartesian, open epistemology will not be able to operate without history, because it is thanks to that discipline (or better to that practice and of theoretical consideration materialized in the time of its development) that we can

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grasp the limits of “outdated” (périmé) knowledge, whose scientific nature shows all its shortcomings. The method for understanding the sciences of the past (and the philosophies part of them) will be a kind of psychoanalysis of objective knowledge that Bachelard anticipates in his 1934 book and which will find its full formulation in his 1938 work, La formation de l’esprit scientifique (The Formation of the Scientific Mind). Here again, it is a question of speaking in terms of the subconscious and of the habits of scientific thought which in reality block it at a certain phase of its evolution, no longer allowing it to change. Hence, the discontinuity of its history (to change, a conceptual and instrumental revolution is necessary). Here is how Bachelard criticizes the rigidity of Cartesian epistemology: “We hasten to outline experience in its major features; phenomenology is considered as an elementary geometry; the mind is instructed in the handling of solid forms, refusing the lesson of transformations. Our mind is based on acquired habits of rationality. As a consequence, a whole Euclidean infrastructure is formed in the mind shaped by everyday experience of natural and manufactured solids. Any anomalies in the experimental results would then be explained by assuming that this unconsciously Euclidian view of things is correct. But is this geometrical structure, thought to be fundamentally characteristic of human intelligence, truly definitive? We can now refute this, given that contemporary physics is now being framed along non-Euclidian schema. For that, it was enough for the physicist to approach a new domain with a fully independent spirit, after a psychoanalysis of Euclidean reflex” (Bachelard 1934: 37–37, my emphasis). The epistemology that follows will no longer be able to be “thingy” (chosiste), the scientific object becomes dematerialized, and mathematical abstraction constructs it each time. According to Bachelard, the scientific revolution provoked by relativity and microphysics opens up the possibility of understanding the history of the scientific mind in a completely different way. If we speak of concepts, we must also speak of conceptualizations, since they go hand in hand. It has nothing to do “with words whose meaning change while the syntax of the language remains the same, nor with a free and changing syntax applied to the organisation of unchanging ideas. Theoretical relations among notions modify the definition of these notions as much as changes in the definition of notions modifies their mutual relations” (Bachelard 1984: 53). The history of science cannot work without epistemology just as epistemology cannot work without the history of science: if we want to write the dynamic history of the scientific spirit (mind), we must be able to follow its conceptual discontinuities, since “it is when a concept changes meaning that it has the most meaning” (Bachelard 1934: 52). Then we will understand, for example, that the passage from Newtonian physics to contemporary physics does not have the character of a linear and continuous “development,” but rather the character of an envelopment of the ideas of the past by the new ones which arise on a new psychological level. Indeed, without what Bachelard calls psychology, we can no longer understand history, hence the need to adopt a real “psychoanalysis of objective knowledge,” as it will be formulated in his 1938 book. Epistemology and history, in their reciprocal

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relationships (they will no longer be understood as separate disciplines), are constituted thanks to this psychoanalysis which will make it possible to distill a rectified (rectifiée) and sanctioned (sanctionnée) history of the scientific mind and its progressive rationalization. From this point of view, Bachelard remains a philosopher still convinced of the progressive value of scientific thought oriented towards a Truth, a word that he does not hesitate to spell with a capital letter (Bachelard 1953: 105). However, he was able to introduce notions for the critical understanding of science and scientific thought that were unprecedented, such as that of epistemological obstacle, which could be placed on the same level as Freud’s subconscious or Jung’s archetype. He was also able to assert that scientific thought was all the more scientific in that it was pushed towards more metaphorical than real constructions, where metaphor plays a more important role in the space of abstract reason than in that of a so-called independent objective reality (Bachelard 1938: 5).

Between History and Epistemology The reality with which sciences deal is a multiple reality, ultimately indeterminate, metaphorical, and always rationally constructed. This reality is phenomenological more than ontological plural and not unitary and for which a “phenomeno-technology” must be prepared. Its knowledge can only be “approximated,” but far from being a limit, the approximation shows itself as the true modern scientific method. It is from history that Bachelard assumes the lesson of approximation. All his “philosophy of the inexact,” prepared since his 1928 Essai sur la connaissance approchée (Essay on approximate knowledge) – aimed at giving a new meaning to the concepts of truth and reality (Bachelard 1928: 10) – was needed to interpret the fundamental discontinuity of the course of science. Of course, Bachelard thinks he can find a fairly coherent line of development throughout the history of scientific thought – reminiscent on purpose of the one proposed by Comte. This history would obey a sort of three-state law: from a “prescientific state” (between the 16th and 18th centuries) it would pass through a “scientific state” (nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) to arrive to “the state of the new scientific mind” with the new physics of the twentieth century (Bachelard 1938: 6–7). But within this general framework – Bachelard adds – it is still necessary to grasp “the details of psychological evolution,” because in all the sciences, to different degrees, deep psychic forces remain active which undermine the nobler character of the new scientific mind, namely, the ever more powerful effort towards abstraction and mathematical construction. These obscure psychic forces constitute, with the clear efforts of mathematicizing reason, the concrete reality of the history of science. This history is contaminated by the plurality of psychic states, which pass, as for the child, from the concrete state to the abstract state. No science is exempt from it: “Even in a clear mind there are dark areas, caverns still haunted by shadows” (Bachelard 1938: 19). Despite the ideal of pure abstraction, Bachelard knows well that all science always remains subject to multiple and “impure” interests, “always

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imperfect inductive” interests. Historians – he adds – simply point to them and to grasping the development of a science as a set of “facts” on which they express no judgment. They take everything from a science, without eliminating anything. The task of scientific philosophy and epistemology, on the other hand, is to discover everything which remains from obscure psychic power, which constitutes an “epistemological obstacle,” and so to eliminate it (by authority) in order to distill only the “fertile ideas,” the pure abstraction, the truths without errors of the coherent constructions of the mathematical reason (Bachelard 1938: 9–10, 251). What interests the epistemologist, in a science, is only “the effort of rationalization and construction”: “Historians of science have to take ideas as facts. Epistemologists have to take facts as ideas and place them within a system of thought. A fact that a whole era has misunderstood remains a fact in historians’ eyes. For epistemologists however, it is an obstacle, a counter-thought” (Bachelard 1938: 27). However, if we put aside a certain superficiality with which Bachelard considers the task of the historian of science and the power of authority attributed to the epistemologist (Castelli Gattinara 1998), we can nevertheless appreciate an attitude which will exert a great influence on the way in which Georges Canguilhem and then Michel Foucault and even Michel Serres will deal with the history of science. All bent on epistemology, Bachelard calls for particular attention to go beyond the alleged objectivity of historical facts: no one at the time had yet done this with the same scope. This is where the work of research must know how to measure itself with “the psychological variations in the interpretation of the same text. At the same time, under the same word, there are such different concepts!” (Bachelard 1938: 17). History must become epistemological to be interesting (in the eyes of Bachelard). The notion of epistemological obstacle – despite its negative meaning, clearly revealing the epistemological ideology of its inventor – serves to “problematize” knowledge and to question the role of concepts for the constitution of scientific objects and objectivities. Thus, the evolution of knowledge will no longer be understood as necessarily progressive: “Knowledge gained through scientific effort can itself decline. An abstract question, freely and openly expressed, will become worn out, with just the concrete answer remaining. The mind’s activity is consequently reversed and blocked. An epistemological obstacle will encrust any knowledge that is not questioned. Intellectual habits that were once useful and healthy can, in the long run, hamper research. [. . .] We fall prey to an attitude of vain optimism if we think that knowing leads automatically to knowing, that learning becomes easier the more extensive it is, and that intellect, officially recognised by early successes and by prowess in passing competitive examinations, can be capitalised as if it were material wealth. Even allowing that a well-drilled mind may escape the intellectual narcissism so common in literary culture and in the passionate espousal of judgements of taste, it can certainly be said that a well-drilled mind is unfortunately a closed mind” (Bachelard 1938: 25–26). Therefore, it is necessary to detect the epistemological obstacles hindering the ideal course of abstraction. To do this, Bachelard undertakes to work on the concepts and their changes despite their apparent homogeneity. He also undertakes to discuss

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all the achievements concerning historical research, all the words, data, objects, practices, received ideas, and categories of which the texts of the past are full. By taking up the clinical and theoretical strategies of Freud and Jung, he sets up a “psychoanalysis of objective knowledge” which – although functional to the Bachelardian law of the three states – allows renewal of the history of science in a radical way. Historians and epistemologists have to recognize a whole psychology behind a formula, an experimental procedure, the formulation of a hypothesis or a theory. The words used are no longer to be considered neutral, as well as the articulation of the arguments, the objects chosen for the experimental investigation, the images, the instruments, and the metaphors to which scientists resort. The epistemologically engaged historian will no longer be fooled by the theoretical and practical means employed by the scholars of the past. The cases dealt with in La formation de l’esprit scientifique are an obvious example of a new way of doing the history of science, even if today these researches reveal all their limits. To assert that “metaphors seduce reason [...] and gradually and insensibly become general schemas,” whose danger consists in the fact that they act surreptitiously, since they can resist and act for a long time in the subconscious of the scientist, is to claim historical attention steeped in epistemology. The step is short – Canguilhem, Althusser, and Foucault and then Daston and Galison will do it easily – to recognize (behind the metaphors used by certain researchers) the political, scientific, and philosophical ideology which guided them. But it took the liberating effort of Bachelard to shake the history of science from its dogmatic slumber.

The “Phenomeno-Technology” Bachelard was able to give this new momentum to the history of science because he thought of scientific practices and objects from the perspective of “experimental rationalism.” According to him, the scientific object – not only the object of research, but also the instruments put in place to study it – is the materialization of a theory, of an idea, and therefore of rational work. Against all ingenious and inductive empiricism, we do not start from material phenomena to go back to a theory that would explain them, but on the contrary, we must start from the theory and understand the phenomena as its materialization. In his text of 1931, “Noumène et microphysique,” he proposes this formula: “Cogitatur, ergo est, all the while being under-stood that the fact of being mathematically thought is the mark of an existence that is both organic and objective” (Bachelard 2006: 80). If under the phenomenon one presupposes a noumenon, “We could therefore say that mathematical physics corresponds to a noumenology that is at great odds with the phenomenography wherein scientific empiricism pretends to dwell. This noumenology brings to light a phenomenotechnique, by means of which, new phenomena are not only merely discovered, but also made up, and not merely discovered but made up from scratch.” So: “Present day atomic science is more than a description of phenomena, it is a pro-duction of phenomena” (Bachelard 2006: 80, 84).

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This is the first time that Bachelard uses the term phenomeno-technology (phénoménotechnique), a key word in his philosophy, whose importance Ch. Alunni has clearly underlined for a mathematical philosophy inspired by an active and constructive Spinozism (Alunni 2015: 9–32). But its value for a historical epistemology is also important. If “modern science produces its phenomena,” then the historian will no longer be able to ignore the reason behind this production, which means he will no longer be able to ignore the rational and material conditions of the production of phenomena itself. He should know that everything he finds in his research – texts, instruments, objects, questions, problems, inventions, social relations, etc. – does not constitute a rationalization, but it stems from it. Differently than any phenomenology, in particular its Husserlian declination, Bachelard wants to emphasize (mostly against Bergson) the fact that thought, knowledge, and scientific experience are something completely different from common knowledge and experience. The phenomenon of common experience has nothing to do with the scientific phenomenon, and the historian (as well as the epistemologist or the philosopher) who deals with it must be well aware of this crucial difference (Donatiello et al. 2017: 221). For any science at any stage of its development, “Objectivity cannot be separated from the social aspect of proof. The only way to achieve objectivity is to set forth, in a discursive and detailed manner, a method of objectification. [. . .] Scientific observation is always polemical; it either confirms or denies a prior thesis, a pre-existing model, an observational protocol. It shows as it demonstrates; it establishes a hierarchy of appearances; it transcends the immediate; it reconstructs first its own models and then reality” (Bachelard 1934: 12–13). Consequentially, through scientific activity “phenomena must be selected, filtered, purified, shaped by instruments (coulé dans le moule des instruments, produit sur le plan des instruments): indeed, it may well be the instruments that produce the phenomenon in the first place. And instruments are nothing but theories materialized. The phenomena they produce bear the stamp of theory throughout” (Bachelard 1934: 13, our emphasis). This is what Bachelard calls phenomeno-technology. “Its purpose is to amplify what is revealed beyond appearance. It takes its instructions from construction. Wonderworking reason designs its own miracles. Science conjures up a world, not by means of magic immanent in reality but by rational impulse immanent in mind” (Bachelard 1934: 13). (Even more, about objectivity: “We have in fact attained a level of knowledge at which scientific objects are what we make them, neither more nor less. We have mastery over objectivity. The history of the laboratory phenomenon is very precisely that of its measurement. The phenomenon is contemporaneous with its measurement. Causality is in a way solidified by our instruments. Objectivity becomes even purer the more it ceases to be passive in order to become more markedly active, as it ceases too to be continuous in order to become more clearly discontinuous. We realise our theoretical thought by degrees” (Bachelard 1936: 77); Bachelard 2000:77.) Scholars have shown the similarities and the differences between the Bachelardian construction of this reasoning and that, for example, of I. Hacking (Tjiattas 1991: 203–210; Castelao-Lawless 1995: 44–59; Vagelli 2017: 121–134).

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The relationship of filiation and differentiation between Bachelard and Canguilhem or with Foucault has been sufficiently discussed. However, the somewhat “revolutionary” act of phenomeno-technology has opened up a perspective for the history of science which, even despite Bachelard, has been able to advance in ways that otherwise would probably not have been possible. Admittedly, Bachelard retains a still hegemonic attitude towards an epistemological history of science, because for him it was epistemology that always had the last word in the name of an epistemologically “purified” history. This remains out of the question and has bothered historians, who could not and cannot still today accept statements such as this: “Alongside the slow and hesitant history of what has been, we must then write a rapid, decisive history of what ought to have been. This normalised history is not really inaccurate. It is incorrect socially speaking, in the real rise of popular science which, as we have tried to show in the course of this book, perpetrates each and every error. It is true by virtue of the line of geniuses, in the sweet solicitations of objective truth. It is this delicate line that sketches the real destiny of human thought, gradually rising above and overhanging the line of life” (Bachelard 1938: 248). However, his concept of recurring history has been very important in emancipating the work of historians from the illusion of the objectivity of facts and documents and in pushing them to question the status of truth, both of their own research and of the direction of their intellectual interpretation. Recurrent history, as it is conceived by Bachelard, is not really a hegemony of the epistemological perspective on historical practice, because a similar question had been posed by some historians (not of the sciences) concerning their own discipline since the 1930s. M. Bloch and L. Febvre, scholars of, respectively, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, called it “problem-history,” as we recalled above, and invited their colleagues to question the past “from the problems of the present.” (On the relationships, differences, and analogies between the problems and conceptualizations between historians, historians of science, and epistemologists in the interwar period, see Castelli Gattinara (1998).)

“All History Must Be Judged” The idea of a recurring history corresponds strictly to the problematic but inevitable union between the practices and theorizations of historians and epistemologists. Although Bachelard gave it a strongly epistemological emphasis – such indeed was the battle he was fighting in the 1950s – this historical approach could be called either “epistemological history” or “historical epistemology,” the former not necessarily stronger or more pertinent than the latter. Unlike today, Bachelard does not use one instead of the other. This difference will make sense only with Canguilhem and especially with his students. With Bachelard, recurring history is a kind of history “against the grain,” to use an expression of Walter Benjamin. It is a history conceived and understood on the basis of the present, in the sense that the phenomena of the scientific past are judged and

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considered in the light of the most recent scientific theories and rational acquisitions. It is the present that gives its proper perspective to history (of scientific thought and practice), which from then on will be a history which has been judged and sanctioned. This completely disrupts the traditional conception of history: “We see there is an educational need to formulate a recurrent history, a history which is elucidated by the finality of the present, a history which departs from the certainty of the present and discovers in the past a progressive layering of truth. In this way scientific thought is assured of the story of its progress. This recurrent history appears in the books of contemporary science as a historical preamble. All too often it is truncated. Too much is left out. It does not sufficiently prepare an educational training of the various differential thresholds of culture. [. . .] This recurrent history, this history which is judged, which is valued, neither can nor wishes to re-establish prescientific mentalities. [. . .] The history of science emerges then as the most irreversible of all histories. In discovering what is true, the man of science bans what is irrational. Irrationalism will no doubt spring up elsewhere. But from now on there are paths which are barred. The history of science is the history of the defeat of irrationalism” (Bachelard 1951a, b: 26–27 own translation). This history, despite the arrogance of its peremptory character, is “recurrent,” regressive, because the present which is taken as a frame of reference is also historically determined and socialized, therefore contextualized and impermanent (Bachelard 1968: 39–51). It will inevitably be an “epistemological history,” and it will be able to tell us what should have been thought about, what it could have been, and what today can continue to remain valid. (“So an epistemological history needs to be created. Epistemology aims to give to notions, theories and methods what could be termed their epistemological weight. It seeks to designate as such not just that which is erroneous and inconsistent, but that which is implicit, disordered, heterogeneous, arbitrary. By recurrence, it allows us to appreciate that which is already a theme, that which is not yet, and to reveal what remains obscured by the heterogeneous, making the implicit explicit” (Bachelard 1968: 46–47 own translation).) It represents an “other” history, interested in other things and where the before and the after – the conventional and usual temporalization of “historians of empires and peoples” (Bachelard 1965 [1953]: 24) – not only can be reversed, but they can also become complete strangers to each other. Its pace is jerky because of “breaks” (ruptures) in the temporal rhythm brought about by “epistemological acts,” which means by ideas, theories, concepts, and even words as well as facts, instruments, and experiences that take on their “progressive” meaning only afterwards, in the light of the present (whereas at the time they could remain completely unnoticed). What should be noticed is that we do not give up history altogether, but that we mobilize it by multiplying it and by articulating it on several levels. This is true despite the progressive hegemony of abstract mathematical rationalization (well criticized by M. Serres) which for Bachelard determines the direction of scientific progress, from which all history must be judged (Bachelard 1965 [1953]: 23–28). (Bachelard explains why it would be useless for the historian of science to take to pieces the errors of the past, the outdated theories, etc. See, for example, the

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following extract, unacceptable today for a historian of science: “The history of phlogiston theory is obsolete because it is based on a fundamental error, on a contradiction in the ponderal laws of chemistry. A rationalist can only examine it closely with a certain guilty conscience. An epistemologist can only look into it because patterns of the psychoanalysis of objective knowledge can be identified. A historian of science who indulges in it must be aware that he works in the paleontology of an extinct scientific spirit” (Bachelard 1965 [1953]: 25 own translation). For a peremptory criticism of all this, see Serres (1972: 203–222).) The introduction of the concept of “rupture” makes discontinuity acceptable, thereby opening the whole historical perspective which will be that of Th. S. Kuhn, on the one hand, and of Foucault, on the other hand. Bachelard disarticulates historical monolithism, and it is exactly that which fascinated Canguilhem, but also his students D. Lecourt, L. Althusser, M. Foucault, and M. Serres. Taking history to pieces on the epistemological level could not be harmless, but Bachelard’s “gesture” imparted a new look to the studies of those who, while being philosophers and wanting to remain so, had understood the importance of history for their own approach. Epistemology had to be historical. Bachelard had written it very clearly: “We must therefore come to more nuanced historical studies. It is above all necessary to understand the multiplicity of the difficulties which have hindered the progress” (Bachelard 1972: 149 own translation). Other scholars will dare to question this idea of progress. They have been able to do so because they have been able to qualify its history, to analyze its presuppositions, to contextualize its epistemology, to clarify the difference between what we now understand by this word and what was believed at the time of its use, even though it was the time when Bachelard wrote his texts. Bachelard was perfectly aware of this and he taught it: “The philosophical position that I assume here is, of course, not only difficult and dangerous. It holds within itself an element which ruins it,” because it is based on “the ephemeral character of the modernity of science [. . .].” The history of science will have to be often redone, often reconsidered (Bachelard 1972: 144 own translation).

Canguilhem’s Task Georges Canguilhem takes up this point of view of Bachelard when he quotes E. J. Dijksterhuis to emphasize that the history of science can no longer remain a sort of neutral and cumulative memory of science (what is “science” in fact?). History anyway must become the “laboratory” of epistemology, since no historian can any longer put forward the old requirement of presenting things as they “really” happened. This is why it is necessary “to substitute for the history of the sciences the sciences according to their history,” which implies – as we recalled it at the beginning of this text – the epistemological contamination of the sciences in their social, political, ideological, physical, economic, and psychological context. No history can any longer claim a disciplinary “purity” (hence Foucault’s so-called “archaeological” necessity to find the conceptual strata that found a system of ideas,

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or what will be called later a “style of reasoning” [by I. Hacking 2002], modelled on A. C. Crombie’s “styles of thought”). Following Bachelard – while enriching his project – Canguilhem poses the difference between a so-called science of the past and the past of today’s science. In the case of botany, for example, there is incomparability (T. S. Kuhn would have written more radically “incommensurability”) between the methods used in the eighteenth century and the chemical and physical analyses employed by contemporary botanists. The botanical “project” is therefore not in continuity. Each historian must choose a route that he will have to “justify”; he will take seriously certain facts, or procedures, in relation to others; he will have to sort out the documents, words, metaphors, and concepts involved; etc. All of this requires not only some “flexibility,” as Bachelard called it, but also “taking a stance” which can only be ideological. This is what both Canguilhem and Althusser wrote. Moreover, Canguilhem recognizes the proximity of the ideas of Bachelard and Kuhn with his own (Canguilhem 2009 [1977]: 20–23). Less hegemonic than Bachelard, Canguilhem – while remaining above all a philosopher –does not consider it useless for the history of science to dwell on reconstructing the errors of the past, the outdated conceptions and the outdated theories, because the principles of (epistemological) authority are always historically situated and can change. The historical effort is indeed useful for understanding the ideology of the past in order to detect the conditions of possibility of a style of reasoning, or more simply of a theory or a conceptualization and its practices. The historian who deals with outdated questions or problems that no longer affect the interests of a certain current science is always concerned with epistemology, even though he is not “guided” by some operational concepts of his present – but often also because he is guided by them, as in the case of the works of Foucault (or, in the milieu of Italian historians of the second half of the twentieth century, in the case of “microhistory”). This means that the scientists most forgotten by history did reason and argue according to a “spontaneous philosophy” and to an epistemology that represented at that time its condition of thinkability and practicability. What Bachelard called an epistemological obstacle should henceforth be understood as a manifestation of another epistemology, historically situated, with contingencies, practices, concepts, and theoretical operators that deserve to be reconstructed. The error of the past is revealed as such thanks to the truth of today, by a recurring historical analysis, but this is possible by opening up to a future which will be able to show how this truth will be understood as an error in its turn (and error as a truth of another kind). Only a historical perspective that is well situated, conscious of belonging to an episteme, conditioned by a style of reasoning, involving a conceptual architecture of which many aspects remain subconscious, makes it possible not to fall into an absolutist and abstract conception of truth and of the progress that would lead to it. Canguilhem, compared to Bachelard, tried to attenuate the epistemological hegemony of mathematical abstraction of historical practices, softening the sharp judgments of the philosopher from Bar-sur-Aube. However, he retains its thematic core, namely, the irreplaceable role of the history of science for an epistemology which is conscious of itself, of its limits as much as of its powers.

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In history we can recognize epistemology at work, although history can only be epistemological. Foucault explained it very clearly: “The history of the sciences [. . .] cannot construct its object anywhere but in an ideal space-time. And this space-time is given to it neither by the “realistic” time accumulated by the historian’s erudition nor by the space of ideality that partitions science today in an authoritative way but by the viewpoint of epistemology. Epistemology,” he continued “is not the general theory of every science and of every possible scientific statement; it is the search for the normativity internal to the different scientific activities, as they have actually been carried out” (Foucault 1998: 473). By emancipating himself from the privilege given by Bachelard to mathematical formalization, Canguilhem abandons the idea of a progressive history towards the Truth (with a capital T, that of the most powerful abstraction) of which Bachelard had spoken about in his Le matérialisme rationnel (Bachelard 1972 [1953]). The history of science conscious of its epistemology is not a history of “the” truth, but the history of the conditions of possibility of “telling” or seeking “a” truth, of the norms established to circumscribe and say it, and of the practices used to “discover” it (Canguilhem 1983: 16–23). That is the reason Canguilhem devoted a lot of effort to writing the history of a science that was still far from the degree of formalization gained by mathematics, physics, and even chemistry. Medicine and the life sciences have in fact enabled him to make the conceptual and practical strategies proposed by Bachelard work even more effectively (epistemological obstacle, recurrence, rupture, discontinuity, and error). This kind of history making is what fascinated and conditioned the work of Foucault, for whom nothing was more “revolutionary” than the fact of having considered concepts as objects of the history of science. What has rightly been called “the French style in epistemology” has been characterized in this way (Braunstein 2002; Davidson 2001: 81) but it is radically new compared to the previous way of making history of sciences.

Conclusion This style has been judged by some researchers as too conditioned by philosophical perspectives, which would have erased or hidden various courses that a history of science evolved in this way could have followed. The more or less implicit epistemology (or philosophy) of Bachelard, Canguilhem, or Foucault would have dominated too much the perspective of their historical work. Such has been the criticism of some followers of what is nowadays called “historical epistemology,” after it was taken up (or fully proposed ex novo) by L. Daston (Daston 1994) or I. Hacking and A. I. Davidson. Among them, simplifying greatly, there are those who, like Davidson or Hacking, recognize a kind of filiation, less ideal, with the line of BachelardCanguilhem-Althusser and Foucault line, those who are not too interested in this genealogy and go into it in silence (L. Daston and P. Galison), and others who prefer to emphasize their difference compared with the French style and to extend their field of research to quite different fields of scientific and nonscientific knowledge

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(aesthetics, for example) (Schmidgen et al. 2012; Daston and Galison 2007; Braunstein et al. 2019). Still, the impetus given by Bachelard, and especially the change of perspective given to the history of science, has represented an important critical turning point for what is called “historical epistemology.” Canguilhem highlighted it well, in an article dedicated to Bachelard: “By thus profoundly renewing the meaning of the history of science, by wresting it from its previous position of inferiority, and by promoting it to a philosophical discipline of the highest rank, Gaston Bachelard has done more than blaze a trail – he has defined a mission” (Canguilhem 1983: 186 own translation). He knew very well that this task was going to be articulated and modified over time, because of contingencies, questions asked, and knowledge strategies used, as well as the results of the research carried out. This mobility of knowledge in its practices and in its conceptualizations is the legacy he left us and which continues to inspire our efforts, even when it occurs that we distance ourselves from it.

Cross-References ▶ Pierre Duhem: Between the Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History ▶ The Case of Life in the Historiography of Modern Science: Canguilhem’s “Biophilosophy” ▶ The Origins of Alexandre Koyré’s History of Scientific Thought

References Alunni Ch (2015) G. Bachelard face aux mathématiques. Revue de Synthèse, t. 136, n. 1–2 Bachelard G (1928) Essai sur la connaissance approchée. Vrin, Paris Bachelard G (1934) Le nouvel esprit scientifique. PUF, Paris Bachelard G (1936) Dialectique de la durée. PUF, Paris Bachelard G (1951a) L’activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine. PUF, Paris Bachelard G (1951b) L’actualité de l’histoire des sciences. In: Bachelard G (1972) L’engagement rationaliste. PUF, Paris Bachelard G (1965) [1953]. Le matérialisme rationnel. PUF, Paris Bachelard S (1968) Epistémologie et histoire des sciences. Revue de Synthèse, t. LXXXIX, n. 49 Bachelard G (1972) L’engagement rationaliste. PUF, Paris Bachelard G (1984) The new scientific spirit. Beacon Press, Boston Bachelard G (2000) Dialectic of duration. Clinamen Press, Manchester Bachelard G (2006) Noumenon and microphysics. Philos Forum, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 37(1): 75–84 (en. tr. by B. Roy) Braunstein J-F (2002) Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault. Le “style français” en épistémologie. In: Wagner 2002 Braunstein J-F, Moya Diez I, Vagelli M (eds) (2019) L’épistémologie historique. Histoire et méthodes. Ed. De la Sorbonne, Paris Brunschvicg L (1922) L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique. F. Alcan, Paris

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Canguilhem G (1976) Il ruolo dell’epistemologia nella storiografia scientifica contemporanea. In: Scienza e Tecnica 76, Annuario dell’Enciclopedia della Scienza e della Tecnica. Mondadori, Milan (now in Canguilhem 2009 [2007]) Canguilhem G (1983) Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences. Vrin, Paris Canguilhem G (2009) [1977]. Idéologie et rationalité dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie. Vrin, Paris Castelao-Lawless T (1995) Phenomenotecnique in historical perspective. Its origins and implications for philosophy of science. Philos Sci 62(1) Castelli Gattinara E (1998) Les inquiétudes de la raison: épistémologie et histoire en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres. Vrin, Paris Castelli Gattinara E. (2017) Bachelard e Heidegger a confronto su tecnica, scienza e ontologia. In: Donatiello, Galofaro, Ienna, 2017 Cournot AA (1970) [1912] [1851]. Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances. Gallimard, Paris Daston L (1994) Historical epistemology. In: Chandler J, Davidson AI, Harootinian D (eds) Questions of evidence. Proof, practice, and persuasion across the disciplines. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Daston L, Galison P (2007) Objectivity. Zone Books, New York Davidson AI (2001) The emergence of sexuality. Historical epistemology and the formation of concepts. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Donatiello P, Galofaro F, Ienna G (2017) Il senso della tecnica. Saggi su Bachelard. Esculapio, Bologna Febvre L (1965) Combats pour l’histoire. A. Colin, Paris Foucault M (1998) Aesthetics, method and epistemology (ed Faubion JD). The New Press, New York Gayon J (2003) Bachelard et l’histoire des sciences. In: Wunenburger 2003 Gingras Y (2010) Naming without necessity: on the genealogy and uses of the label “historical epistemology”, note of research, CIRST, 2010–1 and Revue de Synthèse 131:439–454 Hacking I (2002) Historical ontology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Lecourt D (1969) L’épistémologie historique de Gaston Bachelard. Vrin, Paris Lecourt D (2016) [2008] Georges Canguilhem. PUF, Paris Massicotte G (1981) L’histoire-problème, St. Edisem, Hyacinte-Paris MPIWG (2021). https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/ Schmidgen H, Schöttler P, Braunstein J-F (eds) (2012) Epistemology and history. From Bachelard and Canguilhem to today’s history of science. Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin Serres M (1972) Hermes II, L’interférence. Minuit, Paris Tjiattas M (1991) Bachelard and scientific realism. Philos Forum XXII Vagelli M (2017) Bachelard, Hacking e il realismo tecnoscientifico. In: Donatiello, Galofaro, Ienna, 2017 Wagner P (ed) (2002) Les philosophes et la science. Gallimard, Paris Wunenburger JJ (ed) (2003) Bachelard et l’épistémologie française. PUF, Paris

Part III Historiography of Science from Modern Science to Contemporary Scientific World

Early Historiography of Science

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Status of Mathematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scientific Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Heroization of the Scientist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Galileo and His Followers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Biographical Style Spreads North: France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . English Biography of Scientists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The chapter focuses mainly on early historiography of mathematics (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries). The earliest historiographical essays are mainly introductions to technical works, pursuing the need to upgrade the reputation of mathematics (rather than delving into its past technical developments) by tracing its roots in biblical or mythological literature. As the field established itself, its historiography turned to biography, then considered the best historiographical vehicle, and ended by heroizing scientists in line with contemporary literary style, recalling biblical and classical elements. Keywords

Scientific revolution · History of mathematics · Biographies of scientists · Renaissance biographies · Myth

M. Segre (*) Gabriele D’Annunzio University, Chieti, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_19

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Introduction At the beginning of the seventeenth century, as Galileo was making his discoveries and creating the new science, Francis Bacon was writing The Great Instauration – an indication of contemporaries’ awareness that a new kind of knowledge was emerging. How did they report what was happening? To be sure, one can hardly speak either of “science” or of its historiography during the seventeenth century or previous times. The roots of what we call “science” today were in philosophy (more precisely in natural philosophy or medicine) and mathematics, as well as in other fields including the arts and the occult sciences. Moreover, the main fields at the roots of modern science – philosophy and mathematics – were different from today’s: they were broader, with branches or even stems that later developed into independent fields.1 And, of course, one cannot speak of a historiography of science in modern terms, though the many reports scattered throughout contemporary literature can be valuable if taken in the appropriate contexts.2 Since this literature is broad, for the sake of simplicity, let me concentrate on those branches that gave rise to the modern physical-mathematical fields.3 Even here, one finds many historical notes scattered through Renaissance and early modern literature and taking various literary forms, such as introductions to scientific treatises or biographical essays, or simply short remarks. At that time (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries), the kern of mathematics consisted in the study of numbers, the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, and it was valued less than philosophy despite its struggles to upgrade its reputation.4 Robert Goulding summarizes the scope of contemporary “history” of the field: Renaissance scholars used history to underpin larger claims about the usefulness and potential of the sciences for their society. In the case of mathematics, their writings also helped to overcome the indifference of university authorities and students—and even the lay

Philosophy, for example, included physics, which was a qualitative field, and as late as 1677 mathematics included arithmetic, geometry, music, geography, hydrology, navigation, meteorology, astronomy, “and other mathematical sciences.” See Middleton (1975, 144). 2 A milestone in modern historiography of science is Joseph Agassi’s Towards an Historiography of Science (1963/1967). The first issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas of 2006 devoted several articles to the histories of science in early modern Europe (JHI 67/1): Robert Goulding, “Histories of Science in Early Modern Europe: Introduction,” 33–40; James Steven Byrne, “A Humanist History of Mathematics? Regiomontanus’s Padua Oration in Context,” 41–61; Robert Goulding, “Method and Mathematics: Peter Ramus’s Histories of the Sciences,” 63–85; Nicholas Popper, “‛Abraham, Planter of Mathematics’: Histories of Mathematics and Astrology in Early Modern Europe,” 87–106. 3 For a general outline, see Sinkevich (2017), https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1707.01774. Accessed 30 Apr 2022. 4 The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght (London, 1538) defined “Mathematicus” as “he that is cunnynge in auljgryme, musyke, geometry, and astronomy” and “Philosophia” as “the loue or fauojrynge of wysedome.” 1

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public—towards teaching of the sciences, and to frame the forms in which the sciences were eventually established in the academy. (Goulding 2006, 35)

While these historical works may not enter into technicalities, they undoubtedly give an idea of how contemporaries viewed science and even what its social context was. In what follows, I do not endeavor to contribute anything new but rather to highlight a number of issues I find of central relevance.

The Status of Mathematics The modern literature dealing with the historiography of science highlights two early essays that present a more or less systematic history of science: one by Regiomontanus (1436–1476) and a later one by Peter Ramus (1515–1572). Both essays were nonetheless only introductory to their technical works, which confirms the above quotation. “Regiomontanus” is the latinized name of Johannes Müller (referencing his birthplace of Königsberg in Franconia), the outstanding pre-Copernican mathematician, astrologer, and astronomer whose works and translations were instrumental in the development of heliocentrism. In or around 1464, he held a series of lectures at the University of Padua on the ninth-century Arabic astronomer Al-Farghānī, with an inaugural oration on the main stages of the development and utility of mathematical sciences since antiquity; the oration was not published for the first time until 1537 in Nuremberg.5 Noel Swerdlow warns that though a historical text, its main purpose was not to write history: Regiomontanus “wished, first of all, to bring the mathematical sciences into—or at least have them recognized as equal (if not superior) to—humanistic studies” (Swerdlow 1993, 132). True, Regiomontanus repeats the widespread contemporary opinion that astronomy stemmed either from the ancient Hebrews (Abraham and Moses) or from mythological figures (Prometheus, Hercules, and Atlas), though James Byrne stresses that Regiomontanus, contrary to his peers, avoided discussing the issue (Byrne 2006, 51).6 And admittedly, in scrolling through Regiomontanus’ oration, I notice many themes I myself treat in my own teaching of the history of science, such as the Egyptian roots of geometry, the Pythagorean tradition, Hipparchus, Euclid and the Euclidian tradition, Archimedes, Apollonius, and Ptolemy. The idea that mathematics has biblical origins was long-lasting (was it a belief or only a means of legitimation?). As much as a century later, it is found in the writings of humanist, logician, and educational reformer Peter Ramus. His works contain many historical notes or essays. The last, and broadest, is the introductory part of his 5 Oratio Iohannis de Monteregio, habita Patavij in praelectione Alfragani (Müller, Johannes – Regiomontanus, 1537/1972). For a critical review with translations of selected passages, see Byrne, “A Humanist History of Mathematics?” (Byrne 2006, 41–61). 6 The main thesis of Byrne’s article, “A Humanist History of Mathematics?”, is that the oration places Regiomontanus less firmly in the humanistic tradition than generally thought.

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mathematicarum libri unus et triginta (1569, “Thirty-One Books of Mathematical Essays”), unfolding in three books. The First Book outlines three historical periods: a “Chaldean” period from Adam to Abraham (again); an “Egyptian” period; and a “Greek and Latin” period from Thales to Theon, where the kern of the historical treatment begins. The Second Book classifies various fields in their historical development in Europe (incidentally including astronomy, optics, and music as part of physics), mentioning many mathematicians and intellectuals including Regiomontanus, Melanchthon, Reinhold, Apianus, Rheticus, and Copernicus. The Third Book, dealing with mathematical methods, mentions names including Cardano, Maurolico, Commandino, and Tartaglia. Ramus’ historiography is likewise an attempt to emphasize the importance of mathematics and legitimize it – more specifically, over scholastic logic. Yet as Goulding notes, Ramus’ history of mathematics also developed according to the problems that arose in his theoretical understanding of mathematics (Goulding 2006, 64). Galina Sinkevich points out omissions of well-known contemporaries (such as Michael Stifel and Tycho Brahe), which may be an interesting subject for further studies and may contribute to a better understanding of how early modern mathematicians considered the development of science (Sinkevich 2017, 3). Nonetheless, a much better established and widespread genre of history of science is that of biography.

Scientific Biography The contribution of biographies and, even more, of autobiographies to history is a much-debated topic. Indeed, probably the earliest available lives of Renaissance mathematicians are the famous autobiographies of the two leading mathematicians and antagonists, Niccolò Tartaglia (1500–1557) and Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576).7 To a twenty-first-century reader, the predominant feature of these autobiographies is the emphasis on episodes of their subjects’ lives rather than on their contributions to mathematics and science. This is particularly true of Cardano’s long and curious autobiography, which is composed of numerous short chapters describing different periods of his life. To learn more concerning the development of science, one has to turn to biographies proper or collections of biographies. The beginning of the seventeenth century saw two impressive collections of this kind: Bernardino Baldi’s (1553–1617) Vite de’ Matematici and Pierre Gassendi’s (1592–1655) biographies of early modern astronomers (1654).8 7

Tartaglia’s autobiography is included in his Quesiti et inventioni diverse (Tartaglia 1554/1959, 69– 70; Cardan 1962). 8 The lives of medieval and Renaissance mathematicians are collected in Baldi (1998). For a list of other published lives, see Baldi (1998, 29–30). Gassendi’s biographies were included in Gassendi (1658/1964).

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Baldi was a mathematician and man of letters from Urbino and a pupil of Federico Commandino (1509–1575). Two years after the latter’s death, Baldi wrote a biography to honor him (Baldi 1998, 494–520). His Vita of Commandino was the first of more than 200 lives of philosophers and mathematicians from antiquity to the Renaissance (among them the first biography of Copernicus, Baldi 1998, 402–413), some of which are still unpublished. Baldi was writing in a period in which mathematics was gradually establishing itself and needing less legitimation; the aim was rather to rescue from oblivion the memory of excellent men to whom the world was so much in debt.9 His Vite are thus a breakthrough toward a historiography of mathematics proper based on biography (though, of course, still far from modern historiography). They follow the model of classical biography (above all, that of Diogenes Laertius) by stressing elements including biographical details.10 Baldi begins by listing, and occasionally discussing, the meaning of the names, appellations, or surnames of his subjects and emphasizes the importance of their place of birth, parentage, and naturally their teachers. He discusses the historical circumstances in which a specific mathematician lived and follows it by a detailed presentation of his work, often supported by quotations and anecdotes from classical sources. Gassendi’s biographies, on the other hand, introduce some more rhetorical traits. His life of Copernicus, for instance, pays – rightly or wrongly – particular attention to Copernicus’ birth and emphasizes his early aptitudes. Gassendi stresses how the young Copernicus was well versed in Greek and Latin, philosophy, and medicine and mentions his private mathematics teacher Albertus Brudzewo (Gassendi 1658/ 1964, Vol. 5, 499). Similarly, Gassendi’s Life of Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) relates that Brahe was proficient in Latin at the early age of seven and gives a lengthy account of the tuition he received (Gassendi 1658/1964, Vol. 5, 388). Such aspects are even more emphasized in later biographies of scientists and fit a particular contemporary literary style rather than describing actual facts. When taken in their literary context, they nonetheless remain valuable sources for the modern historian.

The Heroization of the Scientist In a recent article, I suggest that the seventeenth century saw the emergence of a model for biographies of scientists, rooted in biblical and classical literature and reminiscent of the Renaissance/Baroque biographies of artists glorifying heroes (Segre 2021, 207–230). 9

See Paul Lawrence Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics, who devotes a whole chapter to Baldi (Rose 1975, 263–279), here p. 265. 10 Baldi’s literary precursors are discussed by Nenci in his introduction to Le vite de’ matematici (Baldi 1998); by Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics, in the chapter devoted to Baldi (Rose 1975); and by Bronisław Biliński, Prolegomena alle Vite dei matematici di Bernardino Baldi (1587–1596) (Biliński 1977, 72–97).

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The Bible contains many reports that could have inspired later glorification, such as noteworthy occurrences around the birth of a central character as preamble to his undertakings (e.g., the mother’s infertility); coincidences – or, at times, plain miracles – altering a set destiny; and descriptions of magical effects by some figures on their surroundings. Classical biography, rooted in sources including Greek mythology, offers a particular genre known as aretalogy (from the Greek α᾿ ρετή aretḗ, “virtue”) defined by Moses Hadas and Morton Smith in their Heroes and Gods: Spiritual Biographies in Antiquity as “a formal account of the remarkable career of an impressive teacher that was used as a basis for moral instruction” (Hadas and Smith 1965, 3). Many of these features may have converged in Renaissance and Baroque biography, in particular in the most influential collection of lives in early modern times: Giorgio Vasari’s (1511–1575) Lives of the Artists (Vasari 1988). As far as the scientists that are its subjects are concerned, the biographic literature heroizes them by highlighting and embellishing alleged qualities or events, such as: • Noteworthy occurrences around the birth and youth of the scientist. • The precocious and high proficiency of the scientist in several fields and languages (mostly Greek and Latin) and his familiarity with many authors. • The strange, unexpected coincidence or accident by which the future scientist finds his vocation, different from the one his father has ordained for him. • The association of the scientist with a prominent tutor that replaces his father and legitimizes his work. • The scientist’s transcendent knowledge of nature. • The particular effect that the work of the scientist has on the community. These statements are often accompanied by unverifiable anecdotes that amplify the story into a myth; one such renowned myth in the history of science involves Galileo Galilei (1564–1642).

Galileo and His Followers In the same year in which Gassendi’s Lives of astronomers were published, Vincenzio Viviani (1622–1703) and Niccolò Gherardini (1604–1678) – two intimates of Galileo – were each writing a life of the latter (Galilei 1968, Vol. 19, 597–646).11 Both biographers had assisted Galileo in his old age: Viviani had been Galileo’s pupil and assistant, and Gherardini was the curate of the priory not far from Galileo’s house. Viviani’s Life of Galileo is a typical example of the heroizing biographical style of the Renaissance such as was studied by art historians Ernst Kris (1900–1957) and Otto Kurz (1908–1975) in their classic Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist. They spotted glorifying elements similar to the ones quoted above in Renaissance biographies of artists (Vasari’s Lives are a paradigmatic example). Art and 11

The early biographies of Galileo were recently collected and translated by Gattei (2019).

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science biography have a lot in common, including indicating that scientists and artists were considered the same type of genius (Kris and Kurz 1934, 1979). Kris, who was a psychoanalyst as well, adds that anecdotes in the early history of art “strive toward an approximation of real-life situations and generally create the impression of being true” (Kris 1953, 65). Indeed, Viviani’s drafts in Florence’s Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale indicate that he tried to make Galileo’s birth (February 15, 1564) coincide with Michelangelo’s death although the latter died 3 days later (Segre 1989a, 207–231).12 Viviani also sets out a long description of Galileo’s precociousness, beginning with a sentence that is more or less copied from Vasari’s life of Giotto (Segre 1989a, 225–226, cf. Gattei 2019, xix). Vasari says in that work: “Mostrando in tutti gli atti ancora fanciulleschi una vivacità e prontezza del suo ingegno” (“Giotto showed in all his boyish ways such unusually quick intelligence and liveliness,” Vasari 1988, Vol. 2, 96), bolding mine. Viviani says of Galileo: “Cominciò ne’ prim’anni della sua fanciullezza a dar saggio della vivacità del suo ingegno” (“In the early years of his childhood, he began to display the vivacity of his mind,” Gattei 2019, 4–5, bolding mine). As to Galileo’s exceptional early childhood, Viviani relates (or invents) as follows: In the early years of his childhood, Galileo began to display the vivacity of his mind: he spent most of his leisure time constructing various instruments and machines with his own hands, imitating and producing small scale models of manmade objects, such as mills, galleys, and all sorts of other machines of common use. [. . .] He committed himself to reading major Latin authors, and all by himself gained the erudition in the humanities that he later demonstrated in private gatherings [. . .] At the same time, he devoted himself to the study of Greek language, which he learned quite well [. . .] Galileo greatly enjoyed practicing music, fingering the keys and playing the lute. [. . .] He achieved such a high level of excellence on the lute that he found himself competing with the top masters of the times [. . .] He very much enjoyed drawing, in which he achieved amazing results—and he was so gifted and talented in it that he later used to tell his friends that had it been possible, at this age, to choose a profession, no doubt he should have chosen painting. (Gattei 2019, 4–7)

Is there anything Galileo was not able to do in his youth? According to Viviani, Galileo had always had a transcendent knowledge of nature: “Galileo, whom nature had elected to unveil to the world part of those secrets that had been buried in the dense darkness of human minds for so many centuries. . .” (Gattei 2019, 6–7). As a student in Pisa, Galileo needed only to watch a lamp swinging in the cathedral of Pisa to discover the principle of isochronism of the pendulum (Gattei 2019, 8–9). However, this anecdote was cast into doubt after historian of art Igino Benvenuto Supino discovered that the “Galilean Lamp” in Pisa Cathedral had not been hung in the Cathedral until 1587, 4 years after Galileo was supposed to have watched it swing (Supino 1893, 215–218). It seems, then, to be in a style of writing more reminiscent of Phidias’ ability to calculate the size of a lion by 12

On Galileo’s birth and Michelangelo’s death (Segre 1989a, 222–223).

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merely looking at a claw. Moreover, as Viviani’s correspondence testifies, he planned to embellish the description even further and describe Galileo’s “supernatural talent” (talento sopranaturale) but was dissuaded by a churchman who pointed out that under the circumstances this would be exaggerated (Tenca 1954, 219). Galileo’s father, Vincenzo, wanted his son to study medicine, but Galileo was more attracted by mathematics. Viviani, for his part, describes at length Galileo’s father’s unwillingness to let his son study mathematics with Ostilio Ricci (1540–1603, a mathematician who tutored the pages of the Grand Duke), fearing that he would abandon medicine (Gattei 2019, 10–13). Gherardini describes how Galileo met Ricci through a bizarre coincidence: Galileo went to talk with him [Ricci] a few times, and always found him teaching and explaining Euclid; and since Ricci could not listen to Galileo, Galileo listened to Ricci’s lectures. Galileo enjoyed them so much, drawing in such nourishment for his mind, that he developed a growing passion for mathematics, thereby neglecting lectures in medicine at the university. Instead, he went to the room where Master Ricci lectured on mathematics. He had no right to speak, and was even less sure that he had a right to attend the lectures, as they were meant to be for the pages only, or those who were in service at the court; so he remained in the room, in a place from which he could hardly hear what was being taught. Galileo persisted in attending the mathematics lectures, secretly and briefly, for nearly two months. (Gattei 2019, 142–143)

Ricci, in any case, fills the role of the prominent tutor who replaces, if not Galileo’s father, at least the latter’s wishes. Viviani reports the famous – and much-doubted – story of Galileo refuting Aristotle’s law of falling bodies by experimenting from the tower of Pisa. While there is no evidence that the story is true, it is a typical example of the particular effect of the work of the scientist on his surroundings: “He showed this with repeated experiments from the top of the tower of Pisa, in the presence of the other lecturers and philosophers as well as all their students” (Gattei 2019, 14–15).13 So much for Galileo. Similar elements can be found in the biography of one of Galileo’s leading followers, the mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598–1647), written by the latter’s pupil, Urbano D’Aviso (1618–1685) (Cavalieri 1690, xii–xxii). D’Aviso emphasizes Cavalieri’s precocious talents as a child, relating how the latter excelled at school in rhetoric and in writing and reading poetry. Like Viviani, he borrows Vasari’s words from the latter’s life of Giotto and Viviani’s life of Galileo: “Mostrò in tal studio una vivacità d’ingegno grandissima” (“He showed in his study a very lively intelligence”) (Cavalieri 1690, xii. Bolding and translation mine). D’Aviso uses an anecdote to illustrate the accidental way through which Cavalieri came to mathematics. After Cavalieri was ordained in his birth city of Milan, he was sent to the convent of S. Girolamo in Pisa, where he felt homesick and unhappy. It so happened that Benedetto Castelli (1578–1643), Galileo’s friend and follower, lived in the same convent and noted Cavalieri’s sadness as well as his 13

Doubts on the truthfulness of the tower experiment were expressed by several authors (Segre 1989b).

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extraordinary talents. Castelli encouraged Cavalieri to study mathematics, partly as a means of overcoming his unhappiness. Cavalieri followed the suggestion and quickly became an outstanding mathematician. Let me end this series of examples related to Italian mathematicians with an eloquent Vita of Vincenzo Viviani, published in 1708 by the Accademia Arcadia, where he had been a member (Tocci 1708, Vol. 1, 123–139). It dwells on Viviani’s precociousness as a mathematician, supported by anecdotes. At a certain stage of Viviani’s schooling, his teacher noted his “elevatissimo ingegno” (“highest intelligence”) and recommended he should take up mathematics (Tocci 1708, 124, translation mine). The same teacher, who served at the Tuscan court, later praised the 16-year-old Viviani’s “stupendo ingegno” (“stupendous intelligence,” my bolding in each case, Tocci 1708, 124, translation and bolding mine). The grand duke, then in Leghorn, requested to see the young mathematician, and Viviani was summoned to court. During the monotonous sail from Florence to Leghorn, Viviani managed to study up to the fourth book of Euclid. When he arrived at court and met the grand duke, the latter was initially skeptical and asked that Viviani be given a problem in geometry, which he quickly solved in the waiting room. This determined Viviani’s future career, for the grand duke granted him a scholarship and introduced him to Galileo. This last anecdote dramatizes the moment in which the mathematician is initiated into his career – fitting into the traditional pattern of heroization. There is, by the way, an additional unpublished biography of Viviani in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence (Galilean MS 155, 1–5), written by Viviani’s nephew Jacopo Panzanini, which may have been used by the Arcadian author. It relates more or less the same things but is relatively sober by comparison, and the Arcadia may have “stretched” facts to embellish the description and make it fit into the typical pattern of heroization. For example, Panzanini relates that as Viviani sailed to Leghorn, he studied only the second and a good part of the third book of Euclid; the Arcadian biography embellishes this by saying that Viviani read “up to the fourth” book of Euclid. The biographies I have dealt with above are mainly of Italian mathematicians who, at least at the beginning of the seventeenth century, still played a leading role in science. In the second half of the century, the focus of scientific activity moved north of the Alps, accompanied by the same biographical style. Indeed, the style can be found all over Europe in different types of lives, from “dispassionate” dictionaries such as Louis Moréri’s (1643–1680) Grand diction[n]aire to entertaining bibliographical sketches like John Aubrey’s (1626–1697) Brief Lives.

The Biographical Style Spreads North: France The style of heroization gradually permeated French biographies of scientists. Here are a few examples: Marin Mersenne (1588–1648): His first biography was written as early as 1649 – soon after his death – by his pupil, the Minim Friar, Hilarion de Coste (1595–1661).

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A specialist in writing biographies and éloges. Coste begins his biography by recounting that Mersenne was born on September 8, 1588: Notable in the church as the birth of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and for the destruction of Jerusalem, conquered and destroyed by the Emperor Titus, son of Vespasian, as the Savior of the world had predicted forty years earlier. This day is also notable for the birth of several illustrious men of piety, of worth, and of doctrine. (de Coste 1649, 2–3).14

The description speaks for itself. The biography of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), written in 1663 by his sister, Françoise Gilberte Périer (1620–1687), offers a long, and typical, description of Pascal’s youth (Pascal 1923, Vol. 1, 53–59). Though their father conferred a broad education on young Blaise, she writes, the boy always wanted to know more. When Blaise’s talent for geometry began to emerge at the age of 12, it encountered his father’s resistance: the latter wanted his son to be proficient with languages first and avoided speaking about geometry, even hiding all books on the subject. Yet Blaise continued practicing geometry, up to learning the 32-s proposition of Euclid’s first book. “By accident,”15 the father 1 day caught him delving into mathematics, unnoticed by young Pascal, and was finally convinced of his son’s genius. Apart from single biographies such as Pascal’s or Mersenne’s, compilations such as Moréri’s Grand diction[n]aire historique (first edition 1674) contain scattered recurrent elements of heroization of scientists. In the 1681 edition of Moréri’s Dictionaire, the entry “Copernicus” contains the hackneyed expression “having penetrated the secrets of nature,” indicating the mathematician’s transcendent knowledge of nature. (Moréri 1681, Vol. 1, 994–995).16 In the entry devoted to Tycho Brahe, the description of the astronomer’s youth speaks for itself: Tycho was sent to Leipzig to study law and, without his teacher knowing it, began to make astronomical observations. His knowledge finally surpassed that of his teacher, and all the great men of Europe were honored to pay him visits or correspond with him (Moréri 1681, Vol. 2, 1206–1207). Moréri’s work was not intended as a collection of lives. A more vivid contemporary example is offered by 69 lives of scientists written by Bernard le Bovier (or Bouyer) de Fontenelle (1657–1757). As Secrétaire perpétuel of the French Académie des sciences, Fontenelle wrote its history from 1699 to 1740, and as the academicians died, he wrote and published their éloges, including the lives of

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(La Vie du R. P. Marin Mersenne theologien, philosophe et mathematicien de l’Ordre des Peres Minime, par F. D. C. H. Religieux du mesme Ordre (Paris, 1649), 2–3: “. . .iour celebre en l’Eglise par la Natiuité de la Vierge Mere de Dieu, & pour la destruction de Hierusalem, qui fut prise & ruinée par l’Epereur Tite fils de Vespasien, comme le Sauuer du monde l’auoit predit quarante ans auparauant: Ce iour est aussi remarquable pour la naissance de plusieurs hommes illustrus en pieté, en valeur, & en doctrine.” Translation mine. 15 “Par hazard” (Pascal 1923, Vol. 1, 54). 16 This edition was the earliest available to me: “Ayant pénétré dans les secrets de la nature.” Translation mine.

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Viviani, l’Hopital, Jacob Bernoulli, Jean Dominique Cassini, Leibniz, and Newton. As noted by Suzanne Delorme, author of the article on Fontenelle in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, in the first éloges, Fontenelle had not yet attained complete mastery of the field (Gillispie 1972, Vol. 5, 61). But even his early éloges repeat certain formulations again and again; for instance, in his éloge of Viviani (1703), one finds the phrasing “Full of that vigor of spirit given by first youth.”17 – reminiscent of those phrases quoted above in descriptions of Giotto’s, Galileo’s, or Cavalieri’s youth (Fontenelle 1994, Vol. 6, 82). These recurrences became more and more frequent as Fontenelle became more practiced in the art of obituary. In later biographies, he constantly remarked, inter alia, on how a mathematician found his vocation by pure chance or how his extraordinary talent at a young age drove him to his true vocation. So we learn that the Marquis Guillaume-François de l’Hôpital (1661–1704) was not initially intended to become a mathematician but discovered his great natural talent as soon as he came across geometry and began studying it passionately (Fontenelle 1994, Vol. 6, 95–96). At the age of 15, he happened to find himself in the company of some mathematicians discussing a problem posed by Pascal related to the cycloid; l’Hôpital took only a day to solve the problem. According to Fontenelle, Jacob Bernoulli (1654–1705) received the usual classical education consisting of Latin, Greek, and scholastic philosophy, but no geometry. “By chance,”18 he noticed some geometrical figures and was attracted by them. As soon as he got hold of some mathematics books, he began to study alone, furtively, with no other teacher but his talent, against the will of his father. By the age of 18, thanks only to his natural talent for calculation, he was already able to solve a difficult mathematical problem related to the calendar (Fontenelle 1994, Vol. 6, 109). Fontenelle’s éloge of Jean Dominique Cassini (1625–1712) describes in detail the coincidence which led the latter to astronomy. According to Fontenelle, Cassini was visiting his friend, Lercaro, later Doge of the Republic of Genoa; on this occasion, a churchman lent him (Cassini) some books on judicial astrology for fun. The books awakened Cassini’s natural affinity for the stars; Fontenelle emphasizes that the attraction to “ridiculous” astrology was short-lived but was enough to arouse Cassini’s interest in the “solid charm” of astronomy. Cassini devoted himself to astronomy, made rapid progress, and was appointed to the chair of astronomy in Bologna at the age of only 25 (Fontenelle 1994, Vol. 6, 265–266). To give another example, Fontenelle’s sketch of the life of Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) presents the latter as a prodigy whose genius went beyond normal human talents and who could be compared to a titan such as Hercules. Following the pattern of heroization, he describes Leibniz’s precociousness by relating his talents as a poet and claims that he once composed a poem of 300 verses in Latin without a single error (Fontenelle 1994, Vol. 6, 378). Fontenelle’s éloge of Isaac Newton (1643–1727), to be sure, is not particularly “heroic,” as one might have expected after reading the former’s letter to Conduitt 17 18

“Plein de cette vigueur d’esprit que donne la première jeunesse.” Translation mine. “Par hasard.” Translation mine.

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mentioned at the beginning of the article; this may have been the result of different views concerning Newton’s science.19 In any case, Fontenelle’s éloges, like Moréri’s Dictionaire, show the extent to which the pattern of heroization was widespread in France. The same pattern spread to other countries and affected various types of prose.

English Biography of Scientists Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the first modern philosopher of science, greatly influenced both British and continental science and deserved a biography with commensurate traits. William Rawley (c. 1588–1667), the seventeenth-century editor of Bacon’s works (1657) under the title Resuscitatio, included a biography of Bacon in which the latter’s precocious high proficiency was presented with an anecdote that is very similar to Viviani’s Arcadian biography: His first, and childish, years, were not without some Mark of Eminency; At which Time, he was endued, with that Pregnancy, and Towardness, of Wit; As they were Presages, of that Deep, and Universall, Apprehension, which was manifest in him, afterward; And caused him, to be taken notice of, by several Persons, of Worth, and Place; And, especially, by the Queen; who, (as I have been informed,) delighted much, then, to confer with him; And to prove him with Questions; unto whom, he delivered Himself, with that Gravity, and Maturity, above his years; That her Majesty, would often term Him, The young Lord Keeper. (Rawley 1657).20

To increase the literary impact, the following sentence was added to the 1661 edition of the Resuscitatio: “Being asked, by the Queen; how old he was? He answered with much discretion, being then but a boy; That he was two years younger than Her Majesties happy Reigne; with which Answer the Queen was much taken.” We move from Bacon’s life to Newton’s biography as authored by William Stukeley (1687–1765), an antiquarian, physician, and clergyman, who – like Viviani and Gherardini in Galileo’s case – came to be on terms of close friendship with Newton during the latter’s years. He met Newton at the Royal Society and later moved to Grantham, where Newton had spent his youth. In Grantham, Stukeley undertook to collect reminiscences of the genius’ early life, and his 1752 biography is an interesting example of heroization. Stukeley refers to Plutarch as the prototype of biography: “Biography is a thing which I have no claim to, and has only been well executed by the masterly pen of Plutarch” (Stukeley 1936, 2. Of course, Plutarch was not the only milestone.) Stukeley describes Newton’s birth as a cosmic event: “He was born on Christmas day 1642. Some have observed, this time was particularly fruitful of great genius’s” (Stukeley 1936, 19). As Gale Christianson notes: 19

See France and St Clair (2002, 81–101, 93–96), Schaffer (2015, 48–61), Fontenelle (1728), and. http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/OTHE00036. 20 The first part of the book is without page numbers. Spelling and italics as in the original text.

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Like the Biblical Joseph, Isaac the father plays but a minor role in the story, thus removing all moral taint from the hero’s origin. The widowed Hannah Newton is without blemish, as pure in spirit as the Madonna herself: ‘She was,’ in Stukeley’s words, ‘a woman of so extraordinary an understanding and virtue that those who think that a soul like Sir Isaac Newton’s could be formed by any thing less than the immediate operation of a divine Creator might be apt to ascribe to her many of those extraordinary qualities with which he was endowed.’ (Christianson 1995, 88)

The long description of Newton’s childhood is also typical, with many anecdotes indicating Newton’s precocious talent (Stukeley 1936, 38). Stukeley relates how all those that knew Newton in Grantham “recount many instances of the pregnancy of his genius, whilst a boy, his strange inventions and extraordinary inclination and skill for mechanical works. That insted of playing among other boys, when from school, he always busyed himself in making knicknacks of divers sorts and models of wood.” Stukeley repeatedly emphasizes Newton’s practical talents: he recounts that Newton had all sort of tools, “which he would use with much dexterity, as if he had been brought up to the trade.” Newton had a transcendent knowledge of nature: he “penetrated beyond the superficial view of the thing” (Stukeley 1936, 39). While the story of Newton’s apple, also related by Stukeley as well as by Conduitt and other sources, may contain more truth than Galileo’s pendulum, it is another example of ex ungue leonem (Stukeley 1936, 20).21 And Patricia Fara reminds us that the apple could recall the forbidden fruit of knowledge in the Garden of Eden: again a biblical reference (Fara 1999, 167). Stukeley further relates that much like Galileo and Hooke, Sir Isaac “was not only expert at his mechanical tools, but equally so with his pen; for he busyed himself very much with drawing, which he took his own inclination and improv’d by his observation of nature” (Stukeley 1936, 43–44). He goes on: “When he was order’d into the field to tend on a flock of sheep, he was sitting under a tree, with a book in his hand; or busying himself with a knife, cutting models and inventions in wood. At other times he would get to a spring head or running stream, which this charming country abounds with. There he made little wheels, such as they use in water-mills” (Stukeley 1936, 48). Alas, Newton’s father died before he was born, but the zealous Stukeley lets his mother play the role of the “disappointed father”: “His mother, as well as the servants, were some-what offended by this bookishness of his” (Stukeley 1936, 50). He then replaces her with a “legitimizing father figure”: “But his old master, Mr. Stokes, who now became rector of Colsterworth, saw thro’, judg’d better, and admir’d his uncommon genius; he never ceas’d remonstrating to his mother what a loss it was to the world, as well as a vain attempt, to bury so extraordinary a talent in rustic business” (Stukeley 1936, 50–51). Finally, a description of the particular effect that the genius had on the community: Newton as president of the Royal Society. “There we view him in his proper dignity...There he sat at rest, in the intellectual center, as the great solar orb shining with its own light, and diffusing his beamy influence thro’ the whole system of arts and science” (Stukeley 1936, 63). These are only a few examples out of the

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On the plausibility of the story of Newton’s apple, see Westfall (1980, 154).

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many scattered through Stukeley’s essay testifying that he was writing according to a specific pattern of heroization. So too was John Aubrey (himself a man of science) in his amusing Brief Lives, also written during the second half of the seventeenth century, though not published until the nineteenth (Aubrey 1987). Aubrey’s Brief Lives is picturesque anecdotes, stories, memoirs, or gossip about well-known individuals. Allan Pritchard remarks that in the field of biography, Aubrey breaks decisively with the past (Pritchard 2009, 172). Not quite: even these unique biographical sketches contain many of the past elements of heroization. A considerable part of Aubrey’s sketch of the life of Newton’s teacher, Isaac Barrow (1630–1677), for example, is dedicated to his precociousness as a child and to how he came to his profession, naturally emphasizing young Barrow’s precocious talents (Aubrey 1987, 125–128). Barrow, coming from a family of merchants, was not predestined to become a mathematician. Following the typical biographical pattern, Aubrey emphasizes the father’s involvement (and skepticism) in the choice of Barrow’s career by providing an anecdote: in Cambridge, Barrow’s father “asked what profession he would be of, a merchant or....” Barrow, of course, begged to be allowed to continue studying at the university. The father agreed, and Barrow’s tutor, foreseeing Barrow’s great future, even offered to waive the tuition fees. In the description of Edmond Halley’s (1656–1742) childhood, Aubrey relates that as a child, Halley was so precocious and so skilled in making celestial globes that a famous globe-maker said of him, “if a star were misplaced in the Globe, he would presently find it” (Aubrey 1987, 205). He studied geometry as a young boy and could make a sundial at the age of 16. When he went to Queen’s College Oxford not a whit older, he was already well versed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Three years later he solved the problem in astronomy which today bears his name. In similar vein is Aubrey’s presentation of Robert Hooke (1635–1703) (Aubrey 1987, 242–245). Young Hooke, according to Aubrey, succeeded in painting a picture without any previous training as a painter; made “A Diall on a round trencher; never having had any instruction. His father was not Mathematicall at all”; learned to play the organ in 20 lessons; and, matching Viviani, “in one week’s time made himself master of the VI books of Euclid.”

Conclusion The main purpose of early historiography of science, at least as the mathematical sciences are concerned, pursued the needs of the field rather than describing its developments. Initially, it sought legitimacy by tracing its roots in biblical or mythological literature. It then turned to biography, then considered the best historiographical vehicle, and ended in heroizing scientists by applying the current literary style in the same way as Renaissance biographies of artists. Only in the twentieth century, as the historiography of science developed, did such legendary accounts start to disappear – although not totally and not from popular history of science.

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Cross-References ▶ History of Science as History of Our Best Errors: Joseph Agassi’s Critical Historiography of Science

References Agassi J (1963) Towards an historiography of science. Mouton, The Hague Agassi J (1967) Towards an historiography of science. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown Aubrey J (1987) In: Dick OL (ed) Aubrey’s brief lives. Penguin Books, London Baldi B (1998) In: Nenci E (ed) Le vite de’ matematici. FrancoAngeli Milan Biliński B (1977) Prolegomena alle Vite dei matematici di Bernardino Baldi (1587–1596). Accademia Polacca delle scienze, Rome Byrne JS (2006) A humanist history of mathematics? Regiomontanus’s Padua oration in context. J Hist Ideas 67:41–61 Cardan J (1962) The book of my life (De Vita Propria Liber) (trans: Stoner J). Dover, New York Cavalieri B (1690) Sfera astronomica. Rome Christianson GE (1995) On the renaissance model of early scientific biography. Int Soc Sci Rev 70: 87–92 de Coste H (1649) La Vie du R. P. Marin Mersenne theologien, philosophe et mathematicien de l’Ordre des Peres Minime, par F. D. C. H. Religieux du mesme Ordre. Paris Fara P (1999) Catch a falling apple: Isaac Newton and myths of genius. Endeavour 23:167–170 Fontenelle (1728) The life of Sir Isaac Newton. London Fontenelle (1994) Oeuvres complètes. Fayard, Paris France P (2002) From eulogy to biography: the French academic Eloge. In: France P, St Clair W (eds) Mapping lives: the uses of biography. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 81–101 France P, St Clair W (eds) (2002) Mapping lives: the uses of biography. Oxford University Press, Oxford Galilei G (1968) Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, Edizione Nazionale. Antonio Favaro (ed) (Reprint. Firenze: Barbèra, 1968) Gassendi P (1658/1964) Opera Omnia, Vol. 5. Lyon. Reprinted Stuttgart-Bad Frommann, Cannstatt Gattei S (ed) (2019) On the life of Galileo. Princeton University Press, Princeton Gillispie CC (ed) (1972) Dictionary of scientific biography, Vol. V. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York Goulding R (2006) Method and mathematics: Peter Ramus’s histories of the sciences. J Hist Ideas 67:63–85 Hadas M, Smith M (1965) Heroes and Gods: spiritual biographies in antiquity. Freeport, New York Kris E (1953) Psychoanalytic explorations in art. Allen & Unwin, London Kris E, Kurz O (1934) Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein historischer Versuch. Krystall Verlag, Vienna Kris E, Kurz O (1979) Legend, legend, myth, and magic in the image of the artist: a historical experiment (trans: Laing A). Yale University Press, New Haven Middleton WEK (1975) Science in Rome, 1675–1700, and the Accademia Fisicomatematica of Giovanni Giustino Ciampini. BJHS 8:138–154 Moréri L (1681) Le grand diction[n]aire historique (2 vols). Lyon Müller J (Regiomontanus) (1537/1972) Oratio Iohannis de Monteregio, habita Patavij in praelectione Alfragani. Nuremberg. (Reprinted in facsimile in Joannis Regiomontani Opera collectanea, ed. Felix Schmeidler. Osnabrück: Zeller, 1972, pp 41–53) Pascal B (1923) In: Brunschwicg L, Boutroux P (eds) Œuvres, Vol. 1, 2nd edn. Hachette, Paris. https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Livre:Œuvres_de_Blaise_Pascal,_I.djvu

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Pritchard A (2009) English biography in the seventeenth century: a critical survey. University of Toronto Press, Toronto Ramus P (1569) Scholarium mathematicarum. Basel Rawley W (1657) Resuscitatio. London Rose PLR (1975) The Italian renaissance of mathematics. Droz, Geneva Schaffer S (2015) Fontenelle’s Newton and the uses of genius. L’Ésprit Créateur 55:48–61 Segre M (1989a) Viviani’s life of Galileo. Isis 80:207–231 Segre M (1989b) Galileo, Viviani and the tower of Pisa. Stud Hist Phil Sci 20:435–451 Segre M (2021) The Dawn of scientific biography. Early Sci Med 26:207–230 Sinkevich GI (2017) Historia matheseos. Early development stage history of mathematics, historiography. History and Overview Stukeley W (1936) Memoirs of sir Isaac Newton’s life. In: White AH (ed) . Taylor and Francis, London Supino IB (1893) La lampada di Galileo. Archivio storico dell’arte 6(3):215–218 Swerdlow NM (1993) Science and humanism in the renaissance: Regiomontanus’s oration on the dignity and utility of the mathematical sciences. In: Horwich P (ed) World changes: Thomas Kuhn and the nature of science. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 131–168 Tartaglia N (1554/1959) Quesiti et inventioni diverse. (Reprint: Ateneo di Brescia, Brescia, 1959) Tenca L (1954) Relazione fra Vincenzio Viviani e Michel Angelo Ricci. Rendiconti dell’Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere, Classe di Scienze 87:212–228 Tocci P (1708) Vita di Vincenzio Viviani. In: Crescimbeni GM (ed) Le vite degli arcadi illustri, Vol. 1. Rome, pp 123–139 Vasari G (1988) Lives of the artists: a selection, vol 1 (trans: Bull G, 2 vols) Penguin Books, London, p 1965. (Reprinted 1988; Vol. 2, 1988) Vasari G. Le vite. http://vasari.sns.it/cgi-bin/vasari/Vasari-all?code_f¼print_page&work¼le_vite. Accessed 26 Dec 2019 Westfall R (1980) Never at rest: a biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

On the Interpretations of the Cultural and Techno-Scientific Significance of Portuguese Navigations: A Historiographic Approach

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . António Sérgio, Jaime e Armando Cortesão: Experimentalism and the Geographical Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joaquim Barradas De Carvalho: A Prehistory of Modern Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reijer Hooykaas: Sophisticated Empiricism and Science in Manueline Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Asking why modern science appears in Europe, H. Floris Cohen (in How modern science came into the world) speaks about three traditions that merge in sixteenthto seventeenth-century Europe: speculative philosophy, pure and applied mathematics, and experimentalism that inquires into the facts of nature. This last tradition originated in navigation and exploration of new territories, trade, mining, and technological development that uses mathematics, producing a “coercive empiricism.” Floris Cohen and his mentor Reijer Hooykaas both relate Portuguese nautical knowledge with a new attitude decisive for the rise of modern science. Hooykaas learned the Portuguese language and read the Portuguese literature of the period and its interpretation by Portuguese historians who conceptualized the notions of experimentalism, geographic and intellectual revolution, and its social-cultural conditioning. This chapter offers an inquiry into the genealogy and on the affinity of the theses defended by Hooykaas and his Portuguese predecessors. Based on works produced essentially during the First Republic (1910–1926) and during the Estado Novo (1926–1974), it will be J. Príncipe (*) Departamento de Física da Universidade de Évora, Centro de Estudos de História e Filosofia da Ciência, Instituto de História Contemporânea, IN2PAST, Évora, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_21

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shown that there is a historiographic lineage, tainted with pragmatism, which links authors such as Joaquim Bensaúde, António Sérgio, the brothers Jaime and Armando Cortesão, Silva Dias, Barradas de Carvalho, and Reijer Hooykaas and which is related to the thesis of L. Olschki and E. Zilsel concerning the practical and social origins of modern science. Keywords

Portuguese navigations · Pre-modernity · Geographic Revolution · Experimentalism · Coercive empiricism · Pragmatism

Introduction The idea that Portuguese discoveries were the heyday of Portugal’s history has been consensual among Portuguese liberal intelligentsia since the mid-nineteenth century. Portugal being one of the European colonial powers, studies on the priority of Portuguese discoveries supported overseas politics in favor of colonial rights and fed nationalist feelings. This patriotism was exacerbated by the British requirement of the immediate withdrawal of the Portuguese military forces mobilized in the territories between Angola and Mozambique (Ultimatum of 1890) and the implementation of the Republic in 1910. In this vein, the efforts of the second Viscount of Santarém (1791–1856) are paradigmatic: In 1841, he published the Chronicle of the discovery and conquest of the Guinea by Gomes Eanes de Azurara (1410–1474), work which values the action of Prince Henrique (1394–1460), and proposes a dialogue with Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). In his work Cosmos (1845–1850), Humboldt had ignored the role of the Portuguese in Atlantic discoveries, extolling Colombo (Protásio 2019: 723–4). In 1836, he stated that nautical science was based on “the most general use of the solar and lunar ephemerides of Regiomontanus” (Humboldt apud Cortesão 1960/1975: 1343), which would have been introduced in Portugal by the German Martin Behaim, disciple of Regiomontanus and member of the Mathematical Board that advised King John II. These ideas prevailed in German and French specialized literature throughout the nineteenth century. As an example, the French geographer Lucien Gallois (1857–1941), a disciple of Vidal de la Blache, insisted, in his doctoral thesis, on Behaim’s role, arguing from a passage in the Decades (1552) of João de Barros (Gallois 1890: 25–37). Against the thesis of a German origin of astronomical tables and instruments, the Portuguese engineer and historian of Jewish descent Joaquim Bensaúde (1859–1952) published L’astronomie nautique au Portugal à l’époque des grandes découvertes (1912). Bensaúde had studied in Germany and took care of the international dissemination of his works. In his book he developed ideas already presented by Luciano Cordeiro in 1883, and by Ernst Georg Ravenstein concerning the nullity of Behaim as an astronomer and the importance of Abraham ben Samuel Zacut (c. 1450 – c. 1522); cf. (Ravenstein 1908: 13–16; Bensaúde 1912: 5–18;

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Albuquerque and Saraiva 1955: 433, 440–447). Bensaúde stated that nautical guides, containing astronomical knowledge and instructions (regiment) for the calculation of latitude by the sun, had been written in Portugal at least from 1485. He studied attentively the so-called nautical guide of Munich (a simplified version of the nautical guide existing in the Évora Library) and proved that these guides, intended for Portuguese pilots, were written using astronomical tables elaborated between 1473 and 1478 by Zacut who taught in Salamanca and became royal astronomer of King João II. Bensaúde’s book was greeted by Gallois in 1914 and received the Prix Binoux from the Institut de France in 1916 (dos Santos and Silva 2004: 79). In addition to these “positive” conclusions, Bensaúde believed that, in agreement with Raymond Beazley, author of Prince Henry the Navigator (1895), Prince Henrique (1394–1460) was responsible for a methodical state plan that culminated in the Indian sea route and that in his School of Sagres, from 1416, “a scientific method had been introduced by the collaboration between learned men and sailors, that is, by the interaction between science and experience (theory and practice)”; and the general organization produced “a navy whose functioning was perfect.” The existence of the “Sagres” nautical school, or of a permanent “board of mathematicians” to advice King João II has been a subject of dispute since the 1870s; also there were objections to the idea of a single great plan that evolved from the time of Henrique, inspired by a continuity principle common to many historians whose conceptual roots had a Hegelian evolutionist ground (Ravenstein 1908: 14, 15; Albuquerque 1991: 39–50). However, the pragmatist idea of a successful interaction between learned and practical men has generally been accepted after Bensaúde. In his view, this interaction mobilized the geographical knowledge of the ancient authors regarding the terrestrial trips of the Middle Ages, astrological knowledge (associated with the Libros del Saber de Astronomia, written in the era of King Alfonso El Sabio), and cartographical knowledge. He praised a method that “combined theory and practice and contact with an unknown real world [and allowed] the most remarkable practical application given to astronomy” and the “formation of the modern scientific spirit based on strict and rigorous reasoning, freed from naive beliefs or the unshakable prestige of ancient authors” (Bensaúde 1917: 8, 51–52). Subscribing to the thesis of a Portuguese decline circa 1540 (common to virtually all the authors we will deal with), Bensaúde admits that the introduction of the Inquisition in 1536, and the Company of Jesus in 1545, caused a paralysis of the Portuguese scientific “élan.” The subsequent development of cartography was the work of Flemish geographers – who nonetheless owed much to the Portuguese (Bensaúde 1917: 22, 40, 51). The perspective that attributes to Portuguese discoveries a universalistic significance was developed by Luciano Pereira da Silva (1864–1926), professor at the University of Coimbra, mathematician and historian, and author of Astronomy in Os Lusíadas (1915). He wrote about Camões’ longest poem [1572]: “This epic has exceeded the national limits to become one of the masterpieces of world literature, by the high human value that it contains, because it sings an important phase of civilization, in which the Portuguese nation had the first place. (. . .) The Lusíadas

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acquired a universal interest because they are the epic of the integral conquest of Earth by man” (da Silva 1925: 265). In the Canto X of the epic, Camões described the “machine of the World” – inspired by the Treatise on the Sphere of Pedro Nunes. Pereira da Silva revisited the history of Nunes’ cosmological conceptions quoting Le Système du Monde de Pierre Duhem; he considered the medieval Islamic world, whose astronomical and cosmological knowledge transited to the Latin world. The treatise of Nunes was the third of the Portuguese translations of the elementary treatise Sphera Mundi, written by John Hollywood; cf. (da Silva 1925: 266–290; Albuquerque and Saraiva 1955: 394–397; Hooykaas 1981: 299–301). Pereira da Silva concluded his demonstration of Camões’ knowledge of Ptolemaic cosmography stating: “The Ptolemaic geocentric theory would be abandoned in the seventeenth century (. . .) [it was] the result of the elaboration of centuries, in which the best intelligences of various races and religions collaborated; the Lusíadas’ World machine marks one of the most important stadiums in the evolution of the science of the stars” (da Silva 1925: 288).

Anto´nio Se´rgio, Jaime e Armando Cortesa˜o: Experimentalism and the Geographical Revolution The rationalist cultural movement Seara Nova (founded in 1921), which united many Republican intellectuals, had special interest in the history of Portuguese high culture. Among its members, António Sérgio and the brothers Jaime and Armando Cortesão wrote about the era of Portuguese navigations. They cherished the works of Bensaúde and Pereira da Silva, critically amplifying this interest in the cultural and scientific significance of the knowledge associated with the discoveries, highlighting the experimentalism and geographical revolution that the Portuguese promoted. António Sérgio de Souza (1883–1969) graduated at the Naval School (Lisbon), studied on education in Geneve, and then became Minister of Education (1923) and a distinguished philosopher, historian, and intellectual. Around 1915, he established a connection between Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s labor philosophy, the pedagogy of learning by doing (John Dewey), and the great discussion that took place in France, circa 1910, on the origins of human intelligence (opposing Henri Bergson to Émile Durkheim). In his interpretations of the history of Portugal, he followed that Iberian lineage of thought that since the sixteenth century showed the contradictions of expansion, as exemplified by the economic criticism of the seventeenth-century “arbitristas,” to which a critique of scientific backwardness, consequence of Counter-Reformation, is added since the Enlightenment. Sérgio gave great value to economic factors, judging the dynastic crisis of 1383–1385 as the first major bourgeois revolution and stating that overseas expansion, which this revolution had prepared, served to solve the European problem of trade with the East; cf. (Príncipe 2021: 53–74; Sérgio 1913: 155; 1929b: 48–54, 56; Quesada 1996: 5–50). In his essay “The Cadaverous Kingdom” (1926), he characterized as experimentalist the mindset of the elite linked to the discoveries: Experience arises as the

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source of truth; enquiring is made with critical freedom (Sérgio 1929a: 31, 32). He proposes, very briefly, a justification for the emergence of Galileo’s new physics that promoted the unification of celestial and terrestrial physics: Two peoples (the Italian and ours) were at the forehead of the revolution. Industrial labor and maritime trade impelled the Italian to the revolution; and it was the navigations and the discoveries (children of trade needs) that shaped the mentality of the Portuguese into the new attitude. (Sérgio 1929a: 24–28)

Quoting the beginning of Galileo’s Discorsi, where Salviati talks about the Arsenals of Venice, AS sets a parallel with the Portuguese: The liberating role that industrial mechanical activity had in Italy had navigation among us. It forced us to the direct examination of natural phenomena. The needs of piloting lead us to the study of mathematics, which here culminates with Pedro Nunes; and the assiduous exploration of new sceneries – new lands, new seas, new climates and new stars – showed to the Portuguese, at each step, the huge mistakes of the authorities, whose statements had been given faith as the revelation of God Himself. (Sérgio 1929a: 19, 29)

This seminal passages marks later studies that elaborate on the “Revolution of Experience” and the social conditions of the outbreak and decline of the scientific mindset in Portugal; cf. (Albuquerque and Saraiva 1955: 476, 501; da Silva Dias 1973/1983: 77: de Carvalho 1981a, b: 13, 205, 207). Sérgio’s thesis has affinity with that of the philologist and historian Leonardo Olschki (1885–1962), who in his Galileo und Seine Zeit (published in 1927) stated that what allowed Galileo to transcend the infertile scholarship of its scientific predecessors was the contact with the new tradition of application of mathematics to technological issues, the linear perspective, mining, fortification, ballistic, and tradition that is invoked in the first journey of Discorsi. The new dynamism of the European world is a central element of the Olschki thesis: If the Greeks had rationalist philosophy and deductively developed mathematics (essentially the same as the ones used by Galileo), it was the European seventeenth century which completed what might seem embryonic in ancient Greece; cf. (Cohen 1994: § 5.2). Olschki wrote about Galileo and the artist-engineers in the context of the new vernacular literature. Edgar Zilsel (1891–1944), a Marxist (but independent) sociologist, philosophically a supporter of logical empiricism, revisited the subject enquiring about the sociological function of the occupations of the scientific authors and of their professional ideals. He had in mind the comparison of “analogous groups in other periods and other civilizations” but, in his famous article of 1942, he just considered in detail the cases of Italy and England, studied by Olschki and by Merton. Zilsel relates the rise of science with early capitalism (with its rationality and quantitative mentality) and technology. The new scientific thinking, characterized by causal, experimental, and quantitative methods, needs individualism and freedom from authorities. Zilsel considers “three strata of intellectual activity in the period from 1300 to 1600: the universities, humanism and labor”; the scholastic method is teleological, based on “distinguishing and enumerating” and “explain the ends and meanings of the phenomena”;

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humanism is “more interested in words than in things”; humanists and scholastics had “methodical training of the intellect” but share the same disdain for manual labor and “avoided the vernacular and wrote and spoke Latin only.” Around 1550, “with the advance of technology, a few learned authors began to be interested in the mechanical arts, which had become economically so important (. . .) the rise of the methods of the manual workers to the ranks of academically trained scholars at the end of the sixteenth century is the decisive event in the genesis of science”; this fusion between the learned and the practical men occurred around 1600; cf. (Zilsel 1942: 548–550, 553–555, 560; Cohen 1994: § 5.2.4; 2010: 219, 634–635).). Sérgio refers to Pedro Nunes (1502–1578), João de Castro (1500–1548), Duarte Barbosa (1480–1521), and quote excerpts from Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis de Duarte Pacheco Pereira (1460–1533), Colóquios de Garcia da Orta (1501–1568), and Luís de Camões (1524?–1580). He values the experimentalism of this Portuguese cultural elite of the sixteenth century, not only for its scientific value and material improvement but also for its belonging to a more general revolutionary and progressive trend, “critical humanism,” one facet of which, scientific experimentalism, is the facet looks to nature, while the other facet is a renewed interest in human, social, and moral issues, in a manner illustrated by the work of Erasmus. The National Library (Lisbon) was directed, between 1919 and 1927, by one founder of Seara Nova, Jaime Cortesão (1884–1960). This physician who became an intellectual and a historian supported a creative intellectual group in the library, mostly constituted by members of Seara Nova. In 1927, Cortesão goes into exile, first in France and then in Brazil (1940). In Rio de Janeiro he teaches at the Rio Branco Institute, specializing in the history of Portuguese discoveries and the formation of Brazil. In 1952, he organizes the Historic Exhibition of São Paulo, to commemorate the fourth centenary of the city’s foundation. He returns to Portugal in 1957. For Cortesão, the Portuguese expansion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries corresponded to the execution of an ideal plan slowly elaborated by Christendom, a plan brought to practice by Prince Henrique and which corresponds to a set of cosmopolitan trends, needs, and problems that impelled Christendom to geographical expansion. From an economic point of view, JC points to the imbalance in trade with the East, aggravated by the rise of the Turks, a problem that nourished the idea of obtaining access and control of rich and tropical goods, such as gold and spices (Cortesão 1960/1975: 1323–24). From an intellectual point of view, Cortesão points to a naturalistic trend associated with the popularity of Franciscanism, which was accompanied by a set of geographical legends, including a fantastic view of the Indies, the belief in the existence of a Christian kingdom on the other side of the Islamic world, that of the Prestes João, and the existence of the enchanted islands, founded by Christian bishops somewhere in the midst of the Atlantic Ocean. This new trend, coinciding with Aristotle’s rediscovery, would have favored the victory of nominalists about realists, Cortesão pointing to the Franciscan Roger Bacon as a “precursor of the scientific spirit of the Renaissance” (Cortesão 1960/1975: 1328) (We mainly use the final and unfinished work The Portuguese Discoveries (1960), whose bibliography

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shows how his central ideas stayed stable. The reference to nominalists shows the knowledge of Duhem’s works; cf. (Hooykaas 1987/2003: 24).). According, to Cortesão, the geographical expansion is initiated by the Portuguese, according to a “scientific and methodical organization of the discoveries,” which included several interconnected aspects: naval construction (with the development of the “caravel”); the study of the physical geography of the oceans, with the study of physical agents on the surface of the oceans (namely, sea currents and dominant winds), in order to find a set of transoceanic navigation roads; the science of a ship’s position (using the compass for the directions and determining latitude by the height of stars and/or the sun, using instruments such as the quadrant or the nautical astrolabe, and a set of rules coded for this determination, the “navigation regiments”); the knowledge of the dimensions of the globe (determination of the size of the degree of the meridian); and the art of fixing in the charts accurately the new discovered lands; cf. (Cortesão 1930/1983: 55; 1960/1975: 1330; 1965: 40). For Cortesão as for Bensaúde “Portugal was the great school of navigation in modern times” and “all the expansion of Europe, and its civilization in the remaining part of the planet, from the 16th to the 18th century, is based on nautical science, in that century created and widespread” (Cortesão 1960/1975: 1331). Following his discovery of the so-called Madrid and Coimbra Astronomical Almanacs, which he classifies as “prenautical science,” Cortesão believes that already circa 1320 (the era of King Diniz) there were native methods independent of the Libros del Saber, for the determination of latitudes. The rules and tables of these almanacs could be used to determine the position of ships from the height of the sun (Cortesão 1960/1975: 1351–1363, 1451); cf. (Albuquerque and Saraiva 1955: 401, 410, 428). In Cortesão’s eyes, the Portuguese operated a geographical revolution. The geographical knowledge of medieval Christians was very limited: the existence of the antipodes was denied and only a small part of the elite of that time professed the sphericity of the Earth. Fundamental was the rediscovery of Ptolemy by the Muslims. In Iberia this astronomical knowledge was used not only in astrology but in determining latitude to build sun clocks and to orient themselves to Mecca. Through the translations of Ptolemy’s work, made in Toledo, from Arabic to the Latin, this corpus could benefit Portuguese nautical science: it taught how to relate the earth to the heavenly sphere, projecting over the sphere the geographical position of a place, and how to consider the dimensions of the globe by determining the length of the meridian arc, an aspect stressed by João de Castro in his Treatise on the sphere, a work also rediscovered by Cortesão (Cortesão 1960/1975: 1348, 1365–66, 1435–1438). That said, Ptolemy’s geography was full of errors: the uninhabitability of tropical torrid zones, the extension of Africa to the south and the idea that the Indian Ocean was an inner sea, the evaluation by defect of the degree of meridian, etc. These geographical and cosmographic misconceptions were propagated by Christendom, namely, through Sacrobosco’s De Sphera Mundi (circa 1230) and his comment by Pierre d’Ailly in Ymago Mundi. Accordingly, East Asia would be very close to Hercules’ columns, so the achievement of arriving to the Indies sailing west – as Columbus did – was something conceivable, whereas the trip of Vasco da Gama, bypassing Africa to arrive in India, involved interdicts and dangers. Thus, the

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problems that the Portuguese were experimentally solving were inseparable from the state of geographical knowledge (Cortesão 1960/1975: 1334–1341). The idea that Portuguese nautical knowledge resulted from the collaboration between practical men and men of learning is fundamental to Cortesão: “In addition to practice, knowledge of experience done, it was indispensable for the pilot to know in its general lines the functioning of what they called the machine of the world. An elite of statesmen and men of learning, collaborating with the navigators, presided over the pilot’s formation” (Cortesão 1960/1975: 1381). Cortesão recognizes two nautical cultures: “that of the cosmographers and the men of learning, José Vizinho [Zacut’s disciple], Duarte Pacheco, Pedro Nunes and João de Castro; and the popular culture of the pilots Pedro Eanes, André Pires, João de Lisboa and Manuel Álvares.” The first culture sometimes trailed the second, for practice tuned knowledge and the way of writing regiments and maritime rutters, which contained precious information about physical agents such as winds and currents and geographical accidents (Cortesão 1960/1975: 1394). In his conclusion entitled “Balance of an era,” Cortesão partly resumed his 1930 text for the International Anvers Exhibition and stated that as a result of Portuguese discoveries and achievements, an unparalleled economic and political revolution occurred on a global scale, with a shift from the Mediterranean axis to the Atlantic. At the same time, there was “geographical expansion of humanity,” which culminated in circumnavigation by Magalhães, indeed a geographical revolution. Cortesão emphasized the universalist significance of this revolution, with decisive contributions to nautical astronomy (inaugurating the “astronomical period of navigation”), to the hydrography of new lands and seas, and to cartography. A revolution also occurred from the spiritual and cultural point of view characterized by a “spirit of doubt and experimental essay” against “the restricted and rigid building of medieval science.” For Cortesão, “the feeling of the greatness of humankind and nature” and the formation of the modern spirit of the Renaissance owe more to the news brought to all of Europe by the discoveries than to humanism: “We have seen, observed, we have described with incomparable sharpness and mastery. We have excelled in all observational sciences; and we have accumulated a huge scientific material.” But the Inquisition and the Jesuit monopoly on knowledge and consciences took charge of “condemning in Portugal the scientific spirit that had animated our 15th and 16th centuries” (Cortesão 1960/1975: 1450–1453, 1520–1523); cf. (Cortesão 1930/1983: 48, 50, 68–72). The youngest brother of Jaime, Armando Cortesão (1891–1977) also had an important contribution to the history of science. He graduated in agronomy, and during the First Republic, he then participated in colonial administration and studies. He lived in exile between 1933 and 1952, mostly in London. There he worked for the BBC, approached the Fabian Society and the Labour Party, and developed his historical research benefitting London’s facilities such as the library of the British Museum. With his Cartografia e cartógrafos portugueses dos séculos XV e XVI (Contribuição para um estudo completo), book published in 1935 by Seara Nova, and mostly with his critical edition of The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires (An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to Japan, written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515),

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he got an international reputation. The care with which he transcribed and annotated historical documents was paired with concerns of priority claims of the Portuguese in geographical knowledge and the arrival of Europeans to new places of the globe by sea. This patriotic sense allowed, although he was a republican, cosmopolitan, and liberal, his work to be used and supported by the Estado Novo from a perspective of nationalist praise of the great epic of the discoveries; cf. (de Oliveira 2019: 70–105; Cortesão 1949: 198). In the context of the nationalistic celebration of that 500th anniversary of the death of Henry the Navigator, he co-edited together with Teixeira da Mota the Portugaliæ Monumenta Cartographica (1960–1962). That said, A. Cortesão’s international activities do not authorize any suspicion of positivism or conservative nationalism. The physician and historian Arlindo Camilo Monteiro (1888–1956), the historian of ideas Joaquim de Carvalho (1892–1958), both founders of the Portuguese Group for the History of the Sciences (PGHS), and A. Cortesão were members of the International Academy of the History of Science (IAHS), which periodically organized the International Congresses of the History of Science. The 1931 Congress in London launched a social approach to the history of science. When in 1946 UNESCO was founded, an Institute of History of Science became part of its project, inspired by the 1931 Congress and by a cosmopolitan humanistic ideal. A. Cortesão was invited by Julian Huxley and Joseph Needham, to set it up. The academy was the precursor of the International Union of the History of Science. The constitution of this IUHS, partly financed by UNESCO, was formally announced during the fifth ICHS (Lausanne 1947) where A. Cortesão “presented the UNESCO project and the rationale behind the Organization’s involvement in the field of study: scientific research must be linked to the history of science and vice versa” (Petitjean 2006: 81). A. Cortesão joined the division of “philosophy and civilizations” to lead the project “Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind.” He finished his career at UNESCO in 1952 as Secretary General of the International Commission for a scientific and cultural history of humanity. After his return to Portugal, he became associated with the University of Coimbra, lecturing and directing a center of studies on cartography, created after the 500th Anniversary of Prince Henrique’s death; cf. (de Oliveira 2019: 87; Pereira et al. 2019: 39, 40, 93). Armando Cortesão had the holistic conviction of the necessary articulation between the development of nautical science and economic and cultural history. As he states in his article “Nautical Science and the Geographical Revolution” (1953), from Charlemagne there was a cultural flowering in Europe, with the founding of universities, exchanges with the Islamic world, Aristotelianism, and Franciscanism. In this text, Cortesão highlights the relationship between navigation, which led to a geographical revolution, and the development of capitalism, citing Lewis Mumford regarding the emergence of modern capitalism in the thirteenth century with great investment in ships and cargoes; cf. (Cortesão 1953: 111). In 1934 Portugal hosted the Third International Congress of History of Science, where great importance was given to Portuguese nautical science. This was in part due to the fact that in the 1930s, Aldo Mieli helped the formation of the PGHS. In their historical works, he and George Sarton showed the importance of the Portuguese. For example, Mieli in Panorama General de historia de la Ciencia dedicates

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a chapter to The Great Maritime Discoveries. There he recognizes the priority of navigations and Portuguese nautical knowledge, showing that Colombo, contrary to Vasco da Gama, did something in agreement with medieval knowledge (he quotes Ymago Mundi de Pierre d’Ailly), praises the figure of Prince Henrique, and refers to the meaning of the Almanach Perpetuum of Zacut. In addition to mentioning many of the main sources of Portuguese nautical science, Mieli refers to Portuguese historians such as Santarém, Bensaúde, Pereira da Silva, Armando Cortesão, and Duarte Leite; cf. (Mieli 1967: 87–112).

Joaquim Barradas De Carvalho: A Prehistory of Modern Thought Joaquim Barradas de Carvalho (1920–1979) stood out for his works, produced from the 1950s, on the Portuguese Renaissance, whose specificity he associated with the knowledge and attitudes developed by an elite linked to navigations; cf. (de Carvalho 1964: 306–307; de Carvalho 1981a, b: 87, 97). After completing the degree in History (Lisbon, 1946) in which he was a student of Victorino Magalhães Godinho, his opposition to the regime led him to exile in France and Brazil, joining the CNRS and the École des Annales. He was a professor of Iberian history at the University of São Paulo between 1964 and 1969 and at the University of Lisbon after the 1974 Revolution. Carvalho gathered from the École des Annales the notions of “longue durée”; this “long duration” notion corresponds to the distinction between geographical time, social time, and individual time, the latter being that of “histoire événementielle,” event history, illustrated by Fernand Braudel in his 1949 work on the Mediterranean and also the preference for a structuralist history of the mentalities (Lucien Febvre in Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle, published in 1947, replaces the question “was Rabelais an atheist?” by the question of “might Rabelais have been an atheist?”). He became familiar with the French literature on history and philosophy of sciences, from Abel Rey to Gaston Bachelard (from the latter he took the notion of epistemological rupture) and Louis Althusser, being very sensitive to Alexandre Koyré’s works on the seventeenthcentury Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. From Koyré he adopted the thesis that quantitative and experimental physics were decisive in the constitution of modern thinking and that the rupture that allowed its emergence is marked by the work of Galileo and Descartes; cf. (de Carvalho 1981a, b: 19–20, 41–42). Inspired by the structuralist ideal of a social history of thought, Carvalho would state that Galileo and Descartes, whose study traditionally had belonged to the event history, were only possible because of the formation of general conditions favorable to a new mindset, characterized by a new mental “outillage” (the “mental tool set” being a primary object of structural history); these conditions of practical order are linked to navigations and trade: A rupture like that of the seventeenth century was prepared in depth since long before by men who were the unconscious authors. Their life, the life of their time, led them to it. Maritime and geographical discoveries, the development of commercial life (. . .) led to

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the mental rupture of the seventeenth century. Men are constrained to measure things, to consider nature and society, not only in their qualitative aspect, but also under their quantitative aspect. And the change of attitude that results from this, modified them in what they had the most delicate: their mental “outillage”, and even their psychology. (de Carvalho 1981a, b: 49–50)

Carvalho believes in the singularity of Portugal’s history. Inspired by Sérgio, he claims that in Portugal the first bourgeois revolution took place on the scale of a nation (1383–1385), under the leadership of a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie whose interests will develop towards long-distance maritime trade; cf. (de Carvalho 1981a, b: 199–200). In accordance with Koyré, the new mentality has as key concepts the “mathematization of the real” and “experience” (de Carvalho 1981a, b: 27–31). Carvalho investigated exhaustively the Portuguese literature from the eleventh century to the sixteenth century and divided it thematically into two groups: first group, literary texts, chronics, textbooks originating from the court, texts of various orders, and archival documents, and second group, travel literature and scientific literature. The most notable works of travel literature are Esmeraldo de situ orbis (1505–1508) and the maritime rutters of João de Castro. Esmeraldo shares characteristics of various genres: it is a history book, a navigation regiment, an atlas, a rutter, and a book of geography and cosmography, with a high philosophical value. It is in this travel literature, written in vernacular language by authors who have practical interests and in the scientific literature linked to nautical problems, that Carvalho discovers an important contribution to the “prehistory of modern thinking.” He notes, with Lucien Febvre, that this literature, where new mental tools were socially constituted, is far from the humanist tradition that cultivated Greek and Latin: “humanism and science developed separately and without direct reciprocal action” (Febvre apud de Carvalho 1964: 302–303). As an index of change in mental perspective not only qualitatively but quantitatively, Carvalho considers the generalization of the use of Arabic numerals, a new arithmetic utensil that will replace Roman numbers (and their Gothic and Portuguese derivatives) and the numbers written in full. In accordance with Febvre and various science historians, Carvalho notes that the nonuse of Arabic numerals made the arithmetic operations and the development of algebra extremely difficult and that the nautical tables, used for the calculation of latitude, were written in numerals and needed them for their elaboration (de Carvalho 1981a, b: 98). Carvalho will compare the percentages of the three types of notation of the numbers present in Portuguese literature, a hard and exhaustive work that started in 1958 and which is completed in its 1975 doctorat d’état (de Carvalho 1983). In the long period considered and for the first group of texts, the percentage of Arabic numerals is tiny, corresponding mainly to indications of the year (de Carvalho 1981a, b: 54). But for the second group, things are diverse. Considering the ten travel books that are known, written between 1453 and 1508, Carvalho shows that the percentage is not only higher (reaching in some cases 50%) but above all that the percentage is higher among foreigners than among the Portuguese. These

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foreigners, who stood out during the reigns of João II and/or Manuel I, are men who came to Portugal attracted by maritime and commercial activities and then adopted the Portuguese language, for instance, Martin Behaim, born in Nuremberg, the German Hans Mayr, and the Moravian Valentim Fernandes, the most important book editor of his time in Portugal. This allows Carvalho to conclude that: “The massive introduction and the diffusion of Arabic numerals in Portugal would be due to these foreigners, all Germans (. . .) [They would have] widespread the use of Arabic numerals in the cultural environment of practical men and men of science linked to trade and navigations” (de Carvalho 1981a, b: 66). Carvalho finds two Portuguese exceptions: the “revolutionary” Duarte Pacheco Pereira, navigator and navigation technician of high spirit and accuracy, which established the best value of the length of meridian degree throughout the century (18 leagues by degree), and João de Castro, in whose maritime rutters we see the rise of a modern scientific mentality; both did use Arabic numerals in high percentage. João de Castro is a figure close to Pedro Nunes, the remarkable mathematician and royal cosmographer, in whose works, naturally, also predominate Arabic numerals; cf. (de Carvalho 1964: 333–304; de Carvalho 1983: 404–406). As a general conclusion on the role of Arabic numerals, Carvalho stresses the rise of a cosmopolitan maritime bourgeoisie that produces a travel literature breaking with tradition: “Trade, navigations and the foreshadows of modern science and thinking advance in parallel, imposing genres of life, professions, an economic, social and cultural climate, to which in Portugal, the very nobility could not escape – the climate of the new and rising bourgeoisie” (de Carvalho 1981a, b: 71–72). Considering the notion of “experience,” the second key concept of the new mental “outillage” that is then constituted, a kind of prehistory of the notion of scientific experience, Carvalho verifies that it is also in the second group of texts that a new meaning of the term is constituted. For example, in Esmeraldo we find famous formulas like “the experience that is the mother of things save us from illusion and removes every doubt,” which is the idea of experience emerging as a source of truth, in a context where (geographical) observations show new facts that often deny the authority of ancient texts or result from the careful determination of quantities, distances, and latitudes from the height of celestial bodies; cf. (de Carvalho 1981a, b: 110–113). This observational and practical context of navigations (the word observation is then rare and does not have our current meaning) illustrates Abel Rey’s thesis that “the passage of qualitative to quantitative is essentially linked to the processes of the predominance of perception visuals,” which is to the “sensitive support of thought.” In Esmeraldo, as in João de Castro’s works, the magic mentality is absent and there is a clear distinction between the possible and the impossible. It is also in these two works (in a mental framework simultaneously rationalist and realistic, but cosmologically Ptolemaic) that Carvalho identifies an epistemological reflection on the ways of knowing the truth with a distinction between reason (understanding) and experience; cf. (de Carvalho 1964: 305). Carvalho also identifies the use of the term “experience” to designate situations in which a phenomenon is provoked to be observed, for example, to repeat the act of measuring the “same physical quantity” with attention to the conditions of observation, in a sense that foreshadows the idea of scientific experience or experimentation.

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This sense is found in excerpts of works by Pedro Nunes, the greatest Iberian mathematician of his time, and in João de Castro, the “technician” who collaborates with Pedro Nunes (de Carvalho 1981a, b: 113–114). This interaction between Castro and Nunes corresponds to a unique interaction between science and technique: not only Castro uses astronomical tables calculated by Pedro Nunes, but Nunes also participates in the design of instruments that are then used by Castro in his navigations (de Carvalho 1981a, b: 189; Albuquerque and Saraiva 1955: 463–465). For Castro and Nunes there are true things which are given to reason (such as Euclides’ geometry and logic, the principle of noncontradiction and reasoning using syllogism), and there are situations in which the senses deceive us and must be corrected by reason. Carvalho, who sometimes has an admittedly progressive profile in relation to scientific knowledge, is surprised that João de Castro remains strictly Ptolemaic in cosmology and comes to admit that this assumed conservatism is partly due to fear of the censorship of the Inquisition. Also, the historian of ideas, professor at the University of Coimbra, Silva Dias (1916–1994), following Joaquim de Carvalho, notes that Pedro Nunes in 1566, in his Opera, mentions Copernicus to correct just some aspects of mathematics, remaining silent regarding more general issues, because he refuses to “introduce himself into an order of ideas and problems whose theological implication could not escape his spirit”; he admits that prudence resulted from justified fear (da Silva Dias 1973/1983: 92). This was also the interpretation of the mathematician and historian Francisco Gomes Teixeira (1851–1933); cf. (Teixeira 1934: Part II, end of section ‘A cosmologia na obra de Pedro Nunes’). The existence of a prehistory of modern thinking that occurs in Portugal between the fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, evident in the generalization of the use of Arabic numerals and the replacement of the authority argument with experience, and the elaboration of this notion in the sense of scientific experience, which Carvalho detects in the Portuguese travel and scientific literatures, goes together with the recognition that Portuguese experimentalism, in line with what Koyré states in his work Du monde clos à l’Univers infini, remained in the strictly Ptolemaic framework, no attempt being made in the way of the infinitization of the universe, or the breaking down of Aristotelian cosmology (de Carvalho 1981a, b: 41). Therefore, after his impressive research effort, Carvalho says humbly: “Our test field is by necessity Portugal, even though this is an unfortunate test field (. . .) Galileo was not born, did not live in Portugal, and this did not happened by chance (. . .) Portugal had the maritime discoveries (. . .) but the decay and the Inquisition destroyed, from the mid-sixteenth century, a whole process that would go far” (de Carvalho 1981a, b: 31–32).

Reijer Hooykaas: Sophisticated Empiricism and Science in Manueline Style Since the 1960s, the Dutch historian of science Reijer Hooykaas (1906–1994) conducted studies on the technical-scientific and cultural significance of the Portuguese discoveries, having spent long periods in Portugal and collaborated with two

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professors at the University of Coimbra: his friend Armando Cortesão and Luís de Albuquerque (1917–1992), a mathematician who worked systematically on the history of Portuguese nautical knowledge (For Hooykaas biography, see Flipse (2013), (Hooykaas 1983: 7, 23); about his teaching in the University of Coimbra, which started in 1962, see (Hooykaas 1983: VII–XXII) and (Pereira e al. 2019: 42).). Hooykaas was born into a Calvinist family of silversmiths. From 1923 to 1930, he studied chemistry at the University of Utrecht. In 1946, Hooykaas was appointed to the first chair for the history of natural sciences in the Netherlands. In October 1947, he attended the fifth International Congress of the History of Science in Lausanne, where he learned about the organization of the history of science in other countries and came into contact with historians of science from all over the world. The subject of the relation between religion and science became a constant in his intellectual interests, exemplifying his conviction that the history of science should be taken seriously as part of cultural history. A work that certainly prepared Hooykaas’ interest in the Portuguese case was his 1958 study on Pierre de La Ramée (1515–1572) (Ramus in Latin), humanist, professor of philosophy, and eloquence in Paris, who came to convert to Calvinism. Ramus was an apostle of “philosophical freedom,” an aspect he associated with his religious convictions, and developed a utilitarian and empiricist philosophy, based on the idea of a “natural reason.” Attending traders and workshops, he joined the tradition of men of learning with that of artisans. The Ramism that quickly spread in reformed countries favored the transformation of medieval sciences into modern experimental science (Hooykaas 1958: 1–2, 91–96). For Ramus the mathematical sciences had almost been destroyed by the Platonic prejudice of contempt for practical applications and he argued that their flowering came from association with craftwork. Consequently, he placed calculation above the theory of numbers, land surveying above pure geometry, and nautical science above theoretical astronomy; cf. (Hooykaas 1966/1983: 590; 1972: 90; 1981: 325, 394–395). In his subsequent work Religion and the Rise of Modern Science, Hooykaas deals with the evolution of relationships between reason and experience, showing how the rise of modern science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is accompanied by an overtaking of the Greek vision, which, if it gave us a rationalist philosophy and the mathematics, also created a mindset characterized by the deification of nature, an underestimation of human capacity and a depreciation of manual labor. This worldview came to be replaced by one that values manual labor, with a more humble view of human reason, simultaneously affirming the human ability to intervene in nature, putting it to our service. The new mindset that emerges with early modern science, the cooperation of head and hand, is favored by the emancipation of the bourgeoisie during the Renaissance, emancipation that was effective in renovated cities such as Nuremberg, Anvers, London, or Amsterdam. Many bourgeois being also artisans, collaboration between men of learning and practical men, were promoted, favoring the experimental method – “manual skill and acute methodical thinking now went together” (Hooykaas 1972: cit. 92); cf. (Hooykaas 1981: 395–398; 1983: 19–31; 1987/2003: 27–28).

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This attitude received a positive sanction by reformed religious thinking that valued manual and experimental work. Discussing the so-called Merton thesis (1938) that linked English Puritanism to a tendency towards scientific and experimental knowledge (inspired by Max Weber’s work on Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism), Hooykaas corrects it by stating that scientific research was favored by the belief in the principle that the actions of human life are made “for the glory of God” (not only the religious vocation for priesthood is “divine” but also the “ethics of labor”), by the “theory of accommodation” of Calvin (which favors a nonliteral interpretation of the Bible with regard to Physis), by the Protestant doctrine of the “universal (or general) priesthood of believers” (which eliminated the mediation of ecclesial authority), and by the belief that God reveals Himself to men in two books – the Bible and nature (Hooykaas 1972: 98–134). As Hooykaas will say later, man’s intervention on nature is favored by the mechanistic perspective, which will however develop in opposition to scholastic organicism, because if parts of nature behave as mechanisms, it is possible to manufacture them, while if they are all as organisms, then they are inimitable. So, the attitude of coercive empiricism is favored by mechanism, which clearly progresses between the end of the Middle Ages and Newton (Hooykaas 1987/2003: 29, 30). The expression “coercive empiricism” is of baconian inspiration, since for Francis Bacon experiments are “nature coerced by arts” (Bacon apud Hooykaas 1987/2003: 38). Hooykaas, always crossing philosophy and history of science, was developing a sophisticated empiricism. In his Gifford Lectures (1976), he states the continuity of the scientist’s ways of thought, which is beyond the changeable character of methods and results that may be judged as scientific at a given time and later seen as nonscientific (Hooykaas 1999: 14). There he identifies three components that serve as foundations to “scientific achievements” – “Fact,” “Faith,” and “Fiction” – components whose relative proportions are not a priori fixed. The facts are not objective data that imposes on us from the outside but something true that Newton described like a process: “like de first dawning opens slowly, by little and little into a clear light” (Newton according to Hooykaas 1999: 5). We just have access to “signs yielded by nature [that] have to be translated and interpreted in the language of man,” i.e., “it is not the objective ‘fact’ of nature but the human conception of it that finds its place in science” (Hooykaas 1999: 6). Hence, its dependence on the “analogy of nature” (the sun rises even when there are clouds) and the dialectic of mutual adaptation between the data obtained by experiment and the expected laws, to such an extent that what is a “fact” for a generation can become for the following “fiction.” Moreover, many facts are accepted by authority arguments and not by observation, recall the sixteenth-century quarrels in which observation shocked with the authority of the ancients; cf. (Hooykaas 1999: 188–190, 7–8). “Faith” designates the set of basic beliefs in “things not seen,” many having metaphysical or a priori character. This includes the axioms of a general theory, which are never directly tested by experience, and also the beliefs in order, unity, analogy, harmony, intelligibility of nature, and regulative ideas that should be reflected in the simplicity and economy of theories. These beliefs, which are also a

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practical need for scientists, lead, for example, to persist in the idea that a group of phenomena obeys a law; João de Castro’s experiences about the declination of the magnetic needle invalidated the proportionality relationship between that declination and the difference in longitude from a reference meridian, but he kept the belief in a law to discover in the future (Hooykaas 1999: 10–12). The “fictions” correspond to the use of the faculty of imagination that allows you to build a set of more or less conventional heuristic strategies such as working hypotheses and models. These are conditionally accepted, not being taken to be true, which corresponds to the “suspension of the judgment”; cf. (Hooykaas 1999: 12–13). The way this sophisticated empiricism relates to his historical studies is evident in the chapter “Thinking with the hands,” an expression of the French philosopher Jean Bodin and a metaphor for “let the thoughts be followed by action” (Hooykaas 1999: 186); cf. (Hooykaas 1966/1983: 589). There he shows how, from the seventeenth century, especially in the northwestern countries of Europe, experimental research develops associated with cooperation between artisans, engineers, and men of learning. Hooykaas resumes the early cases of João de Castro (in his maritime rutters written between 1538 and 1541) and Garcia de Orta, with his research on magnetism, stating: “Castro e Orta were exceptionally realistic, free from fables and not afraid of using their own hands in order to find truth about nature”; this was a very different attitude from the Jesuits of Coimbra whose Aristotelian conservatism went by pair with the invocation of experiences they never performed. Hooykaas states that João de Castro remained deeply conservative (Aristotelian) regarding natural philosophy (as he will show in his analysis of Castro’s Treatise on the sphere). So he concludes that “the work of Castro shows what science could be in about 1500 if it was not interacting with ‘philosophical’ circles,” that is, the modern experimental spirit was accompanied by a “philosophical worldview fitting the dominant intellectual vision” (Hooykaas 1999: 201, 200). Four years after his first coming to Portugal, Hooykaas, who already mastered the language of Camões, elaborated his seminal text “The Portuguese discoveries and the rise of modern science” (1966). Here we have the core of his thought on the innovative evolution and character of the knowledge associated with Portuguese discoveries, about the mentality conflicts associated with its reception in Portugal as well as about its international diffusion. This text is part of the whole of his reflexion on the general conditions of the emergence of modern science. Showing a deep knowledge of previous studies (namely, those of Bensaúde, Joaquim de Carvalho, the Cortesão brothers, Pereira da Silva, Fontoura da Costa, Hernani Cidade, etc.), he launches a global interpretation that these authors were unable to provide because they ignored most of the international literature that allowed to place Portugal in the European movement that led to modern science. He himself summarizes: “The Portuguese seafarers and scientists of the 15th and 16th centuries made an important contribution to the rise of modern science by unintentionally undermining the belief in scientific authorities and by strengthening the confidence in an empirical, naturalhistoric method” (Hooykaas 1966/1983: XV, 580). If humanists were decisive for the outbreak of the Renaissance, the arts and the literature and recovery of the classics of the Greco-Latin world, their effect on

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science was not so positive, given the excessive veneration of the ancients (which still is felt in Copernicus) and the contempt of experience. Hooykaas finds wide signs of this conservatism in humanists like Sá de Miranda, Francisco de Holanda, and António Ferreira or in scholars of the Colégio das Artes in Coimbra, an institution that between 1548 and 1555 brought together a set of scholars, from Paris and Bordeaux. Initially, its direction was entrusted to André de Gouveia (a member of the progressive group of Bordeaux) who had sympathy for Erasmus. In 1555 the Jesuits took the control of the Colégio and several of these Erasmian humanists were persecuted by the Inquisition (Hooykaas 1981: 424).), such as Arnaldus Fabricius, George Buchanan, or Élie Vinet. That being Pedro Nunes’ colleagues in Coimbra showed little interest in scientific achievements of their time, for instance, ignoring the works of João de Castro. The great exception, because his adventurous life made him travel a lot, is Luís de Camões who made an apology for “knowledge of experience done,” defending an empiricism that is not against reason but against rationalism, since reality goes beyond the expectations of reason; cf. (Hooykaas 1966/1983: 581, 587–588, 591–594; 1981: 236–238, 327–328, 342; 1999: 185, 201; Albuquerque and Saraiva 1955: 488–491). Hooykaas will develop this topic of the reaction of humanists in his long study on Castro (Hooykaas 1981: 233–245) and in the book (Hooykaas 1979). Quoting authors engaged in the discoveries (Diogo Gomes, Pacheco Pereira, João de Barros, Pedro Nunes, João de Castro), Hooykaas shows how they denounced the mistakes and incompleteness of ancient science, highlighting the methodological turning which values experience over the a priori reasoning of the ancients, scholastics, and humanists. In particular, João de Castro insisted on how reason should adapt to the new facts (such as antipode habitability) and not on the contrary, so Hooykaas sees him as a “precursor” of Francis Bacon (Hooykaas 1966/1983: 582–586, 588–589). He analyzes the living conflict between the conservative tendencies of scholastics and humanists and the abundant evidence of the errors and insufficiency of the old: “It was the Portuguese who had to cope as the first in Europe with these opposite influences. Their solution had two aspects: to follow nature wherever it may lead, and secondly, to respect tradition whenever this is possible without violating the first directive” (Hooykaas 1966/1983: 587); cf. (Albuquerque and Saraiva 1955: 492). Exemplifying this attitude, Pedro Nunes and João de Castro praised and accepted Archimedes’ mechanics, Ptolemy’s cosmography, and Euclide’s mathematics, noting how the new observations came to radically renew natural history, where knowledge is more contingent and where the overtaking of Ptolemy’s geography was evident; Hooykaas praises João de Castro and Garcia da Orta for their modern experimentalist attitude; cf. (Hooykaas 1966/1983: 590–591, 594–595). Later, Hooykaas will designate this attitude of compromise (nonrevolutionary as with many scientists, such as Kuhn will insist), between the acquisitions of experience and the portions of ancient knowledge maintained (Ptolemaic geocentrism and an Aristotelian organicist cosmology without openness to the mechanics of the nominalists), as “science in the Manuelin style,” recalling how in this style of architecture to a gothic (conservative) structure have been creatively added armillary

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spheres and naturalistic elements, creating a hybrid style (Hooykaas 1981: 351, 421–426). In 1981, he will say: “When combining a medieval world view in cosmology and in physics with an unprejudiced modern ‘natural history’ (description of lands and living beings) and a modern experimental approach in ‘mathematics’ (magnetism), Castro represents an intermediate stage between ancient and modern natural science (. . .) the manueline science was nipped in the bud; it never became a complete scientific system, but it remained restricted to a fragment of physics (Castro’s magnetical research), of botany (Orta’s Colóquios) and of mathematics (Nunes’ works),” and it was short-lived, as was also the Erasmian movement that at the same time came to an end with the surrender of the Colégio das Artes in Coimbra to the Jesuits (Hooykaas 1981: 421, 424); cf. (Albuquerque and Saraiva 1955: 189–207). Like his predecessors, Hooykaas has questioned the reason why the Portuguese, having been pioneers in geography and natural history, do not have any significant contribution to the “construction of the modern theoretical world view as established by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Huyghens and Newton.” Hooykaas refers to the deterrent effect on the intellectual freedom of the conjugation between Inquisition and spiritual monopoly of the Jesuits and the fact of the residual collaboration between practical men (artisans) and men of learning, which certainly had to do with the social structure of our bourgeoisie at the time: “The cooperation, however between scholars and artisans, so fruitful for the development of the experimental method, was insufficient; the freedom of theorizing, so necessary for scientific progress, was severely restricted as long as the Jesuits practically monopolized education: the name of the Conimbricenses stood as a symbol of stagnancy in the development of science” (Hooykaas 1966/1983: cit. 596); cf. (Hooykaas 1981: 396–397, 424). Later he will add that if during an initial period there was a royal protection of scientific activity (by the infants Henrique and Luís, brother of King João III), it ended up with the last kings of the House of Avis and with the Spanish Filipes and concerning the social aspect: “the feudal and clerical preponderance over the bourgeoisie helped to maintain the ancient prejudices against manual work at a time when in Northern Europe they had lost a great deal of their influence,” acknowledging that these prejudices came from antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero) and remained among the medieval and later scholastics; cf. (Hooykaas 1981: 395–397). In fact, those who had taken seriously Sérgio’s analysis of the bourgeois revolution of 1383–1385 had discussed this preponderance of the conservative classes. Veiga Simões (1888–1954), since the 1930s insists on the difference between the volume of the Portuguese bourgeoisie and that of other European regions, stating “the nobility, after attempts in the 14th and 15th centuries of invading bourgeoisie’s role in the shadow of his privileges could usurp it from King Manuel and monopolize the conduct of Portuguese life” (Simões apud Godinho 1962/2007: 64). In the same vein, the historian of culture António José Saraiva (1917–1993) associated “the rise and triumph of Renaissance critical rationalism (. . .) with the rise and triumph of the bourgeoisie, which is accentuated in the 16th century, against the feudalism whose mental expression is in scholastic.” Recognizing the social heterogeneity of

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the group linked to nautical knowledge, he notes that this group was without “social base capable of sustaining and developing its innovations,” since the bourgeoisie’s position was weakened with India trade, which was not done in a capitalist mold, being a feudal colonialism controlled by the military and administrative apparatus under the protection of the crown. A consequence of this was, on the one hand, the absence of manufacturing activities in the metropolis and the diminished technical development of the mechanical arts. On the other hand, the favoring of this technical development in other parts of Northern Europe: “Overseas territories were markets for European capitalism, but not for European feudalism”; cf. (Albuquerque and Saraiva 1955: 501–507). For its part, Silva Dias showed the lack of interest of the university to expansion novelties. Taking Pedro Margalho (1474–1556) as an example of the pure university scholar, he showed that “in the very field of ‘physics’ his perspective is dominated by the dialectical and ontological interests of Parisian science” (da Silva Dias 1973/ 1983: 24–33, cit. 31). There was a divorce between philosophy and discoveries, exemplified by the Second Scholastic (the “Conimbricenses,” Jesuits who monopolize teaching in Coimbra). Silva Dias, recognizing the exception of the Aula da Esfera, a science class at the Jesuit College of Santo Antão in Lisbon, suggests that there was little institutional support to the “Revolution of Experience,” during and after his outbreak, so referring to a “fragile ‘revolution from experience’” (da Silva Dias 1973/1983: 46, cit. 24).

Conclusion The first Portuguese historians we considered had patriotic sense and sought to establish the Portuguese priority. Bensaúde and his republican colleagues share the liberal perspective that after the era of the discoveries (fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth century), in which an unparalleled scientific and cultural development took place, Portugal has entered a process of decline. Among them we highlighted the group linked to the National Library of Lisbon directed by Jaime Cortesão and to the intellectual movement of Seara Nova, a group characterized by a natural interdisciplinarity, due to the nonprofessionalization of the historians interested in science, which favored a societal understanding of the factors and conditions of the outbreak and decline of a new mindset, designated by the “Revolution of Experience.” To explain the emergence of the new attitude, they all recognized the scientific Iberian heritage from the Muslim era and the interaction between learned and practical men needed for long-distance navigation. Sérgio favored economic factors and Jaime Cortesão added other mental aspects (like Franciscan naturalism). Historians of culture and ideas, such as the Marxist Saraiva or the neo-Kantian Dias, have critically refined those global explanations. This interdisciplinarity, which included interaction with men of science, may not have produced a careful exegesis of sources but it prevented them from falling into the positivism of the pure “internalist” analysis of temporal succession of scientific discoveries. There was a concern with the cultural/civilizational significance of a global movement with many

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facets, of which the geographical revolution was the most obvious positive aspect. These explanations are compatible and even have affinities with theses formulated by Olschki and Zilsel, favoring a materialistic social approach, but they usually do not go deeply in a comparative perspective with other nations and periods. The perception that the Scientific Revolution was initiated by Copernicus and had occurred elsewhere, and the fact that the exponents of our science (Castro and Nunes) were Ptolemaic in cosmography, prevented the connection between what took place in Portugal and the rise of modern science. That connection was established by a new generation. Barradas de Carvalho, in the context of the École des Annales, adopted a structuralist perspective and proposed that the specificity of our Renaissance corresponds to a prehistory of modern thinking in which quantitative mentality and experimentalism were constituted. Reijer Hooykaas, after careful studies made on the relations between science and reform, sees in our “case” a particular configuration, which he names “science in manueline style”; he identifies elements of modernity imposed by practical needs, the interaction between the hand and the head, the abandonment of philosophical prejudices when solving concrete problems, and the development of the rigor of observation, which in Castro expands to the care of the causes of error and an experimental sense, which is combined with disinterested curiosity, the feeling of the beauty of the natural world, and the glory of its understanding, as well as with an ethical humanism dominated by the care of others and tolerance and interest in other peoples; cf. (Hooykaas 1981: 408). Hooykaas will insist on the contingent aspect of this process. The consequences of this interaction between practice and theory, which favored the emergence of experimental science, were unpredictable. It was not anchored in a metaphysical or philosophical perspective that would make experimentalism the good path to the knowledge of the book of nature. The pragmatic attitude developed in Portugal could not foresee that in this new approach was contained an essential component of modern science (and technology): coercive empiricism. The reunion of this trend with Greek philosophical rationalism and mathematics, as well as a more humble attitude of reason towards the unexpected of the world of facts, will produce the rise of modern science. In its 1987 article, presented in public in 1983, Hooykaas insists on how the geographic revolution “marks the beginning of a new, empiricist, non-rationalistic trend in science” (Hooykaas 1987/2003: 22, 25–28, cit. 28). One of the aspects of Hooykaas reflexions that favor the relevance of the geographical revolution is his analysis of Copernicus’ work and its reception throughout the sixteenth century, showing the anachronism of those who see Copernicus as essentially revolutionary: “Whereas (before Copernicus) the seafarers had convinced everybody by observations that Ptolemy’s geography was wrong in many respects, Copernicus could not adduce similar proofs that the physical basis of Ptolemy’s astronomy was wrong. Copernicus’ advocacy was just a great achievement in the art of astronomy; it did not add new data to the ‘history of nature.’” The conflict between hard facts and systems of ideas, which emerged with this geographical revolution that produced a new natural history and methodological changes in the epistemological plan (the Revolution of Experience as several called it), was decisive for the rise of modern science (Hooykaas 1987/2003: 31–36, 40–43, cit. 34).

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Cross-References ▶ “The Herodotus of Geometry”: Montucla and the Birth of a General Historiography of Science in the French Enlightenment ▶ The Historiography of Scientific Revolutions: A Philosophical Reflection

References Albuquerque L (1991) Dúvidas e certezas na história dos Descobrimentos portugueses. Círculo de Leitores, Lisboa Albuquerque L, Saraiva AJ (1955) As navegações e as origens da mentalidade científica. In: Saraiva AJ (ed) História da Cultura em Portugal, vol II. Jornal do Fôro, Lisboa, pp 369–507 Bensaúde J (1912) L’astronomie nautique au Portugal à l’époque des grandes découvertes. Max Drechsel, Bern Bensaúde J (1917) Histoire de la science nautique portuguaise – Résumé. Imprimerie A. Kundig, Geneve Cohen HF (1994) The scientific revolution: a historiographical inquiry. Chicago University Press, Chicago Cohen HF (2010) How modern science came into the world: four civilizations, one 17th-century breakthrough. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam Cortesão J (1930/1983) A Expansão dos portugueses na história da civilização. Livros Horizonte, Lisboa Cortesão A (1949) A ciência náutica e o renascimento. Seara Nova 1136-1137:198–202 Cortesão A (1953) Nautical science and the geographical revolution. Impact Sci Soc 4(2):111–118 Cortesão J (1960/1975) Os Descobrimentos Portugueses. Livros Horizonte, Lisboa Cortesão J (1965) A expansão dos portugueses no período henriquino. Portugália, Lisboa da Silva LP(1925) A concepção cosmológica nos Lusíadas. Lusitânia, Revista de Estudos Portugueses 2(V–VI):263–290 da Silva Dias JS (1973/1983) Os Descobrimentos e a problemática cultural do século XVI, 3rd edn. Presença, Lisboa de Carvalho JB (1964) O ‘Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis’ de Duarte Pacheco Pereira na História da Cultura. Revista de História 29(60):291–307 de Carvalho JB (1981a) Portugal e as origens do pensamento moderno. Livros Horizonte, Lisboa de Carvalho JB (1981b) À la recherche de la spécificité de la renaissance portugaise. Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris de Oliveira FR (2019) Armando Zuzarte Cortesão (1891–1977) vida, exílio e mapas. In: de Matos AT (ed) Homenagem aos fundadores da Academia de Marinha. Academia de Marinha, Lisboa, pp 71–105 dos Santos JM, Silva JMA (2004) A historiografia dos descobrimentos através da correspondência entre alguns dos seus vultos. Imprensa da Universidade, Coimbra Flipse A (2013) Reijer Hooykaas (1906–1994). Studium 6(3/4):287–291 Gallois L (1890) Les géographes allemands de la Renaissance. Ernest Leroux, Paris Godinho VM (1962/2007) A expansão quatrocentista portuguesa. Dom Quixote, Lisboa Hooykaas R (1958) Humanisme, science et Réforme, Pierre de la Ramée (1515–1572). E. J. Brill, Leyde Hooykaas R (1966) The Portuguese discoveries and the rise of modern science. Boletim da Academia Internacional da Cultura Portuguesa, 2: 87–107. Also In: Hooykaas (1983), pp 579–598 Hooykaas R (1972) Religion and the rise of modern science. Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh Hooykaas R (1979) Humanism and the voyages of discovery in 16th century Portuguese science and letters. North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam

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Hooykaas R (1981) Science in Manueline style. The historical context of D. João de Castro’s works. In: Cortesão A, de Albuquerque L (eds) Obras Completas de D. João de Castro, four volumes (1968–1981), vol 4. Academia Internacional da Cultura Portuguesa, Coimbra, pp 231–426 Hooykaas R (1983) Selected studies in history of science. Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra Hooykaas R (1987/2003) The rise of modern science: when and why?, British Journal for History of Science 20(4):453–473. In: Hellyer M (ed) (2003) The scientific revolution: the essential reading. Blackwell, Oxford, pp 19–43 Hooykaas R (1999) Fact, faith and fiction in the development of science. Kluwer, Dordrecht Mieli A (1967) Panorama General de historia de la Ciencia La eclosión Del Renacimiento. EspasaCalpe, Madrid Pereira G, Martins D, Fiolhais C (2019) Os primórdios do ensino de História da Ciência na Faculdade de Ciencias da Universidade de Coimbra. História da Ciência e ensino, construindo interfaces 20:37–51 Petitjean P (2006) UNESCO and the International Union for history of science. In: Petitjean P, Zharov V, Glaser G, Richardson J, de Padirac B, Archibald G (eds) Sixty years of sciences at UNESCO, 1945–2005. UNESCO, pp 81–82. halshs-00166672 Príncipe J (2021) Sérgio: a técnica, o trabalho e as origens do conhecimento científico humano. Trans/Form/Ação, Marília 44:53–74 Protásio DE (2019) Polémicas entre Alexander von Humboldt e o visconde de Santarém 1837–1849. Mátria Digital 7:699–727 Quesada MÁL (1996) La ‘decadencia’ española como argumento historiográfico. Hispania Sacra 48(97):5–50 Ravenstein G (1908) Martin Behaim, his life and his globe. Georg Philip and Son, London Sérgio A (1913) O parasitismo peninsular. A Vida Portuguesa 20:153–159 Sérgio A (1929a) Ensaios II. Seara Nova, Lisboa Sérgio A (1929b) Historia de Portugal. Labor, Barcelona Teixeira FG (1934) História das matemáticas em Portugal. Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, Lisboa. Available at http://www.mat.uc.pt/~jaimecs/livrogt/livrogt.html; consulted in 30-7-2022 Zilsel E (1942) The sociological roots of science. Am J Sociol 47(4):544–562

“The Herodotus of Geometry”: Montucla and the Birth of a General Historiography of Science in the French Enlightenment

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Montucla Before the Histoire des mathématiques: Between Newtonianism and Erudition . . . D’Alembert and Montucla: Shaping Enlightenment Historiography of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter retraces the way in which the first European general history of science was conceived and brought to completion by Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725–1799), one of the members of the group of philosophes gathering around Jean Le Rond d’Alembert when, during the 1750s, he was editor of the Encyclopédie. Combining a tireless historical work with strong philosophical views derived from one of the most preeminent members of the French Enlightenment movement, Montucla ultimately gave modern science its first sophisticated historical narration: thus, the forging and publication of the first edition of Montucla’s Histoire des mathématiques (1758) will be taken as an auspicious vantage point to explore the ways in which the history of science was written, and the historical course of science conceptualized, during the mature phase of the Enlightenment. Keywords

French enlightenment · Enlightenment historiography · Montucla · Delisle · Weidler · D’Alembert · Condillac · Encyclopédie · Mathematical sciences

G. Matteoli (*) University of Turin, Turin, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_22

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Introduction The eighteenth century saw an unprecedented production of monographical works dedicated to the history of the sciences. Unsurprisingly, it was those among them universally renowned as the most advanced and ancient – the mathematical sciences, such as geometry or astronomy – that were first to obtain systematic historical treatment, as the writings of Weidler, Kästner, Costard, Heathcote, Heilbronner, Genovesi, Cossali, Estève, Lalande, Bailly, and Bossut testify. In this field alone, we can appreciate an exponential increase in the output of this genre, reaching its peak in the second half of the century; a phenomenon of outstanding growth, which still largely calls for a complex historical exposition beyond the traditional tropes of enlightenment historiography. To be sure, before that time the past of many individual disciplines had already been variously charted and explored. We know that the etairos of Aristotle, Eudemus of Rhodes, wrote histories of geometry, arithmetics, and astronomy which, though now lost, were very influential through late antiquity (Zhmud 2006). With the Renaissance revival of classical studies, a reinvigorated sense of historicity gradually emerged; and while a privileged kind of relationship with past authors was generally established, e.g., through reforms in education, these new scholarly practices also began positing a critical distance between “the Ancients” and “the Moderns” – velut in confinio duorum populorum constitutus, as Petrarca remarked, ac simul ante retroque prospiciens. This constant interaction with ancient texts remained the rule at least until the end of the seventeenth century, especially for the mathematical disciplines. Correspondingly, the main uses of history for the sciences mostly pertained to providing a means for legitimizing or defining the nature of conflicting contemporary practices and theories against the backdrop of classical standards, or to justify the value of the sciences to university authorities and students and even at times to the lay public (Goulding 2010; Levitin 2015). At the same time, from Vasari to Fontenelle, the genre of biography slowly appeared to differentiate itself from older analogues, like hagiography, incorporating unusual characters other than popes, saints, and kings as worthy of being immortalized through historical accounts. If in his Life of Descartes Adrien Baillet still had to justify extensively his choice of writing about the life of a philosopher, a few decades later Fontenelle’s eulogies of the deceased members of the Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences could now rely on the highest praises of a transfigured intellectual community (Ribard 2003; Mazauric 2007). Nevertheless, although dating the origins of the historiography of scientific disciplines to the eighteenth century would prove itself inaccurate, it is evident that a renewed alliance between science and history was sealed during the European Enlightenment, especially in its hegemonic French variant (Gusdorf 1977). Science itself was changing meaning, increasingly acquiring a status of its own; a status distinct from all previous attempts to interpret nature and humanity’s place in it. In this respect, the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns marked a clear watershed. The astounding successes achieved by the natural sciences in the course of the previous two centuries in explaining some fundamental physical

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phenomena (such as the mechanism of celestial bodies and the motion of objects in space) engendered a bitter controversy over their historical and even epochal significance compared to the results obtained in antiquity. A dynamic conception of knowledge was taking over the old metaphysical view that true knowledge is fixed and can only be subject to comment or interpretation: science progressed, and this progress could even bring about important social and cultural benefits. Other expressions of human intellectual powers, like poetry or the fine arts, seemingly did not progress in this way, and this was perceived as a valid reason for the promoters of the new world vision to begin espousing its epistemic preeminence. In the meantime, this ideological process was aided and defined by important institutional shifts that saw the creation of designated sites for conducting scientific activities – the Academies – under the protection and close control of the state (Laudan 1993; Ziche and Van Driel 2011; Ziche 2012). When this process was still in its early stages, Francis Bacon, the herald of modern science, was among the first to recognize how the as yet untapped powers of historiography might contribute to his program: No man hath propounded to himself the general state of learning to be described and represented from age to age, as many have done the works of nature and the state civil and ecclesiastical; without which the history of the world seemeth to me to be as the statue of Polyphemus with his eye out; that part being wanting which doth most shew the spirit and life of the person. And yet I am not ignorant that in diverse particular sciences, as of the jurisconsults, the mathematicians, the rhetoricians, the philosophers, there are set down some small memorials of the schools, authors, and books; and so likewise some barren relations touching the inventions of arts or usages. But a just story of learning, containing the antiquities and originals of knowledges, and their sects; their inventions, their traditions; their diverse administrations and managings; their flourishing, their oppositions, decays, depressions, oblivions, removes; with the causes and occasions of them, and all other events concerning learning, throughout the ages of the world; I may truly affirm to be wanting. The use and end of which work I do not so much design for curiosity, or satisfaction of those that are the lovers of learning; but chiefly for a more serious and grave purpose, which is this in few words, that it will make learned men wise in the use and administration of learning. (Bacon 1857/1859, VI: 183–184)

The time would soon be ripe for answering Bacon’s call. But having recognized the superiority of modern science over that of the ancients, the historian of science could not be content with the simple accumulation and description of facts as they had occurred. Rather, it was necessary to give substance and meaning to the progress that had been made through the centuries in the unraveling of the secrets of the universe – and it would have been the mathematical sciences, above all, that were about to provide unmistakable evidence for this idea. The generation of the philosophes, raised in the aftermath of the Quarrel, believed that Newton’s discoveries in the Principia mathematica came at the end of a century that represented a true unicum in human history; a “revolution,” as it was starting to be called, that in their hopes had once and for all put the study of nature on the right track. The perceived historical uniqueness of such an event would provide an exciting narrative structure to organize materials in order to design the first general account of

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the history of science from its beginnings to the present age. Some attempts were made in this direction: one of the early members of the Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences, Pierre Rémond de Montmort, once wrote to Johann Bernoulli that It would be desirable if someone wanted to take the trouble to instruct us on how and in what order the discoveries in mathematics have followed themselves, one after another; and to whom we should be obliged for them. The history of painting, of music, of medicine have been written. A good history of mathematics [histoire des mathématiques], especially geometry, would be a much more interesting and useful work. What a pleasure it would be to see the union, the connection between methods, the linkage of different theories, beginning from the earliest times up to our own, where this science has been brought to such a high degree of perfection. It seems to me that such a work, if done well, could be regarded to some extent as a history of the human mind [l’histoire de l’esprit humain]. (Montmort 1714, 399) (Unless otherwise specified, all translations are my own)

When Montmort died in 1719, Fontenelle duly compiled his obituary to be read in front of the other academicians. He recalled that Montmort “had been working on a History of geometry,” and added that “each science, each art should have its own”: It is a true pleasure, and of a very instructive kind, to watch the path taken by the Human Mind [Esprit], and, geometrically speaking, this sort of progression, whose intervals are at first extremely wide, and then proceed naturally, always tightening more and more. [. . .] The project was still in its early stages. May he have a worthy successor! (Fontenelle 1719, 92)

Less than 40 years later, in 1758, a mathematician belonging to the encyclopedists’ circle who was particularly close with Jean le Rond D’Alembert, called Jean-Étienne Montucla, eventually became the “worthy successor” Fontenelle had wished for when he published his Histoire des mathématiques, the first modern general history of science. If one attentively examines the genesis and the accomplishment of Montucla’s work, it is difficult to escape the impression that it was neither a spontaneous nor fortuitous initiative dictated by mere erudition, but that it was instead the product of a precise cultural operation promoted by one of the protagonists of the French Enlightenment. Histories of science such as Montucla’s were part of a wider set of metascientific works (pamphlets, encyclopedias, biographies, philosophical systems, etc.) implicitly or explicitly directed both at delineating science for other scientists and at interpreting it for a wider, unspecialized audience. Compared to the attention that has been dedicated to later periods, such as Romanticism or Positivism, the virtual lack of studies on the whole of this historiographical production has prevented its characteristic individuality from being adequately perceived – as well as from isolating the theoretical and ideological conditioning that marked the beginnings of modern historiography of science overall (but see, for example, Engelhardt 1979; Dagen 1980; Galluzzi 1989). This chapter aims at retracing one of the major threads of this tapestry by following the intellectual and biographical motives that brought to the crafting and publication of Montucla’s work.

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Montucla Before the Histoire des mathe´matiques: Between Newtonianism and Erudition Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725–1799) was born in Lyon into a small family of tradespeople. He was sent to receive his early education at the local Collège de la Trinité, which had been run by the Jesuits since 1565. During the sixteenth century, a series of distinguished professors (such as Honoré Fabri and Paul Hoste) had made the Collège renowned throughout France for the quality of its scientific training. When Montucla entered it at the end of the 1730s, the school was endowed with a library of nearly 45,000 volumes, an astronomical observatory, and a cabinet of antiques and medals. Around that time there were also two younger students, Charles Bossut and Jérôme Lalande, who attended the same classes as Montucla and were later to become equally prominent historians of science. Lalande remained a lifelong friend of Montucla, and eventually took care of the finalization and publication of the second expanded edition of his Histoire de mathématiques after his death (Montucla 1799/1802). Although the curriculum generally followed the ratio studiorum of the Jesuit order, the professors’ personality and ideological leanings could bear a significant impact on their teaching. Around 1740, a philosophical change of scene had taken place when some of the old savants of Cartesian compliance relocated in other cities, and the ranks of the local junction point of the lyonnaise scientifically minded intellectual class, the Société des conférences, were joined by a group of younger scholars generally committed to Newtonianism, such as the polymath Jacques Mathon de la Cour and the Jesuit Father Laurent Béraud. The latter also became the new professor of mathematics at the Collège, as well as the director of the astronomical observatory and of the cabinet of antiques by virtue of his vast erudition. At the end of his life Montucla would still recall him fondly as “a great scholar and artful Jesuit, who put in my hands so to speak my first book of geometry” (Montucla 1799/1802, 348). The same is true for Lalande and Bossut; and even though we own scarce records of Béraud’s teaching activities, there are reasons to believe he was the first to spark their interest towards a historical approach to the study of the sciences. Not only were Mathon and Béraud interested in the latest scientific trends and developments – overtly defending Newtonian ideology against Cartesian attacks while making contributions to vanguard fields of the time, such as electricity, magnetism, and chemistry – they also incarnated some of the last specimens of those sixteenth-century’s erudite savants whose work could still combine, say, a mémoire on the life of Socrates and a study on how to improve the fertility of the soil; the analysis of a medal from the late Roman Empire and a dissertation on lunar eclipses (Crépel 2017). Furthermore, Lyon’s intellectual milieu stood out, even within the academic movement, for its peculiar leaning towards historical-scientific interests. For example, already in 1674 one of the predecessors of Béraud on the chair of mathematics at the Collège, Father Claude François Milliet Dechales, had

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edited a successful translation of Euclid’s works and a Cursus, seu Mundus mathematicus which contained a Tractatus proemialis de progressu matheseos et illustribus mathematicis; in 1740, Félix Juvenel de Carlencas published in Lyon a second expanded edition of his encyclopedic Essai sur l’histoire des belles-lettres, des sciences et des arts, which was present in the library of the Collège. At the beginning of the 1740s, the members of the local Académie des Sciences (possibly prompted by the publication of Carlencas’ Essai) produced a series of mémoires revolving around historiographical-scientific topics, of which unfortunately we have retained only the titles: Mathon de la Cour presented his Réflexions sur l’utilité de l’histoire, a fait voir combien l’histoire des sciences et arts était plus utile que l’histoire des faits et des évènements; Father Colonia gave an essay on Les révolutions de l’esprit humain dans les sciences et dans les arts; Du Perron a Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire de la physique, and the president Dugas a Dissertation sur l’histoire de la naissance et des progrès de la physique depuis les plus anciens philosophes jusques aux plus modernes (Crépel and Schmit 2017, 103). Given the relatively small size of the city and the limited availability of places for intellectual exchanges, it is very likely that Montucla attended or at least heard about those lectures. Since Lyon did not have a university at that time, when he concluded his studies at the Collège in 1743, Montucla was sent to Toulouse to study law; a profession that his family, which was far from wealthy, saw as more lucrative than a career in mathematics. But things had to play out otherwise; even though he eventually got his license in 1745, he never practiced advocacy. During his stay in the city, he still preferred the company of the Toulouse savants over university life. He started attending the informal meetings of the Société des Sciences (which shortly thereafter would have formally come to constitute the royal Académie des Sciences, Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres of Toulouse) and was even admitted as élève in the class of geometry (Taillefer 1984, 269). Though less lively than its lyonnaise counterpart, the Academy of Toulouse showed flourishing intellectual activity in the field of astronomy, animated by François Garipuy and his pupil Antoine Darquier. They both came from the Toulouse aristocratic elite, who were characterized by a peculiar combination of classical erudite learning and openness towards new ideas, which was reflected diffusely in their writings (Lamy 2006). As Darquier remembered in the eulogy he wrote for his mentor, Garipuy spent much of his time “reading the geometers, ancients and moderns,” adding that “in this regard, his erudition was portentous”: even the most simple astronomical observation of an eclipse could contain an erudite digression on the measuring tools of ancient astronomers or the cosmology of the Greeks (Darquier 1784, 144). Montucla collaborated with them, assisting their work and continuing to keep his confrères in Lyon informed about their discoveries and observations until 1750. Thanks to the support of Béraud and Mathon, in 1747 Montucla was received in the class of mathematical sciences as a member of the Académie of Lyon, by then renamed Société Royale. He actively participated in the life of the society, attending its weekly meetings and supplying some mémoires on geometry, algebra, and calculus; he also fostered the reception as associé of Alexandre Savérien, a nautical

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engineer who would become one of the most prolific historians of science and philosophy in the second half of the century. Moreover, around that time, Savérien was working on his Dictionnaire universel de mathématique et de physique (1753), to which Montucla provided some direct contributions (see for example the entries “Cone,” “Frottement,” “Hydraulique,” “Intéret,” “Lumière,” “Ovale,” “Parabole,” “Sciographie,” and “Section conique”). Determined to pursue a career in mathematics, in 1750 Montucla decided to relocate to Paris in order to gain “what only Paris could offer at the time: [. . .] expert teachers giving lessons everywhere; collections rich in the works of nature and art; libraries; and most of all, meetings of scholars and gens de lettres” (Leblond 1800, 5). The occasion arose from the fact that, in the previous years, his teacher Béraud had been maintaining a scientific correspondence with the astronomer JosephNicolas Delisle, former assistant of the old Giovanni Domenico Cassini and professor of mathematics and physics at the Collège Royal of Paris. Delisle had recently returned from a 20-years’ long diplomatic trip to Saint Petersburg, where King Louis XV and Czar Peter the Great jointly entrusted him with the task of founding an observatory, so as to train the first generation of Russian astronomers in the most advanced astronomical techniques. In 1750, Delisle was conducting his observations at the Hôtel de Cluny, near the Sorbonne; and that’s where, under Béraud’s request, he received Montucla together with Lalande and Bossut (though at slightly different times) and introduced them to the Parisian grand monde. Delisle came from a family of scholars. His father Claude was a historian, who had also been employed as private preceptor by the royal family (among others, for the Regent Philippe d’Orleans) and had been working on a universal history, remained unaccomplished and published posthumously. Claude Delisle took care of homeschooling his children, too, and they all ended up following in his footsteps. Even though Joseph-Nicolas made a name for himself mostly as an astronomer and a geographer, his writings are permeated by a subtle historical perceptiveness that, compared to the examples previously taken into consideration, had more to do with the pragmatic necessity and usefulness of a historical treatment of scientific progress based on their most recent outstanding progresses than with pure old-fashioned humanistic erudition (Doublet 1934). This new approach was going to have far-reaching consequences. Free of his diplomatic obligation, after his return in Paris, Delisle could finally start working again on a project he had been planning since the days of his apprenticeship at the observatory with Cassini (who had also published a short essay on The Origins and Progresses of Astronomy (Cassini 1693): Having applied myself by inclination to the study of Astronomy for more than 25 years, and having collected during that time all the observations, theories, and other memoirs which could serve the progress of this science, I finally understood that this science was too vast for a single astronomer to hope to be able to treat it in all its parts in a manner that leaves nothing to be desired in the century in which we live. Thus, I have understood that the project of composing a Complete Treatise of Astronomy, Historically Expounded, which I had been pondering for some time [. . .] was outside of my capabilities; or at least, that it was uncertain if I could ever accomplish it alone. (Delisle 1738, 3)

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Nevertheless, this idea never really left Delisle’s mind, and he kept collecting materials and recruiting partners for its accomplishment ever since. During his return trip from Russia, he began to gather all sorts of writings scattered across Europe relating to the history of astronomy, such as a good part of Kepler’s correspondence and the manuscript bequest by Hevelius. While in Wittenberg, he recruited the German erudite and astronomer Johann Friedrich Weidler (his correspondent at least since the 1730s, to whom he had already commissioned his Historia astronomiae, Weidler 1741) to engage in the crafting of a complete bibliography of astronomy – which he fulfilled (Weidler 1754) – that was to be integrated into a newer and more complete general history of astronomy from its origins to the present time by Delisle. Although left unaccomplished by Delisle himself, the project was eventually taken up and completed by his pupil Lalande (Lalande 1803) and even continued and significantly expanded by the pupil of the latter, Jean-Baptiste Delambre. As shown by Delisle’s correspondence with Weidler, in the years around 1750 he was engaged in the composition of this work. What part Montucla might have had in it, if any, we can only conjecture; what we do know is that a few years later, in the preface to his Histoire des mathématiques, Montucla provided a very peculiar assessment of the work of Delisle’s collaborator – that is, Weidler’s. The preface contains a brief history of the historiography of mathematical sciences before Montucla himself. The main aim of this section is to argue that no one had ever really attempted a proper history of science before his own: his predecessors are variously deemed and valued as chroniclers, bibliographers, or mere erudites, sometimes more harshly, sometimes less so (as in the case of his friend Savérien). But Weidler’s work is treated somewhat differently. Montucla states that he would render himself “guilty of ungratefulness towards a scholar whose works I have frequently found useful” and in which “a lot of erudition can be appreciated,” if he denied them “a certain merit.” But then he adds that he does not “fear the result of the comparison” with his own Histoire, since “the most curious and interesting things to be read in it were not taken from Mr. Weidler”: I would often have made considerable mistakes if I had stuck to this guide, which the torch of criticism does not always shed enough light on. I have taken the liberty of pointing this out in a few notes. (Montucla 1758, I, xx–xxi)

Weidler is indeed mentioned repeatedly and criticized throughout the text. Montucla’s evaluation of his work is often mixed: while the book is “very valuable” and a treasure trove of “bibliographical details,” it cannot possibly “be taken as a true History,” except by “those who would have no idea of the object of such a title” (Montucla 1758, I, 57). And the reason is that The history of a science is not the history of all the authors who have written about it, but only of those who have contributed by their work to push back its limits: the exact enumeration of the former is the work of the Bibliographer, and not of the Historian. It should therefore come as no surprise that no mention is made here of many authors to whom Mr. Weidler has given a place in his work. (Montucla 1758, I, 553)

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It appears that between his arrival in Paris and the publication of the Histoire des mathématiques], Montucla had clearly made up his mind on what value and purpose one should attach to the historian of science’s work, partially moving away from the erudite and humanistic approach he had acquired during his formative years towards a more sophisticated and ultimately philosophical conception of history; and the reason for this ideological reorientation is to be traced back to a decisive encounter he made in his first few years in Paris, during the informal meetings that were regularly held, not far from the Louvre, at the shop of a bookseller called CharlesAntoine Jombert.

D’Alembert and Montucla: Shaping Enlightenment Historiography of Science Among the Parisian booksellers, Jombert was one of the three most active in international trade. He was the cousin of André François Le Breton, one of the four publishers of the Encyclopédie, and had been specializing in the publication of scientific texts related to engineering and the military arts (Kaucher 2015). Montucla started attending his soirées, whose characteristic atmosphere has been described by his first biographer Leblond: It was there that, laughing at the Academies and at the arrogance of which each of them in the Louvre was unable to defend himself, the mathematician, the poet, the moralist and the tactician, the painter and the doctor, met every evening and (to use one of their own expressions) teased each other [s’émoustillaient] in order to maintain their spirits in the liveliness necessary for all their operations. What they found there, above all, was that sort of reciprocal influence which, through a piece of advice, a reflection, even a random contradiction, comes to erase the inaccuracies, to fill the gaps, to enrich the details, and to give to the whole what the views and meditations of one are unable to produce. (Leblond 1800, 6–7)

There Montucla had the chance to make contact with some of the protagonists of the French Enlightenment movement, such as Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, and, most notably, D’Alembert, who would remain a “friend for the rest of his life” (Leblond 1800, 8); it was he that, ultimately, inspired and encouraged the composition of the Histoire des mathématiques. For D’Alembert, the necessity of composing a general history of the sciences had been slowly evolving from a philosophical desideratum into a fully fledged program. Only adumbrated at first in the historical prefaces to some of his major scientific works from the 1740s, the Mémoire historique sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. Jean Bernoulli (1748) and the éloge of the Abbé Terrasson, this need would find its first expression in the Discours préliminaire to the encyclopedia (1751) and eventually in the Essai sur les élémens de philosophie (1759). The philosophical roots of this program can be found in two contemporary cultural threads that also bear close relation to D’Alembert’s biography: the historiographical revolution brought about by Voltaire and the elaboration of Locke’s genetical analysis of knowledge by

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Condillac (for a broader view taking into account other important sources, such as Fontenelle and Montesquieu, see Shklar 1981; Brunetti 1984). Although Voltaire did not seem to show a particularly keen interest in the history of science per se – in 1737, he wrote that one should indulge in discussing the past of scientific concepts mainly in order to flatter the public’s taste, to “satisfy the curiosity of the ignorants who would at least know the history of the sciences” (Voltaire 1877/ 1885, XXII, 242) – it is well known that he had a fundamental role in setting historical thought and practice on a radically novel epistemological foot, his Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) and Essai sur les mœurs (1756) being some of the first examples of modern historiography. However, he occasionally gave something more than bits of analysis of past scientific ideas and personalities, as one can observe by reading the historical notes of some entries contained in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (e.g., “Atome,” “Matière”) or the description of the state and development of scientific thought under the reign of the Sun King which is given in chapter XXXI of his Siècle de Louis XIV (Dagen 2011). In the 1750s, D’Alembert and Voltaire started a correspondence that would eventually evolve into a philosophical alliance and friendship. Among other things, this resulted in Voltaire’s involvement in the encyclopedia endeavor, to which he contributed around 40 entries, such as “Esprit,” “Gens de Lettres,” and “Histoire” (Veysman 2003). As we know from a letter Montucla sent to the Academy of Lyon dated January 17, 1754, he was attentively pondering Voltaire’s historical publications as they came out – although he still lamented that “he was missing the most important part, that is the philosophical history of the human mind.” (Archives of the Academy of Lyon, Ms 268-II, ff 114–115). Even more crucial was Condillac’s influence on D’Alembert. Unlike Voltaire, Condillac belonged to the same generation as D’Alembert; between 1733 and 1735, the two went to the same school, the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations and together with Rousseau and Diderot, at the end of the 1740s, they became very close and met informally on a weekly basis to discuss the encyclopedia project, as well as of philosophy, theater, music, and literature (Badinter 1999, 312–317). In 1746, Condillac published his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines. While endorsing Locke’s thought as the general framework through which to criticize the sort of “ambitious” metaphysics which “wants to pierce all the mysteries; nature, the essence of beings, the most hidden causes” in favor of a more “restrained” one, capable of “adjusting its researches on the weakness of the human mind” (Condillac 1746, v), he also acknowledged the necessity of taking a step beyond it. Locke had discovered too late the importance of language and signs for the genesis of ideas; because of this, “he had skimmed too lightly over the origins of our knowledge.” But “since the soul is not capable of exercising itself fully from the beginning, it was essential [. . .] to show how it acquires this capability, and the way in which it progresses” (Condillac 1746, xviii–xix). One way to accomplish this task was precisely to study thought in its development through time: It is essential for anyone who wants to make progress by himself in the search for truth, to know the mistakes of those who thought they were opening the way. The experience of the

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philosopher, like that of the pilot, is the knowledge of where others have gone astray; and, without this knowledge, there is no compass that can guide him. (Condillac 1746, I, ix)

The Traité des systèmes (1749) would greatly expand on this view, explicitly arguing that “history instructs us on the abuse of such systems” that do away with the anchorage of experience. While mirroring the “genesis of the mind’s faculties,” the history of thought became as such a ground on which to test, almost experimentally, the generation of truth from mistakes and the progressive liberation of reason from the yoke of unrestrained imagination (Condillac 1749, 44). Ultimately, by stressing the importance of considering the genesis of ideas in language and in human development (intended both as a physiological growth, from childhood to adulthood for the individual, and as a symbolic one, from antiquity to the present for humanity), Condillac introduced a dynamic element in Locke’s epistemology that paved the way for a more systematic historical treatment of human knowledge. But despite his originality, Condillac did not advance historical research much further than providing a workbench for his new method (even though one partial exception might be constituted by his late Cours d’études (1769–1773) designed for the instruction of the Prince of Parma). This preoccupation was rather taken up by D’Alembert, who made it the basis of his philosophical manifesto, the Discours préliminaire. There he described two angles or dimensions under which human knowledge, taken as a whole, can be represented: an “encyclopedic order” (freely reworked by him and Diderot on the basis of the Baconian system of knowledge) that shows synoptically how all the links in the “chain of the sciences” are bound together; and a “genealogical order,” in which the succession of the sciences is displayed according to their subsequent “logical” or “philosophical” emergence. By contrast, the universe is pictured as a book, though not of the mathematical kind Galileo had imagined: One might compare the universe to certain works of sublime obscurity, whose authors, by sometimes lowering themselves to the level of the reader, seek to persuade him that he can understand everything, more or less. If we decide to enter this labyrinth, we’d be lucky not to leave the true path! Otherwise, all the lights intended to keep us there would often only serve to lead us further astray. (D’Alembert 1751b, vii)

Due to the limited power of our intellectual capacities, it is not possible to derive the encyclopedic order of the sciences directly from a supposedly immutable natural order. The universe is a labyrinth, and the only thread at our disposal is our own reason. (A very similar depiction of the relation between knowledge and reality was offered by Condillac in his Traité des systèmes: “Waking up from a deep slumber, men see themselves in the middle of a labyrinth, and pose general principles to discover where their way out might be. What could be more ridiculous? And yet, that is the conduct of philosophers. We are born in the middle of a labyrinth, where a thousands of detours are traced out only to lead us to error: if there is a path that leads to the truth, it does not show itself at first; often it is the one that seems to deserve the least of our confidence” (Condillac 1749, 25). Therefore, faute de mieux, the

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encyclopedic order must be derived from the genealogical one, and not vice versa: the “chain of the sciences” must be modeled on the chain of the mind’s operations and interests. There is indeed another, more fundamental reason why it is such a hard task to make the two orders converge. In fact, “we should not believe that the encyclopedic tree should or even can be slavishly subjected” to the genealogical order. While the encyclopedic order provides a static image of the sciences as taken in their spatial configuration, presented as a kind of small-scale globe that allows one to picture all the continents of knowledge at a glance, the genealogical order of their logical succession discloses their temporal dimension. (“It is a sort of world map which should show the main countries, their positions and their mutual dependence, the straight path from one to the other; a path often cut by a thousand obstacles, which can only be known in each country by the inhabitants or travelers, and which can only be shown in particular maps of great detail.”). To be sure, this order is not as static as it may seem, for “the shape of the encyclopedic tree will depend on the point of view from which one considers the literary universe,” so that “one can imagine as many different systems of human knowledge as there are globes of different projections” (D’Alembert 1751b, xv). We discover that the “general system of the Arts and Sciences,” too, is a “sort of labyrinth, a winding path where the mind enters without exactly knowing the route it must follow.” As D’Alembert observes, Most of the Sciences which are considered as containing the principles of all the others, and which must for this reason must occupy the primary position in the encyclopedic order, do not observe the same rank in the genealogical order of ideas, because they were not invented first.

In other words, the genealogical order is often disrupted by the material constraints that the esprit encounters throughout history. Its “needs,” prompted by “the body to which it is united” as well as by political and religious driving forces, push it to “initially study the first objects it is presented with” and to “penetrate as far as it can in the knowledge” of them; very soon, it “runs into difficulties that stop it” and “either for the hope or for the despair of overcoming them, sets out on a new course”; then it “retraces its steps, sometimes crossing the first barriers just to meet new ones,” because “the land of reason and discovery is rather small; and often, instead of learning what we did not know, we succeed by dint of study only in unlearning what we thought we already knew” (D’Alembert 1751b, xiv, xx). At this point, the picture looks grim: to borrow once again Condillac’s metaphor, we find ourselves cast in the labyrinth of the universe just to discover that the esprit, which should have guided us, carries a more tortuous one within itself. But according to D’Alembert, there could be an equivalent to Ariadne’s thread at our disposal; and even though we have no guarantee that it will lead out of the labyrinth once and for all, it might at least “enlighten us as to how we should communicate this knowledge to our readers” (D’Alembert 1751b, xix). This thread consists in following the “historical exposition of the order in which our knowledge has evolved,” that is, the real, and not only philosophical, “history”

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of the esprit through the ages – the history of the arts and sciences, which occupies the second part of the Discours: “Facts are cited, experiments are compared, and methods are imagined only to excite genius to open up unknown roads, and to advance towards new discoveries, considered the first steps in which the great men have ended their race. This is also the aim we have set ourselves in combining the principles of the liberal arts and sciences with the history of their origin and successive progress” (D’Alembert 1751b, xxxviii). In order “not to go too far back in time,” D’Alembert retraces its developments starting from “after the Renaissance of Letters,” at the end of the Middle Ages. In so doing, he ultimately writes one of the first accounts of the beginnings of modern science: a “memorable epoch,” described as a “regeneration of ideas” which brought about “one of those revolutions that give the Earth a new face.” But since it was intended for the general public, the Discours did not delve much into the details of this story. While painting in broad strokes a picture of the successive phases that slowly lead from the cultivation of memory and erudition during the Renaissance (“To enable us to extract from the works of the Ancients all that could be useful, it was necessary for them also to extract what wasn’t”), then through the imitation of the ancients in the literary works (the phase of “imagination”) and finally up to the rise of modern science (the triumph of “reason”), D’Alembert was also consecrating a secular pantheon of the “few great geniuses” that made this march possible, such as Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and Locke (D’Alembert 1751b, xix–xxx). Meant for a more specialized philosophical readership, the Essai sur les éléments de la philosophie (1759) expanded on the program sketched out in the Discours, providing the guidelines and the clearest illustration of the d’Alembertian conception of the history and philosophy of science. Here D’Alembert advocates for the necessity of composing an accurate depiction of the state of knowledge for every epoch; and especially for the present one, “the century of Philosophy,” which would “set the object, the nature and the limits of this revolution” so that posterity “will know better than we do its advantages and disadvantages” (D’Alembert 1759, IV: 3). This “general and reasoned History of Arts and Sciences” should comprise four parts: a history of “our opinions,” of “disputes,” of “errors,” and, the most important of all, of the “history of true knowledge,” containing the fundamental principles of all sciences (D’Alembert 1759, IV: 9–12). It should be composed by taking a middle ground between the erudite and the speculative philosopher, i.e., between “the meticulous and narrow-minded spirit that leaves the trunk for the branches” and the one “too eager for generality, who loses and confuses everything by wanting to embrace and reduce everything.” If this part of “world history” had been less neglected, D’Alembert concludes, “the sciences would have advanced less slowly,” since men would constantly have had “in front of their eyes the progress and works of their predecessors” (D’Alembert 1759, IV: 7, 14). Even though D’Alembert never attempted to undertake this historical project himself, he did try to complement it while assembling his numerous entries for the Encyclopédie (see, for example, “Académie,” “Algébre,” “Analyse,” “Arithmétique,” “Astronomie,” “Attraction,” “Bibliomanie,” “Cosmologie,” “Collège,” “Dynamique,” “Elemens des sciences,” “Dictionnaire,” “Erudit,” “Figure de

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la Terre,” “Géomètre,” “Géométrie,” “Gravitation,” “Infini,” “Intégral (calcul),” “Mathématiques,” “Méchanique,” “Optique,” “Quadrature,” and “Vitesse” in ENCCRE 2017). Most of them concerned the mathematical sciences, and often included long historical overviews and assessments (e.g., “Astronomie,” “Géométrie,” “Figure de la Terre”); others, such as “Académie,” “Collège,” or “Erudit,” pertained to broader cultural and institutional matters relating to the sciences, presenting at times extensive considerations on the writing and teaching of history. In any case, D’Alembert knew that one of his protégés was already working on his project, as he publicly announced in the article “Duplication” from the fifth volume of the Encyclopédie in 1755: Mr. Montucla, very knowledgeable in the history of ancient and modern geometry, has just published a work entitled Histoire des recherches sur la quadrature du cercle. [. . .] It is with pleasure that we take this opportunity to do due justice to Mr. Montucla’s work; it should favorably prepare geometrists for the general history of Mathematics to which the author is currently committed, and which we know to be quite advanced. (ENCCRE 2017)

The Histoire des recherches sur la quadrature du cercle (Montucla 1754) is the first work published by Montucla. Judging by D’Alembert’s endorsements in the Encyclopédie, it seems to have been written in the spirit of his mentor’s historicalphilosophical program, accommodating at the same time the interests of the Parisian Academy of Sciences. By reconstructing the history of one of the oldest and somewhat mysterious problems in the history of geometry – the squaring of the circle – Montucla was indeed trying both to underpin the Newtonian solution to the problem by means of integral and differential calculus as the most accurate and conclusive and to avoid the proliferation of writings that were constantly being submitted to the academy on this topic by exposing their mathematical and practical unsuitability (Jacob 2006). “These alleged geometrists,” Montucla explained, “never cease to tire their fellow geometrists, and especially the Academies, by their insistence on examining and judging their supposed discovery; they carry it from one tribunal to another, that is, from one Academy to another” (Montucla 1754, xv). About 20 years later, in 1775, the Academy of Paris definitively interdicted the submission of memoirs on this subject, ending up acting, as in Montucla’s wording, as a real tribunal of science (Jacob 2005). In the 1750s, Montucla believed that, to this end, “an effective way to decrease the number of those who devote themselves to this research” was to “gather under the same point of view the real discoveries of Geometry on this famous problem”; this point of view being that of the “true history of the Sciences,” which “consists in elaborating as much as possible on the very process of invention,” on the sequence of discoveries in time; a task all the more necessary, since “this process usually differs from how it is explained at a later time” (Montucla 1754, xix-xxi, 127–128). Montucla’s debut on the literary scene was a success, so much so that it earned him the membership to the Prussian Academy of Sciences on July 3, 1755. The Prussian King, Frederick the Great, had been trying to lure D’Alembert to Berlin in order to nourish the array of scholars and philosophes surrounding his court, and it

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was probably D’Alembert himself who suggested Montucla’s name for the position during his first sojourn in Berlin around the same time. In the scientific world of the eighteenth century, being a member of an academy was an important designation of status and prestige. This appointment came at the right time, for Montucla had just renounced his academical bond to the Royal Society of Lyon. This decision arose as a consequence of an unfortunate affair involving D’Alembert and one of Montucla’s former teachers from the days of the Collège de la Trinité, Father Xavier Tolomas. In a public speech, titled Pro scholis publicis, adversus Encyclopædistas, which he had given in front of the gathered students of the school and the lyonnaise notables, Tolomas had insulted D’Alembert, by calling him homuncio cui nec est pater nec res (referring to the fact that he was a foundling and therefore had no respectable social status). What triggered the Jesuit’s invective had been one of D’Alembert’s recent contributions to the Encyclopédie, the polemic article “Collège,” where, among other things, he strongly criticized the Jesuit educational system. When D’Alembert found out, he was outraged and asked both the president of the Royal Society of Lyon and Montucla’s former teacher Laurent Béraud to intercede. But no action whatsoever was taken on the case, leading six members of the society, including Montucla, to resign. Aided by his mastery of ancient and modern languages (he knew English, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and German), in the following years Montucla worked as a journalist for the Gazette de France in order to earn a living. At times, he also collaborated anonymously with the publisher Jombert to reedit and publish “ancient treatises” relating to mathematics, a task he “took on with confidence” (Leblond 1800, 8–9), since at the same time he was carrying out his Histoire des mathématiques]. In the seventh volume of the Encyclopédie (article “Géométrie”), published in 1757, Montucla’s work was promoted once again by D’Alembert who, after having sketched a “short history of Geometry,” could abridge it pointing out that readers would “find all that one could desire to know about it in the Histoire des mathématiques] which is being prepared by Mr. Montucla.” A few months later, in 1758, the Histoire was finally published. Its title can be best translated as History of the Mathematical Sciences: as Montucla explains, mirroring almost word by word D’Alembert’s views (see, for example, the article “Mathématique,” which in turn referred back once again to the Histoire de mathématiques) “mathematics” received its name in antiquity, from the Greek mathesis or mathemata; but, more generally, “that is what we mean by Sciences, as being of all human knowledge, those which best correspond to the scope of this name,” by virtue of their certainty and the constant progress they showed through their historical development (Montucla 1758, 2). The subtitle promises a general history, that is, an account of the progress of mathematics “from its origins to the present day.” The vastness of this undertaking is clearly apparent from a quick glance at the index and at the “Figurative system of mathematics and its divisions” that is attached to it, informed by D’Alembert and Diderot’s own Système figuré des connaissances humaines. The mathematical sciences are divided into “pure” (that is, arithmetics, geometry, and algebra), and “mixed” (mechanics, astronomy, optics, acoustics, and pneumatology), which in turn are further subdivided into a variety of

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disciplines that covers the whole spectrum of the sciences that by then had acquired a certain degree of mathematization, from harmony and cosmology to chronology and geography. The readership Montucla had in mind was a broad one as well, consisting of “philosophers, professionals and those with a love of the sciences” (Montucla 1758, xv), and that is why the chapters are often complemented both by introductions for the uninitiated and by appendices which provide mathematical proofs, sources, and other technical details. Regarding the internal distribution of content, the two volumes are quite uneven in terms of the time span covered. While the first volume starts from Ancient Greek science; proceeds with an attempt at charting non-Western scientific contributions among the Arabs, Persians, Indians, and Chinese; and ends with a long chapter that goes from the Roman Empire to the sixteenth century, the second volume is entirely devoted to the seventeenth century (Crépel and Coste 2005). Despite many features that undeniably belong only to the mentality of its century, Montucla’s account of the genesis, development, and triumph of modern science might continue to present a certain degree of familiarity, even in the light of all the most recent historiographical adjustments: mathematics is still considered to be at the core of most of the sciences; the main characters of the story are approximately the same; and one finds a positive attitude towards conferring attention to the so-called lesser figures. More generally, there is a sense in which Montucla’s successors, who certainly intended on retelling the story in different contexts and for other audiences, had, so to speak, to take on where their forerunner’s work ended: no matter whether to endorse it, to expand on it, or even to criticize it. However, it should not be forgotten that the Enlightenment was not a coherent system or a monolithic doctrine and that other protagonists of that age, such as Diderot, Buffon, and Rousseau, presented significantly different interpretations concerning the value of the mathematical sciences and their place in the development of science tout court. But it appears that D’Alembert had been the only one to systematically endow his mathematically oriented ideology with the support of a strong historical narration that in fact saw many installments (Bossut, Condorcet, and Lagrange’s various contributions belonging to the same d’Alembertian, academic line of influence), which in the long run contributed to grant a stronger legacy to his epistemological and historiographical views. Towards the end of his life, Montucla had been preparing a Bibliographie générale des mathématiques to complete his Histoire (an idea reminiscent of Delisle and Weidler’s twofold historiographical scheme), which was to be composed of “more than 20.000 articles [. . .] accompanied by bibliographical, biographical, critical, historical and instructive notices on the content of the books cited.” Although Lalande made use of it in the editing of the fourth volume of the second edition, the manuscript of the text was never found. But even considering only the first edition of Montucla’s Histoire from 1758, it is still remarkable that no one had ever attempted to assemble in a single narration a comparable quantity of historical materials, with so little studies to fall back on in addition to the published versions of the original sources. This fact was immediately perceived by specialists and

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amateurs alike: no one failed to take notice of it, from Condorcet and Edward Gibbons to Thomas Carlyle and Lagrange, who would have expressly deemed it “unique in its genre” (Beaujouan 1950, 131–132). Montucla himself was already aware of the pioneering character of his opus maius, offering it from the very first lines as a suitable response to the original Baconian and, more recently, Fontenellian complaint: One of the most worthy spectacles to interest a philosophical eye is without doubt that of the development of the human mind and the different branches of its knowledge. The famous Chancellor Bacon noted this more than a century ago, and this was why he compared history, such as it had been written until then, as a mutilated trunk separated from its most noble parts. I do not know by what misfortune of fate this branch of history has always been the most neglected. Our libraries are overrun with prolix narrators of sieges, battles, revolutions; how many lives of supposed heroes are illustrated only by the amount of blood they have left in their path? It is almost impossible to find [. . .] any writers who have undertaken to preserve for posterity the names of these benefactors of humanity, some of whom have worked to relieve its burdens through useful inventions, while others have expanded the capacities of the intellect through their thought and research. Even less does one find someone who has thought about presenting the progress of these inventions, or of following the march and development of the human mind. Would such a picture be any less interesting than that of the horrors and bloody scenes that engender the ambition and nastiness of mankind? (Montucla 1758, iii–iv)

Combining the erudite scholarship he had acquired through his training and the philosophical, encyclopedic outlook gained by frequenting the Parisian Enlightenment circles, Montucla succeeded in composing the most comprehensive history of science produced to that date; in this respect, there was no overestimation in the epithet attributed to him by a nineteenth-century French lyonnaise poet: Montucla [. . .] devient, dans sa patrie l’Hérodote accompli de la géométrie.

(Jean-Louis Boucharlat, Epître à Mathon de la Cour)

Conclusion Retracing the genesis of Montucla’s Histoire des mathématiques has contributed not only to convey a finer-grained picture of the activities and cultural strategies of one of the main philosophes’ circles at the time of the Encyclopédie, that of D’Alembert. It has also shown, by virtue of the diversity and quality of Montucla’s intellectual exchanges through his formative years, how Montucla’s biography provides an auspicious vantage point from which to observe the major historiographical trends of the French Enlightenment pertaining to the sciences: the erudite-humanistic trend, as it was taught in the Collèges and expressed in the non-Parisian academic movement as well; the institutional, Parisian academical trend, epitomized by Delisle’s project for a general history of astronomy, that aimed at providing a coherent

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narration of the history of the sciences chiefly intended for other scientists and patrons, where the practical utility of the sciences and their usefulness to the state provided the main narrative structure; and the philosophical trend, directed both at other scientists and to the lay public in order to disseminate the philosophes’ scientific value system, which Montucla helped substantiate under the direct influence of D’Alembert.

Cross-References ▶ Early Historiography of Science ▶ Leonhard Euler’s Works on the Motion of the Moon: A Historiographical Shift

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Leonhard Euler’s Works on the Motion of the Moon: A Historiographical Shift

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Euler Moon Theory Studies: the Construction of a Research Field in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Lost Historiographical Debate: Euler’s Heritage After the Construction of the Hill–Brown Theory and the 1933 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Euler’s Heritage After World War II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Euler’s Moon Theory in the Historiography of Science at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

In this chapter, the development of the historiography of L. Euler’s works on the motion of the Moon is examined. It is shown that the problem of constructing a mathematical Moon theory was central to the Swiss mathematician’s research program despite the wide variety of his interests in various problems of theoretical mechanics, calculus, and trigonometry. It is shown that the problem of the motion of the body in the central force field was critical for Euler and that he was able to achieve significant advance in solving the three-body problem. It is argued that the approach to L. Euler’s Moon theory was affected and dominated by the changes in paradigms of the Western philosophical tradition in the age of the

D. Starostin (*) St Petersburg State University, St Petersburg, Russia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_23

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scientific revolution of the twentieth century. Dilthey’s and Windelband’s approach to natural sciences as “nomothetical” made scholars of the late nineteenth century seek universal formulae in L. Euler’s theories and criticize him for providing only “partial solutions.” However, over the course of the twentieth century, Wingenstein’s and A. N. Whitehead’s philosophy of science slowly but gradually began to influence the studies of L. Euler’s concepts of the Moon’s motion: in the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholars started to appreciate that the Swiss mathematician’s formulae and solutions were similar to a complex language in which each formula and value was part of the general semantics of the answer, formulated as a system of complex cross-referenced derivations. A. N. Whitehead’s reevaluation of ontology that showed that physicists can only see and measure “atomic elements” of the processes that are otherwise precisely deterministic also contributed to appreciating the “partial solutions” of L. Euler as representing the basic ontological foundations of physics. Keywords

Leonard Euler (1707–1783) · Johann Albrecht Euler (1734–1800) · Moon theory · Precession · “First principles” · I. Newton (1642–1726) · J. Le Rond D’Alembert (1717–1783) · Variation · Great empirical term · Eccentric anomaly · Computation methods

Introduction This chapter seeks to examine the development of historiographical interest in Leonard Euler’s theory of lunar motion. It will suggest that this problem was central to the Swiss mathematician’s studies throughout his life and that he was continuously working on it for more than 40 years. It will address the period from the nineteenth century and elucidate the reasons for scholars turning to the Swiss mathematician’s heritage. In this chapter it will be shown that the precession of the Earth and of the Moon that L. Euler sought to express in mathematical formulae (which is otherwise known as the “great empirical term” of E. W. Brown) was one of his main achievements and also the reason why his works caused a heated discussion among scholars between the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. It will address the creation of modern indices of L. Euler’s (1707–1783) and his son Johann Albrecht Euler’s (1734–1800) publications in the context of this scientific polemics. It will also shed light on how this polemics appeared again in the year 1933 on the 150th anniversary of L. Euler’s death and how his work became part of the historiographical discussion of the problems of lunar motion. It will also reexamine the place which Leonard Euler’s works took in the historiography of lunar motion in the second half of the twentieth century. In the last, fourth section, it will examine the historiography of the twenty-first century and will show the deep reexamination that modern scholars made of Leonard Euler’s approaches to constructing the equations of motions for the Moon.

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Euler Moon Theory Studies: the Construction of a Research Field in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century The investigations of Leonard Euler’s manuscript heritage and published works has had a long history because this heritage is complex and was created by the Swiss mathematician over more than 40 years of his work. The discovery of his unpublished works after his death captured the attention of the educated mathematical and astronomical community and thus added many more titles to the bibliography of his works. In other words, the historiography of his achievements started soon after his death as a practical task of trying to collect information about all of his results, to make an index of them, and to publish those that had been left unpublished due to the sheer amount of work Leonard Euler produced. This made the study of the Swiss mathematician’s heritage consist of two parallel tasks for those who were dealing with his work. One was to continue working on the problems he had addressed and to bring them to the new canonical form. The second task was to produce the workable reference of his printed and manuscript works. This double task was first undertaken by Nicholas Fuss (1755–1826), a Swiss native who had moved to St. Petersburg to serve as a mathematical assistant from 1773 to 1783 (Biermann 1961; Lysenko 1975; Mumenthaler 2006). Between 1800 and 1826, he served as a permanent secretary to the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. His work in mathematics further developed the apparatus and the methods of Leonard Euler in converging series, to solve which he sought, much as his teacher in E841 and some other works on the motion of the Moon, to use multiplication of the adjacent members of the series (Archive of the Academy of Sciences [St. Petersburg], Fond 40, Docket no. 43). In Dockets 67 and 68, there were works on the motion of the body in centrifugal forces and about the motion of the body in the central force, the problems discussed by Euler as models for his calculations of the motion of the Earth, the Moon, and the planets. In Docket 84, the manuscript concerning the “dérangements” of the comet was investigated. Euler’s solutions were further remembered and discussed in the short manuscript on the motion of planets and comets (Docket 85). In other words, N. Fuss was a true student of Leonard Euler who sought to propagate his teacher’s ideas and solutions. But in addition to developing Euler’s concepts and apparatus further, he made a significant breakthrough in preparing the foundation for the historiographical treatment of the works of Leonard Euler. He made Swiss mathematician’s correspondence with brothers Bernoulli (Johann I, Nicholas, and Daniel) and with Christian Goldbach available to the public (Fuss 1843a). Most importantly, he put much effort into making a systematic list of Euler’s works. Both undertakings were brought to fruition by his son Paul Henri Fuss (1798–1855) (who was known in Russia as Pavel Nikolaevich Fuss) (Fuss 1843b; Fuss and Fuss 1849). The works on the motion of the Moon are listed on pages CIX–CX of this index (Fuss 1843a, p. CIX–CX). Thus, by the efforts of Nicholas Fuss and his son Paul Henri Fuss, the groundwork was laid for the historiography of Leonard Euler’s scientific pursuits, including his approach to the problem of the motion of the Moon. The index they published became a critical foundation for the historiography of Leonard Euler’s works.

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By the end of the nineteenth century, the attitude towards Leonard Euler’s heritage changed as that century’s end witnessed an emergence of the Hill–Brown theory of lunar motion (Wilson 2010, p. vii). American astronomer George William Hill (1838–1914) studied at Rutgers University with Theodore Strong, making a great emphasis on the works of Euler (Brown 1916, p. 284). His theory’s completion by 1877 made the heritage of Leonard Euler relevant and helped raise the scholarly community’s interest in it, but it had first made Euler’s concept of the lunar motion seem outdated. It happened because G. W. Hill rejected his predecessor’s idea of using elliptical motions to describe the Moon’s path and instead used an “intermediary orbit” or the first approximation in his model. This theory replaced the calculations of Peter Andreas Hansen (1795–1870) (Hansen 1838), which, scholars claimed, were basically numerical rather than algebraic. It also dismissed the method proposed by Charles Delaunay (1816–1872), the results of which converged too badly to be of practical interest, but which urged further development in the methods of algebraic computation. The theory of Hill was constructed in the period between 1877 and 1908 and was adopted as the basis for calculating lunar ephemerids in the nautical almanacs of the USA, UK, Germany, France, and Spain by 1923 (Wilson 2008, pp. 459–460; Wilson 2010, p. vii). This breakthrough in constructing the lunar theory made scholars to again turn to the works of Leonard Euler and his son Johann Albrecht Euler because it was in their natural interest to figure out who first proposed to separate the “variation” (which has direct relevance for the “great empirical term”) from other kinds of perturbations. In a recent work of C. Wilson, a significant aspect was brought to light that it was the son of Leonard Euler Johann Albrecht Euler, who proposed in his work, read in 1766 and printed in 1768, to treat the “variation” of the Moon differently from other perturbations (Euler [1766] 1768; Wilson 2007, pp. 142–144; Wilson 2008, p. 458; Stäckel 1910a). A very good summary of various lunar theories that can serve any historian of science and that can even be considered a historiographical, and not just mathematical, introduction to lunar theories, including that of Leonard Euler and his collaborators, was produced by a great French astronomer Félix Tisserand (1845–1896). In the third volume of his Traité de mécanique céleste, published in 1894, he gave an excellent summary of Leonard Euler’s two lunar theories, one of 1753 (E187) (Euler 1753) and another of [1768] 1772 (E418) (Euler 1772). His explication of his predecessor’s calculations far surpassed any earlier treatment and is still one of the best even though he was critical of some of the Swiss mathematician’s approaches, models, and conclusions (Tisserand 1894, p. 65–88, esp. at p. 87). A historiographical investigation of Euler’s heritage, such as the one produced by this French astronomer, became important at the end of the nineteenth century because of the controversy that emerged around what has been called as “temporal members” in L. Euler’s equations in mathematical and astronomical lingo. These were those parts or factors in his formulae (the precession of the mean apogee of the Sun ζ0 ) that explicitly depended on time as @ζ0 ~ @t (their name “temporal members” did not come from L. Euler or F. Tisserand, however, and it came to be used later). This dependence of some of Euler’s parameters on time produced the image of the Moon’s orbit around the Earth constantly “wobbling” in the time periods that were

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infinitesimally small in the cosmological scale (hundreds of years as opposed to millions and billions of years). F. Tisserand thought these temporal members to be the most significant shortcoming of L. Euler’s theory and formulae (Tisserand 1894, p. 87). However, he gave L. Euler his due and highly appreciated L. Euler’s idea to split the general inequalities of the Moon’s motion into inequalities of different orders, the orders that were determined by the reverse powers of key lunar parameters. Nevertheless, the scholar stated that this approach could only provide partial solutions to the general equations of lunar motions and failed to provide a mathematically rigorous overarching theory (Tisserand 1894, p. 87; Radau 1894, p. 104–105). He also highlighted a significant aspect of L. Euler’s lunar theory: instead of calculating the values for the precession of the apogee Euler took them from the observations of astronomers (Tisserand 1894, p. 87). Tisserand thus considered his theory incomplete in the mathematical sense. His statements, however, show him as primarily a mathematician, since the practice of taking parameters, especially temporal ones, from observation had long been the way of making advances in physics and was used by E. W. Brown in constructing his lunar theory (Brown 1926). The advantage of Tisserand’s publication was in trying to bring lunar theories to one particular canonical formulaic representation, which made them easy to compare. His book laid the foundation for all further historiographical discussions of Euler’s great achievement in his 1772 publication, but it also totally let Johann Albrecht Euler’s seminal [1766] 1768 article (A22) out of consideration (Euler 1766; Verdun 2015, S. 357–359). Both the publication of L. Euler’s works posthumously and the summary of F. Tisserand made the investigation of the heritage of Leonard Euler an important part of contemporary scientific inquiry. At the beginning of the twentieth century, studying the motion of the Moon came to require scholars to be aware of the historiography of the Swiss mathematician’s works. This prompted a second attempt to create an index of Euler’s works and led to the Russian government’s opening up all Euler’s materials to allow Gustaf Eneström (1852–1923) to make a new, more thorough list of his works with fuller publication data that had been present in Nicholas and Paul Henri Fusses’ index (Eneström 1910). It is by the number in this index that scholars have now gotten accustomed to citing the latter’s publications. At the same time Paul Stäckel (1862–1919) wrote his biography of the son of Leonard Euler Johann Albrecht Euler (1734–1800) and created an index of the latter’s works (Stäckel 1910a, b). This second stage in the development of the historiographical interest towards the works of Leonard Euler and his son firmly put the “Euler question” on the agenda of historians of science as well as of mathematicians and astronomers and contributed to a critically important and exponential development of interest to the works of Leonard Euler, his son, and his collaborators. By 1910 all works of Leonard and Johann Albrecht Euler were listed and thus made available to the public. But his manuscript materials were still located in the Archive of the Academy of Sciences without being brought to light in a publication. Thus by the beginning of the twentieth century, the field for historiographical research in Leonard Euler’s Moon theory and other concepts was finally set.

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A Lost Historiographical Debate: Euler’s Heritage After the Construction of the Hill–Brown Theory and the 1933 Discussion Already in 1916 E. W. Brown wrote in his biography of G. W. Hill that the latter followed the same model of moving rectangular axes as did L. Euler. But this biography also created an intrigue because it spoke of the 1768 paper entitled “Sur la variation de la lune,” in which Euler was able, in E. W. Brown’s opinion, to obtain two or three terms of the same series (Brown 1916, p. 284). It was not the work the Swiss mathematician published in 1745 in Berlin and in 1750 in St. Petersburg, “De motu nodorum lunae ejusque inclinationis ad eclipticam variatione” [E138] (Euler [1747/8] 1750, esp. at pp. 406–407; Verdun 2015, S. 181). But now scholars think that it was the work of J. A. Euler that first employed the powers of the differential (Euler [1766] 1768). At the same time, the works of E. W. Brown confirmed L. Euler’s guess that “the fluctuations in the Moon’s mean longitude including the main empirical term were no real deviations from its gravitational path (i. e. from those based on Newton’s equations – D. S.) but caused in the irregular variations in the Earth’s rate of rotation” (Schlesinger and Brouwer 1939, p. 249; Euler [1749] 1751, p. 92). By the 1930s, these new publications prompted a significant rise of interest towards the original works of Leonard Euler such as his main, “third” lunar theory of [1768] 1772 (E418). On the 150th anniversary of Leonard Euler’s death, the Academy of Sciences scheduled a number of events, among which was the solemn presentation of a lecture on Leonard Euler by A. N. Krylov (1865–1945), a Russian scholar of “ship theory,” before the Presidium of the Academy. The matters of Marxist dialectics did not then occupy much interest in the minds of the old academicians and A. N. Krylov stayed in his report on the basis of pure mathematical and astronomical paradigms. His report, published later, in 1951, in the collection of his works, was one of the best first treatments of Euler’s lunar theory on the conceptual level (he did not use any formulae), and the unfortunate part was that it was made in Russian and was never translated (Krylov 1951a, b, p. 247). In this report, he very clearly described how Euler had changed the coordinate system in his 1772 book [E418] and made a particular point that the formulae were useful for any physicist or engineer and not just astronomers (Euler 1772). He also commented on the disagreement which he saw emerging between Euler’s method and that of the French astronomer F. Tisserand (1845–1896), who had noted (as we have described earlier) that if Euler was to compose the general equations of motion of the Moon, his theory would include “temporal” members (members with the direct time coordinate without it appearing in the sine or cosine function) (Tisserand 1894, p. 87–88; McLaughlin and Miller 2004). Modern scholarship clarified the problems that lay at the foundation of this debate (Verdun 2015, S. 272, 583). F. Tisserand thought more highly of the lunar theory of Laplace, who, in his opinion, “significantly perfected it” by taking the true longitude as the main variable and by using Clairault’s mobile, rotating ellipse to approximate the Moon’s motions (Tisserand 1894, pp. 89–111; Radau 1894, p. 104–105). Among the achievements of F. Tisserand was his extraction of the value of the main

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inequality of the Moon from the formulae of Laplace, which he found to be 125.5 arcseconds (Tisserand 1894, p. 110). This implied 1 of the synodic precession in 28.6 years, the basic cycle of time in the Julian calendar that was also long used for the calculations of the Easter holidays since early Christianity. Thus, F. Tisserand either consciously overlooked or erroneously missed L. Euler’s considerations in regards to the Moon’s inequality that were spread out in the Swiss mathematician’s various works (which will be addressed later in the article). The scholar also noted that the equations produced by Laplace implied that the two forces that were key to calculations were the gravitation of the Earth and some perturbing force, the thesis from which L. Euler started his calculations in the 1740s (Tisserand 1894, p. 94; Euler [1748] 1750b, p. 441, Euler 1962a; Euler [1748] 1750a; Euler [1745] 1746a; Euler [1754] 1756; Verdun 2015, S. 272, 583). F. Tisserand also attributed to Laplace the finding of the cause of the inequality: the ellipsoid form of the Earth that was flattened on the North–South axis (Tisserand 1894, p. 111). But L. Euler had also considered this factor (Euler [1749] 1751, p. 92, 95–105). This suggests that some earlier works of the Swiss mathematician may have thus been overlooked. F. Tisserand may have thus been uninformed of the total amount of L. Euler’s work and was not acquainted with some of L. Euler’s earlier publications that were printed in the proceedings of Berlin’s and St. Petersbourg’s Academies of Sciences. Thus, he seemed to have presented a biased view of the Swiss mathematician’s work. But this bias was mainly due to the specific development in the scientific paradigm in the end of the nineteenth century. The approach of F. Tisserand reminded the readers that he was working within the concept of natural sciences that had been significantly influenced by W. Dilthey (1833–1911) and W. Windelband (1848–1915). These German philosophers saw natural sciences as built on generalization as their primary method of inquiry (Dilthey 1883, p. 78; Windelband 1894, p. 143, 145). In light of W. Dilthey’s and W. Windelband’s division between the natural sciences as “nomothetical” and history and other humanities as “ideographical,” the concentration of scholars of the late nineteenth century on only the general principles or one or several universal formulae made L. Euler’s theories seem incomplete and fragmentary. In other words, the study of the Swiss mathematician’s apparatus and theories by F. Tisserand was made with the belief that natural sciences had as their goal generalized theories while partial solutions were deemed unsatisfactory. This, unfortunately, was the “Zeitgeist” of the natural sciences’ philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century. The French mathematician made sweeping generalizations about L. Euler’s concepts based on only two of the latter’s books, while missing out on his other works that, if put together, nearly presented a consistent theory and the partial solutions in which amounted to a finished self-sufficient theory. Thus, this second stage in the development of the approaches to the problem of constructing the mathematical model of the Moon’s motions coincided with the period in the development of natural sciences one may call “positivist.” The historiographical debate in 1933 was prompted by the “inequality” that was calculated from different mechanics standpoints by F. Tisserand to be 1400 in the period of 273 years (Tisserand 1894, p. 396) and was later included in the lunar

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theory of E. W. Brown (1866–1938) as the “great empirical term” or 10.7100 and the period of 257 years (Brown 1926). In part and indirectly, a disagreement between Euler and Tisserand regarding the “temporal members” as envisioned by A. N. Krylov was caused by this small precession in the Earth’s motion. The Russian academician took up the problem of the “temporal members” that were present in the work of the Swiss mathematician, but the appearance of which was criticized by F. Tisserand. Euler first mentioned the precession (the “temporal member” in later taxonomy) in his 1746 work (E89), where he assessed it to be around 1300 a year due to the resistance of aether (Euler 1746b [E89], S. 249, 274; Euler [1748] 1750b, p. 441, Euler [1749] 1751, p. 92). Aether was a concept Leonard Euler used for some time in the 1740s (E112, no. 15, p. 7). Euler later proposed that the annual precession of the Earth due to the perturbation by the Moon was equal to 1300 in the case of one constant taking the value proposed by Bernoulli (Euler [1748] 1750b [E139], p. 441, Euler [1749] 1751 [E171], p. 92). He made a significant clarification in his second article, in which he noted that the precession he was discussing was that in the relationship to the axis of the figure (axe de figure) of the Earth and not to its actual axis of rotation (axe de rotation) (Euler [1749] 1751 [E171], p. 92). Thus, on a second approach Euler calculated the precession the Earth had from being perturbed by the Moon (Euler 1962a; Euler [1748] 1750a; Euler [1745] 1746a; Euler [1748] 1750b; Verdun 2015, S. 272). Euler was also rightly credited now with calculating the “eccentric anomaly,” the difference in position due to the eccentricity of the lunar orbit of 1800 , which had to be subtracted when the Moon was moving from apogee to perigee and added if it was moving instead from perigee to apogee (Euler [1748] 1750a, p. 421; Verdun 2015, S. 326; Euler 1962a). A modern scholar noted that in 1755 Euler published a very important work in which he calculated the Earth’s and lunar precession to be, respectively, 1600 a century and 50.2500 a year (Euler [1754] 1756; Verdun 2015, S. 583). A related problem of the inequalities in the motions of planets was discussed in E841, the posthumously published manuscript (Euler 1862). It was critical for further development of the apparatus that described the retardation in the motion of the planets. Thus, modern investigations showed that Euler had tried several solutions to the problem of inequalities in the motion of the Moon (Verdun 2015, S. 915–929). Verdun has recently brought to light that missing manuscripts could have contained important formulae for the calculation of perturbations of planets. Euler referred to the formulae that were to follow, contained in a manuscript that is now claimed to be lost and thus unavailable (Verdun 2015, S. 929). Thus, new studies illustrated that a historiographical problem that showed up in the articles by A. N. Krylov had a long pedigree. Verdun recognized that some of the most interesting manuscripts may still be missing and thus prevent us from making a definitive statement on the historical development of the lunar theory. The “back to the sources” turn in modern historiography of science led to recognition of a basic problem in reconstructing L. Euler’s work. Much disagreement on how Euler addressed the variation of the Moon and perturbations of the planets comes from deficiencies in these very sources modern scholarship sought to reexamine.

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But since F. Tisserand acknowledged the presence of the precession, one may wonder about the cause of the polemical exclamation of A. N. Krylov. Did the new data show that Tisserand was wrong and Euler was right because the latter allowed for a “temporal member” in the equations of the motion of the Moon which was recognized by E. W. Brown as “the great empirical term,” while Tisserand thought, on the other hand, that the motion of the Moon’s equation should be free of any “temporal members?” The latter did recognize, however, the existence of unexplained retardation of 1400 . A. N. Krylov noted that for the specific particular cases for which Euler was doing his calculations, he was entirely right (Krylov 1951a, pp. 211–217). In other words, the scholar who was well-versed in theoretical mechanics and who could easily evaluate correctly the problems of the Moon’s motion immediately entered into a discussion with F. Tisserand because the former was aware of the astronomical data and with the Moon theory of E. W. Brown. Thus, preparing a translation of Euler’s work Theoria motuum lunae ([1768] 1772) into Russian was put on the agenda by a Russian academician, A. N. Krylov, who produced it by 1934. Since much of Euler’s text had been then superseded by the work of G. W. Hill, he chose to put away the part which contained the calculations for the members of the equations of the higher order and only provided a short commentary on them. It is interesting that the book was published twice and the two versions were published with different publication data (Euler [1772] 1934; Euler [1772] 1937). Both versions had not only the text of the 1772 edition, but also a historical introduction to the work of Leonard Euler and his collaborators and further development of their theory in the works of G. W. Hill. It was another example of a very good historiographical introduction to the lunar theory of Leonard Euler and his assistants, and into the way, it was developed by G. W. Hill. It was written by a professional mathematician with practical experience in developing the mathematics of shipbuilding and thus was construed in such a way so as to appeal to any mathematician or physicist with classical training. Thus, academician A. N. Krylov or one of his collaborators developed a historical connection between the [1768] 1772 book and the work of the American astronomer without mentioning the mathematical apparatus that had been introduced by Johann Albrecht Euler in his abovementioned [1766] 1768 article.

Euler’s Heritage After World War II This interest to Euler’s Moon theory caused a general upsurge of interest in the publishing of his works, which started as the project of the Swiss Academy of Sciences in the nineteenth century. The aim of the project was to print all works that had been published in the journals and as monographs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the main work on publishing the Opera omnia in Switzerland started after World War II. Thus, Leonard and Johann Albrecht Euler’s works were published by Otto Fleckenstein, Charles Blanc, and Leo Courvoisier in the Opera omnia (Euler 1956, 1958, 1991). Academician A. N. Krylov’s message helped put in motion the publication, in 1965, of his work on the motion of a body

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in the field of central forces (Commentatio de motu corporum vi centrali agitatorum ex Adversariorum Mathematicorum Libro primo deprompta. Archive of the Academy of Sciences [St. Petersburg. Fond 136. Register 1. Docket 129] was published among the first) (Euler 1962b). The interest to the works of Leonard Euler led to publication in the 1960s of several books of his materials (Kopelevich et al. 1962; Mikhailov 1965). An article of G. K. Mikhailov listed all manuscript fragments related to the motion of the Moon (Mikhailov 2019, p. 141). These were: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

De motu Lunae (4 fols.) De motu Lunae in ellipsi (3 fols.) Dissertatio de motibus Lunae (2 fols.) Ex datis initio et fine eclipsis Lunae invenire tempus maximae obscurationis (2 fols.) De viribus, quibus Solis ac Lunae motus determinatur De motu Solis ejusque perturbatione a Luna Constructio elementorum motus Lunae Applicatio theoriae ad observationis eclipsium lunarium

The last several fragments, up to 50 pages of length, were found to be similar to E838 (Mikhailov 2019, p. 141). All fragments illustrate L. Euler’s technique in creating the main equations of lunar perturbations on the basis of the general principles of geometry, differential calculus, and, most importantly, the second law of J. Kepler. In addition to that, several works on celestial mechanics in general were published (Euler 1962a, c). The publication of Leonard Euler’s Opera omnia under the auspices of the Swiss Academy of Sciences initially rose interest in Leonard Euler’s manuscript heritage in Russia, but the first approach to it on the part of scientists and historians of science was very cautious. The developments in physics made scholars instantly question some of Leonard Euler’s assumptions which he employed in his Theoria motuum lunae of [1768] 1772. One insightful publication came in 1970 that enumerated key concepts of Euler’s worldview as a physicist in the sphere of Newton’s mechanics. First, a historian of science found that Euler did use Newton’s principle of “distant action,” the principle that has been totally disproved by the development of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century, but mostly considered it as a mathematical abstraction rather than a real phenomenon (Minchenko 1970, p. 36). In this way, an important credit was given to L. Euler as a physicist whose works could be easily adapted by the physicists of the second half of the twentieth century. Second, it was shown that in trying to explain Newton’s law of gravitation, he was long using the “theory of aether” and the principles of hydrodynamics (Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg), Fond 136. Register 2. Docket 22. Folios 32–33. 21 November 1752) (Minchenko 1970, p. 39). This was a conceptual difference more difficult to deal with, but in 1772, he did not employ the concept of aether as he had in his works in the 1740s and 1750s. Third, he considered it a weakness of L. Euler that the latter came to use the Cartesian coordinates and the

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principles of Descartes only after it was described in MacLaurin’s (1698–1746) “A Treatise of Fluxions” in the late 1740s (MacLaurin 1742). But that was a natural path for an astronomer or a mathematician. Fourth, he evaluated Euler critically because the Swiss mathematician did not yet have a clear understanding of the concept of a body’s energy which could theoretically make his equations be solved better. In other words, this historian of science thought that if L. Euler already knew the law of the preservation of energy, he would have simplified his deductions. Fifth, it was noted that the Swiss mathematician did not yet distinguish between kinetic and potential energy, the phenomenon that would be later formulated by Lagrange and Hamilton (Minchenko 1970, pp. 50–54). This short article summarized all differences between L. Euler and the modern worldview of a physicist. But one can say in his defense that he was a virtuoso in using the second law of Kepler in addition to Newton’s Principia, and the physical concepts that were yet to be developed could not have been on his “list” of workable models. This underappreciated article served as a very insightful introduction to Euler’s outlook on physics. Indirectly arguing against F. Tisserand’s offhand treatment of L. Euler’s formulae, C. A. Truesdell showed the critical importance and power of mathematical formulae of L. Euler (as well of those of D’Alembert, Bernoulli, and others) as key elements of the laws of physics (Truesdell 1984). In the case of L. Euler, the problem of interpreting his heritage against the dichotomy of his personal novelties and discoveries and the common mathematical context of his age was made harder by the fact that his archive in St. Petersburg, Russia, was long hard to access for many scholars. The intellectual workshop of the Swiss mathematician became visible after his notebooks were studied in great detail. The appreciation C. A. Truesdell was able to give to the quality of L. Euler’s mathematical formulae was a sign of the turning tide towards high evaluation of the Swiss mathematician’s perfect mathematical skills that showed up through his works on calculus and on the Moon problem in particular. Being one of the scholars who had an opportunity to scale the true measure of L. Euler’s achievement in the process of publishing his multiple works, he was able to appreciate the consistency of the former’s mathematical apparatus that showed up in several significant works discussing the Moon problem. Thus, the next step in addressing this part of L. Euler’s works was making enumeration of the problems related to astronomy, which was achieved by E. Knobloch. But the first attempt at listing the Swiss mathematician’s works on the Moon problem only showed the wide scope of Euler’s interests and did not address their novelty or peculiarity (the article only summarized information about the contents of the works: it was shown they addressed the path of Mars and of the Moon, algorithms to calculate the position of the Moon, and so on: Ms. 131, p. 86, ms. 132, p. 212, ms. 131, p. 99, etc.) (Knobloch 1989, S. 294–295). This publication by E. Knobloch suggested that the actual path of an idea from a note in the notebook to a full-fledged article on the motion of the Moon had not been studied well before (Knobloch 1989, S. 294–295). A careful reader may notice that in his notebooks he did not mention Kepler’s second and third laws and any of the apparatus from Newton’s Principia. But he obviously used them in the second stage of his work. But in the published works, he and, later, his collaborators turned on the full power of calculus and trigonometric analysis.

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Euler’s Moon Theory in the Historiography of Science at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century In the twenty-first century, the development of research strategies to reassess Euler’s heritage followed several paths. In general, it was the time when scholars began to appreciate the works of L. Euler as a kind of language, a “grammar” of astronomical inquiry. The critical new element to the new approaches was not so much the search for end formulae, but paying more attention to the “language” of L. Euler’s apparatus. In this apparatus the semantic constructions of his derivations now became science to historians’ primary object of investigation. Primary sources were now much more easily available. This made scholars reconsider the contexts in which L. Euler’s theory formulated (Calinger 2019, pp. 227–235). In his most recent book, R. S. Calinger showed a complex way in which Euler shaped his lunar theory in communication with Alexis Clairault and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (Euler 1746c, 138, Opera Omnia 2:23, pp. 1–10; Clairault [1748] 1752a; Clairault [1750] 1752b; Calinger 2007, 2019, p. 230). Thus, the new trend in historiography showed that the Swiss mathematician’s formulae, derivations, and solutions could have been best understood if viewed in light of his contemporary’s apparatus. Since 2000, researchers looked hard at the sources and verified Euler’s basic calculations which were his trademark (Wilson 2007, 2008, 2010; Verdun 2011, 2013a, b, 2015). Examples from his manuscripts showed, for instance, how carefully he chose the variables for integration using Newton’s and Kepler’s laws of motion. It was remarked that in his earlier Ms. 167, Euler used the height as the measure of speed, an ingenious approach that showed him as an astronomer in the first place (Euler [1736] 1965, § 80; Euler 1736; Verdun 2013b, p. 505). One of the great results of publishing the manuscripts and notebooks of Euler and of their investigation by A. Verdun was in showing that among the sources Euler used for his works were the writings of Ismäel Boulliau (Boulliau 1982), Abraham de Moivre (1667–1754), John Keill (1671–1721), and Jacob Hermann (1678–1733) in addition to the commonly known fact that Leonard Euler relied on the works of Johann I Bernoulli (1667–1748) (Verdun 2013a, pp. 241–244, 255–256). He also examined the mathematical approaches Leonard Euler learned from these scholars (Verdun 2013a, pp. 256–258). These discoveries could have reduced the importance of L. Euler’s works, but in some sense, they have also emphasized the complexity of the apparatus he was using. Getting back to the sources including the manuscript ones was especially critical for appreciating the history of the “variation” of the Moon. The development of the lunar theory by G. W. Hill (1838–1914) and its completion by E. W. Brown (1866–1938) had left a significant problem: how to cope with what the latter called the “great empirical term,” but had showed in the works of astronomers including Euler in various other types of perturbations and the “variation.” In fact, an essentially historiographical interest in the list of publications of Leonard and Johann Albrecht Euler was prompted by the fact that the key formulae required to understand the implications of the “variation” in the “third lunar theory” published in Theoria motuum lunae were to be found only in one critical work by Johann

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Albrecht Euler that was read in 1766 and published in 1768 (Euler [1766] 1768; Verdun 2015, S. 357–359). The parameters of the “variation” were best set in the work of Johann Albrecht Euler from 1768 (read in 1766) that sought to separate the variation from all other perturbations (Euler [1766] 1768; Stäckel 1910a, S. 80; Wilson 2008, pp. 454–456). The advantage of this work was that J. A. Euler treated the variation as completely periodic (Wilson 2008, p. 458). This work was written by the son of Euler and its basic calculations seemed to be largely unknown even to the great specialists in lunar theory like F. Tisserand (1845–1896). Scholars recently recognized that L. Euler made a significant breakthrough in creating an approximate model of the Sun–Earth–Moon system that later allowed him to develop a fairly precise mathematical representation. A recent translation into English of Considerationes de motu corporum coelestium (presented at Berlin Academy on April 22, 1762, and at St. Petersburg Academy on May 17, 1762, E304) (Euler [1762] 1766; Euler [1766] 2022) brought to the attention of scholars that one needs to consider the time between 1753 and [1768] 1772 as that of a significant reconceptualization of the motion of the Moon. In fact, this translation has now become a critical element in rethinking Leonard Euler’s development of his final lunar theory because this work’s availability in English made it clear that the Swiss mathematician in 1762 advanced the idea to vary the orbital elements, or, in other words, to imagine how the equations be solved if one would imagine the Moon always to be in syzygy with the Sun as the first approximation (Verdun 2015, S. 241, 349–354). This work, presented between the official publication by Euler of the “first” and of the “second” theories of Moon motion, was a sign of the turn that Euler was making towards formulating the correct approach to the method of varying the elements of the orbit. Recent scholarship makes one recognize that while using his method that was based on the second law of Kepler, the Swiss mathematician also started to advance into those avenues that led him to creating the variation calculus. Despite a recent translation, scholars have not yet appreciated the importance of this shift in how Euler formulated the mathematical problem. But one needs to notice here that if one takes this problem (of the Moon always staying in syzygy with the Sun) together with the third law of Kepler, then one can find that any change in the distance between the Moon and the Earth would produce a change in period that would depend on the displacement in the orbit as the displacement distance in the power of three halves (or otherwise, @T ~ @x3/2) (Verdun 2015, S. 774). This helped L. Euler and his collaborators explain the inequalities in the Moon’s cycles by the variations in the distance between the Earth and the Moon and helped them understand that even a small variation in one of the Moon orbit’s axes would require the Moon to finish its movement to the same synodic point determined by the position of the observer in a much longer time variation. But most importantly, recent scholarship has shown that in addition to using the variation of the orbit as the main approach, L. Euler made breakthrough in advancing approximate numerical differentiation and integration as the main tool of calculating the parameters of the Moon’s motion (Euler [1763] 1770a [E398], p. 149; Goldstin 1977, p. 141, 285; Beutler 2005, p. 254, 259; Verdun 2015, S. 767, 772–773, 777–781). The main achievement of modern scholars was to show that the method

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of integrating by the powers of the differential put forward by Euler in his abovementioned 1770 article [E398] was a development, on the particular example of the Moon’s motion, of his principles of integration developed in his earlier textbook on calculus (Euler [1766] 1768, pp. 493–508; Verdun 2015, S. 767). This allowed the Swiss mathematician to employ the technique that was based on the variation on the orbit parameters much more freely and let him use the division of the equations of the lunar motion into various members with much greater justification for himself and other scholars. Thus, this recent translation of a key work by Euler helped understand the intellectual efforts that helped the “second” theory of Moon’s motion to be born in his famous publication of 1772 (Euler [1768] 1772, E418). The new approach has also allowed scholars to appreciate, although not to its full power, one important mathematical transformation that L. Euler made in helping calculate the formula that could help determine the value of the variation. One critical formulation relevant to the Moon theory can be found in the earlier manuscript version of Euler’s first book on the motion of the Moon, in his book on Mechanics as well as its manuscript version, and in his short manuscript works on the motion of a point under the influence of the central force (Ms. 397, Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, F. 136, register 1, docket 129; Euler 1962b). It was the formula where changing distance between the center of force and the moving point was increasing or decreasing with the differential of this change being in the denominator. This would give a logarithmic function upon integration. Later in his life he clearly developed this theme with a better apparatus and relying on the relations of the angles rather than absolute visible and calculated linear distances. Recent studies appreciated the proposal of L. Euler to put the inequality of the Moon into equations by way of using it as ln(1 þ D), where D was the infinitesimally small variation (Euler [1764] 1766; Sandifier 2015, p. 169). This allowed him to employ the divergent series, on which he already published a number of works, in the calculations of the Moon’s equations (Euler [1754/5] 1760; Barbeau and Leah 1976). He thus was responsible for raising logarithms to the analytical value and to employing them in the calculations of the Moon’s orbit on the permanent basis (Naux 1971, p. 143; Baron 1969, p. 135–148). Recent scholarship has also noted and made important conclusions about the fact that Leonard Euler’s approach seemed to have relied on his son’s paper in reconciling the observations of the Moon to theory in E401, “A New Method for Comparing Observations of the Moon to the Theory” (Euler [1763] 1770b). Johann Albrecht’s method of representing a function as a series of reverse powers may have been in line with the approach that later helped F.-J. Servois (1768–1841) develop what historians of science call “Lagrange’s view” of seeing derivatives not by way of limits, but through the coefficients of the function’s reverse power series expansion (Krylov 1951a, p. 201; Servois 1814; Sandifier 2015, p. 168; Verdun 2015, S. 357–359). It has now been shown that the works of G. W. Hill utilized Johann Albrecht’s concept of the “variation” in naming several types of it (Wilson 2007, pp. 142–144; 2008, pp. 458–460). Hill relied on Johann Albrecht’s formula of the series of reverse powers, absent in the publications and manuscript materials of his father!

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In fact, these publications brought the study of the Swiss mathematician’s work on the theory on the Moon’s motion on an entirely new paradigmatic plane that had been created in the twentieth century by the conceptual epistemological works of L. Witgenstein and A. N. Whitehead (Witgenstein [1953] 2009, §§ 43, 89, 90; Condé 2021, pp. 5, 15; Whitehead 1929a [1985]). The former’s proposal to view every statement as part of a language of higher order finally did justice to L. Euler’s achievement: it suggested that in his works that may have seemed to F. Tisserand as partial solutions were written by L. Euler with a view to the “first principles” of mathematics (Schliesser 2011, pp. 104–105). In fact, particular works that dedicated to finding solutions to what might have seemed as partial problems may be interpreted and, as parts of the larger mathematical “metatext,” spread around in a large number of publications. In this line of reasoning, each formula was like a word or sentence in the language that L. Euler and his assistants so freely used. At the same time, A. N. Whitehead’s reevaluation of ontology and of philosophy of science also contributed to the historian’s of science indirect reassessment of the methods employed by L. Euler. The English philosopher argued that “there is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming,” thus arguing for the “atomism” of events and for the fact that “actual entities are drops of experience” (Whitehead 1929a [1985], p. 35, 18). In contrast to his earlier works, these statements suggested that scientists can only observe fragments of reality, which fundamentally coincided with the philosophical interpretation the classics of quantum mechanics were giving to the basic postulates of their discipline. This took some criticism off L. Euler’s partial solutions of the Moon’s motion since A. N. Whitehead’s interpretation implied that no scholar could even theoretically produce a mathematical model for all parameters of the lunar motion. But at the same time, he wrote that every “actual entity is at once the product of the efficient past, and is also causa sui” (Whitehead 1929b, p. 150). Thus, despite the fact that scientists could only observe and measure “drops of reality,” the physical reality itself develops in interconnected and deterministic processes. Recent scholarship highlighted that the concept of the relativity of motion was central to all Leonard Euler’s work (Maltese 2000, pp. 344–345). One important assessment that modern scholars started to put forward that distinguished Leonard Euler from other mathematicians of his age was that he was from very early set on solving a “three-body” problem (Wilson 2010, p. 22). It was also noted that the theory of G. W. Hill had essentially Eulerian roots (Brown 1916, p. 284; Wilson 2010, p. 26). The 2008 article by C. Wilson (whose shortcoming was to assume that it was Euler senior who actually authored the article discussed) also made a specific notice of the fact that the [1766] 1768 article “Réflexions sur la variation de la lune” was a breakthrough because in it the author sought to treat the “variation” separately from the other inequalities of the Moon (Euler 1766; Wilson 2008, p. 453). It was finally recognized that J. A. Euler, the son of Leonard Euler, calculated the first two terms of the Moon on the variation curve in 1766 (Euler [1766] 1768; Wilson 2010, p. 23). Recognition of Johann Albrecht Euler after so many years was all the more important. A. Verdun’s publications in second decade of the twenty-first century wrapped up a long history of studies of the astronomical heritage of Leonard Euler. For the first time, they linked three types of works by the Swiss mathematician: his

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published works, his posthumously published works, and the research that had been only left in manuscript format (Verdun 2011, 2013a, b, 2015).

Conclusion In this chapter, the stages of development of the historiography of L. Euler’s works on the motion of the Moon were examined. In this chapter it is argued that the approach that mathematicians, historians of science, and scholars adopted to describe L. Euler’s Moon theory was dominated by the contemporary philosophical paradigm of the Western philosophical tradition. In light of Dilthey’s and Windelband’s division between the natural sciences as nomothetical and history and other humanities as ideographical the concentration of scholars of the late nineteenth century on only the general principles of L. Euler’s theories seems to correlate with the “Zeitgeist” of the natural sciences’ breakthrough (Windelband 1894, p. 143, 145). In other words, the study of the Swiss mathematician’s apparatus and theories was made with the belief that natural sciences should ideally be looked at with a view to a generalized theory while partial solutions were deemed unsatisfactory. However, over the course of the twentieth century, Witgenstein’s philosophy of science slowly but gradually took hold in the studies of L. Euler’s concepts of the Moon’s motion: from the second half of the twentieth century and especially in the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholars started to appreciate that the Swiss mathematician’s formulae and solutions were like a complex language in which each formula and value were part of the general semantics of the answer, formulated only as a system of complex cross-referenced formula derivations within the context of works, theories, and solutions proposed by I. Newton, A. Clairault, and F. Le Rond D’Alembert. A. N. Whitehead’s reevaluation of ontology and of the philosophy of science also contributed to the historian’s indirect reassessment of the methods employed by L. Euler, because he argued that although scientists could only observe and measure “drops of reality,” the physical reality itself develops in interconnected and deterministic processes. This took off any critique of what had been dubbed as Euler’s “partial solutions” of the equations of the lunar motion. There were four stages in the historiography of the problem. (1) In the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, much effort was put into publishing the corpus of Euler’s works and of an index to it. When indices were published, the historiography of Euler’s works started to gain momentum. (2) In the 1930s, the discrepancies that existed between different lunar theories stirred interest in addressing the heritage of Leonard Euler as a historiographical problem in the articles of academician A. N. Krylov in the USSR. This also caused the second publication boom of Leonard Euler’s works. (3) In the third and fourth quarters of the twentieth century, scholars made the first attempt at evaluating the overall scientific achievement of Leonard Euler regarding the motion of the Moon. During this stage, scholars noted the breadth of Leonard Euler’s interests based on his notebooks that are held in Russia and seemed to be amazed by the fact that he used a significant amount of problems and information from other sources. They also noted that in the process of

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formulating his ideas, Leonard Euler was going a complex path from basic postulates to basic formulae and then to solutions. But they did not appreciate the historiographical importance of how the Moon theory was built from the “first principles” of Newton’s and Kepler’s laws and from the trigonometry and calculus L. Euler spent so much time developing. (4) At the turn of the twenty-first century, the attempt was made to understand the origin of his approaches among the ideas that had been developed and shared by Johann Bernoulli, J. Le Rond d’Alembert, J. G. Leibnitz, and others. The problem of the lunar motion as the critically important research agenda of L. Euler, to which he dedicated more than 40 years of his life, came to attract the attention of scholars, and it was recognized that he made a significant step forward in contrast to other scholars like A. Clairault. There also appeared, but not yet in a developed form, an understanding among modern scholars of how Euler managed to navigate among the existing theories and methods and to strip his work of some of the traditional methods and limitations that had been inherited from both classical science and from that of the early modern period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since about the beginning of the second decade of the twentyfirst century, the attempt was made to understand how difficult was for Euler the process of formulating his ideas in the balance between the “first principles” and the secondary, derivative principles that had originated from the hypotheses proposed by his recent predecessors, some of which in turn had originated from the traditional knowledge of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Interestingly, however, this new approach suggests that L. Euler’s navigation in the physical concepts of his age in their application to the motion of the Moon makes it necessary to reevaluate his achievements as a physicist. Modern historiography makes it possible to argue that L. Euler exercised a critical and balanced approach to the theories of his age in regards to the motion of the Moon, the approach that was based on the possibility of the mathematical verification of physical theories. It was in this sense that one may see in his works an attempt to make a mathematical verification of any theory of the Moon’s motion the “first principle” of any discussion of physics.

Cross-References ▶ Early Historiography of Science ▶ Gaston Bachelard and Historical Epistemology: A New Perspective for the History of Science in the Twentieth Century ▶ History of Science as History of Our Best Errors: Joseph Agassi’s Critical Historiography of Science ▶ Lorraine Daston’s Historical Epistemology: Style, Program, and School ▶ Pierre Duhem: Between the Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History ▶ The Emergence of a Sophisticated Historiography of Science in Continental Europe in the late Nineteenth Century ▶ The Historiography of Scientific Revolutions: A Philosophical Reflection ▶ The Origins of Alexandre Koyré’s History of Scientific Thought ▶ Thomas Kuhn’s Legacy for the Historiography of Science

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . German Historicism and French Positivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . German Histories of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . French Histories of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter investigates the histories of sciences put forward in the second half of the nineteenth century on the European continent and the historiographical frameworks that shaped those histories. The authors were mainly scientists and mathematicians with marked historical interests and sometimes with a good philosophical background. More specifically, the chapter focuses on Germanspeaking and French-speaking scientists-historians and mathematicianshistorians. Deep scientific, technological, and social transformations took place in the last decades of the century, together with a process of professionalization and specialization of scientific practices. These scientists undertook metatheoretical research on the explicit and implicit foundations of sciences, on the development of scientific theories and practices over time, and on aims and methods of sciences. The awareness of the complexity of scientific traditions can be found both in French research from Cournot to Duhem and in German research from Cantor to Mach. The existence of this cultural environment allows us to understand that Mach and Duhem cannot be looked upon as isolated forerunners. They represented the starting point of the subsequent professionalization of meta-theoretical research on science and at the same time the most S. Bordoni (*) Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_24

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meaningful outcome of historical research that spread through Europe from the mid-nineteenth century. Keywords

Continental Europe · Late nineteenth century · Meta-theoretical commitment · Histories of sciences · Historiographical frameworks · Historicism · Positivism

Introduction This chapter deals with meta-theoretical research on science in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The second half of the century saw the mathematical and theoretical codification and systematization of news fields of physical sciences such as thermodynamics and electromagnetism and the emergence of life sciences such as physiology and evolutionary biology. This transformation consisted in widening, deepening, and redefining the classical fields of research. It also involved investigations on the nature of scientific practices and their history. New historiographical frameworks also emerged. This cultural process took place when the word “science” replaced other words and practices like “natural history,” “natural philosophy,” and “mixed mathematics” (Ross 1962, pp. 66; Bowler and Morus 2005, 3, 6–7, 20, and 53).1 This chapter also deals with militant historiographies, which allowed militant scientists to undertake sophisticated historical research. Why militant? Essentially for two reasons. First: those historians were professional scientists and mathematicians, and they were interested in history and historiography in order to highlight the tradition and the present state of their disciplines. Second: at least some of them were deeply committed to unearthing the hidden or tacit meta-theoretical foundations of the disciplines. In brief, historical research and new historiographical frameworks were necessary tools of a wide-scope meta-theoretical commitment to better understanding science. I must now clarify the adjective meta-theoretical. Under the label meta-theoretical, I encompass a network of investigations on the explicit and implicit foundations of sciences, on the development of scientific theories and practices over time, alongside the focus on aims and methods of sciences. This meta-theoretical commitment prompted historical research but also anthropological and philosophical research leading to new, sophisticated epistemologies. In the last decades of the 1

The establishment of definite boundaries between science and philosophy was one of the achievements of scientific practices in the late nineteenth century. As Pickstone pointed out, “the sciences we take for granted – chemistry, physics, biology, and so forth – were chiefly the creations of the nineteenth century.” Moreover, we should distinguish the process of professionalization from the process of institutionalization in the field of the history of sciences. Institutionalization occurred now and then at the end of the century but took place in a systematic way only after World War II (Pickstone 2007, pp. 490 and 492). Professionalization took place at the end of the nineteenth century, when sophisticated historiographies began to spread throughout Europe.

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nineteenth century, it is hard to separate the two intellectual practices that we nowadays call history of science and philosophy of science. Dealing with continental Europe, I realized that focusing on language communities (more specifically French-speaking and German-speaking communities) was a more suitable choice than focusing on national communities.2 Some scholars, such as Christian Poggendorff, Arthur Arneth, Ferdinand Nesselmann, Michel Chasles, Antoine Augustin Cournot, and Ernest Naville, are not popular names, whereas some others, such as Ernst Mach, Moritz Cantor, Paul Tannery, and Pierre Duhem, are better known. The less known profiles of scientists-historians and mathematicians-historians help us appreciate the existence of a cultural environment, and the existence of this environment tells us that Mach and Duhem were not isolated forerunners. They refined historical interests that had already emerged together with the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia, and then French positivism and German historicism. The last decades of the century saw an “industrial and social revolution” and the spread of new technologies (Hobsbawm 1989, pp. 30–32), together with a process of professionalization and specialization of scientific practices. For the first time in history, scientific practices managed to improve the standards of life in many European towns.3 Both the intellectual and the social role of science and scientists were involved (Swerdlow 1993, pp. 375–376). We find the emergence of an optimistic scientism: science represented the suitable solution for technological and social problems, prompting a new age of progress. Indeed, a pessimistic scientism also emerged: scientific progress could help mankind to cope with social degeneration, “slowing down the deterioration of the human species” (Bowler and Morus 2005, pp. 147–148 and 150).

German Historicism and French Positivism Around 1865 and 1866, the English Matthew Arnold, “a consummate poet and religious, literary, social, and political critic,” who was also a School Inspector for some decades, was sent to the Continent in order to analyze elementary and higher education there (Rapple 1997, pp. 159 and 161). In the report he addressed to the Schools Enquiry Commissioners in 1868, Schools and Universities on the Continent, he collected his observations on France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland’s educational systems (Arnold 1868, p. v). In the end, he lamented that “England, with her wealth and importance, has barely one half the proportion of her population coming, even nominally, under superior instruction, that France and Prussia have.” The quality of the instruction received by 2

Scandinavian historians of mathematics frequently published or re-published their research in German or French. 3 On the advantages of electric energy as a clean kind of energy, see Lami (1891, p. 743); on the spread of telegraphic nets, see Galison (2003, pp. 174–180).

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French and German students was far better than that of English students (Arnold 1868, pp. 288–292). It seemed that “Continental nations . . . had risen in strength and prestige”; culture and education had been playing an important role in that rise (Rapple 1997, p. 160). On the European Continent, universities were better equipped to trigger off – and cope with – cultural, technological, and social progress. In German-speaking context, historical studies underwent a process of professional and methodological systematization. The two aspects were intrinsically intertwined because “(c)entral to the process of professionalisation was the firm belief in the scientific status of history.” In other words, the objects of historical research became “accessible to clearly defined methods of inquiry.” More specifically, according to the German historian Leopold von Ranke and his school, history was a science in a strict sense, even though it was different “in subject matter and methods” from natural sciences. After Ranke, history could only be practiced by “professionally trained historians” (Iggers 2005, pp. 1–2, 8, 14, and 17).4 Around German unification in 1871, we find the birth of the first national societies of history of science and history of medicine, the creation of the first specialized journals, and the implementation of inventories of scientific devices that had been devised, designed, and actually employed since the origin of modern science. In 1886, in the context of German Scientists and Physicians meeting, there was the first historical exhibition. New journals appeared in the new field of history of mathematics: in 1868, the Italian Bullettino; in 1877, Cantor’s Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der mathematischen Wissenschaften; and in 1884, Eneström’s Bibliotheca Mathematica. New interests also emerged: for instance, the science of the European Middle Ages and the discovery of Babylonian science (Swerdlow 1993, pp. 305–307).5 In German historicism, we find a mild naturalism: human history and human experience could be looked upon as elements of the natural world. Droysen’s booklet, Grundriß der Historik, best exemplifies the sophisticated historical method that influenced German histories of science. His short and sharp statements focused on method and nature of history; a revised and enlarged version was published in 1875, and a new, updated version was published in 1882 with minor changes. He started from a series of foundational questions: “How can history stem from current business or current events? (“Wie wird aus den Geschäften Geschichte?”) How can we rely on the scarce amount of data still survived? Can the critical analysis of sources lead us to pure facts (“reinen Thatsache”)? What about objectivity and

According to Iggers, until the early nineteenth century, “there had been two dominant traditions of writing history: one predominantly learned and antiquarian, the other essentially literary.” History was looked upon as history of European élite and its “key institutions, primarily the state, that occupied the central role in the narrative.” There was only one history (Iggers 2005, pp. 23, 52, and 142–43). 5 At the end of the century, a design of international collaboration was put forward by the German mathematician Felix Klein. His Encyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften encompassed both the mathematical body of knowledge and its history. This encyclopedia was published in German and then in French. 4

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historical truth? Can historical knowledge rely on steady foundations like natural sciences? (Droysen 1858, pp. 4–6; 1875, pp. 7–8).6 Droysen remarked that Nature and History are the basic and widest concepts encompassing human experience under the “intuitions (Anschauungen)” of space and time. History does not really deal with past events but rather with present reconstructions. Past is over: it does not exist anymore. History is the network of present reconstructions of the past. What Droysen labelled Historik might be translated as historiography; it was an “Organon” for historical research rather than a philosophy of history, which was rejected as both a priori and too idealistic.7 It would be better to speak of an epistemology of history (Droysen 1858, pp. 10–11). We find the clear awareness that human beings and their intellectual artifacts cannot escape history as well as they cannot escape the natural world.8 German history of mathematics emerged in a systematic way in the second half of the nineteenth century. Two main features should be stressed: a specific interest in non-European mathematics, more specifically Arabic, Indian, and Chinese mathematics, and historical-historiographical periodizations in the history of mathematics. As early as 1837, in the book Aperçu historique sur l’origine et le développement des méthodes en géométrie, particulièrement de celles qui se rapportent à la géométrie moderne, which he republished in 1875, the French mathematician Michel Chasles had pinpointed five epochs in the history of geometry (Chasles 1875, pp. 1, 4, 51, 94, 142, and 189; Peiffer 2002, pp. 16, 19, and 19–21).9 In 1842, the German mathematician Ferdinand Nesselmann stressed the necessity of a critical history of mathematics based on the detailed analysis of sources. He mastered Sanskrit and Arabic and published a critical history of algebra, Versuch einer kritischen Geschichte der Algebra. This 500-page book was devoted to ancient Greek algebra, and it was based on the investigation of original sources. Nesselmann was not interested in history as a simple collection of information and insisted on the critical feature of his research (“Ich wollte, wie der Titel gesagt, eine kritische Geschichte schreiben”). Alongside primary sources, he took into account old and

6

According to Frederick Beiser, German historicism might be traced back to Herder and to a cultural tradition that merged history with natural history and natural laws. This complex network of influences led to some unexpected philosophical convergences like the provisional alliance between Ranke and positivists (Beiser 2011, pp. 100–105, 167–168, 255, 261, and 323–327). 7 Droysen also blamed “the false alternative between materialism and idealism” (Droysen 1875, p. 11). 8 On the network of philosophical influences on German historicism, see McQuillan (2013, p. 136): “. . . some of the figures associated with the historicist tradition identified with the enlightenment, while others turned to historicism in reaction against the enlightenment. [. . .] many early historicists saw their work as an extension of enlightenment naturalism and the “science of man”, while later historicists tried to distinguish their methods from those of the natural sciences.” 9 Until the end of the seventeenth century, investigations into the history of mathematics were part of mathematical practice: historical introductions and historical remarks were quite common in mathematical papers and textbooks. At the same time, since ancient mathematics had been surpassed by the modern one, mathematicians thought that old mathematics did not deserve a specific field of research (Peiffer 2002, pp. 4–5).

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modern historiographies, from Eudemus of Rhodes and Theophrastus of Lesbos until Chasles (Nesselmann 1842, pp. ix–x).10 Ten years later, another German mathematician, Arthur Arneth, focused on the differences between Greek and Hindu mathematics and on a wide-scope history involving the whole of human culture. Teacher of mathematics and physics at a Lyceum and Privatdozent at the University of Heidelberg, he explored the cultural background that gave rise to ancient Greek and Indian mathematics. In ancient Greece, mathematics consisted mainly of a based-on-proof geometry, whereas in ancient India, mathematics consisted of a based-on-procedures algebra (Arneth 1852, p. iv). According to Arneth, the difference stemmed from different anthropological and intellectual habits. Other high-school teachers, well trained in mathematics and ancient languages, undertook the demanding task of writing sophisticated histories of mathematics. In the book of the young mathematician Hermann Hankel, which was posthumously published in 1874, we also find historical periodizations and cultural differences between Greek and Hindu mathematics (Folkerts et al. 2002, pp. 115–117 and 122). In French context, we find an intellectual trend that might be qualified as scientism. It rested upon the confidence in continuous human progress; scientific progress could automatically lead to social progress. The philosophical root of scientism can be traced back to Auguste Comte’s positivism, more specifically to the six volumes of the Cours de philosophie positive he published between 1830 and 1842. Comte looked upon positivism as a key stage in the history of civilization: it was the last, culminating stage. After “the theological stage” and “the metaphysical stage,” the last stage could rely on science as an engine of intellectual and social progress (Comte 1830, pp. 3–8).11 In 1852, he published the book Catéchisme positiviste, wherein he put forward a new kind of scientific or “universal religion.” Both in France and England, after Comte’s death (1857), some positivist philosophers rejected Comte’s religious drift (Comte 1852 (1891), pp. 1, 4–6, 11, 15–17, 21, 26, and 29; Mill 1865, pp. 5, 9, and 125–128).12 Starting from the mid-nineteenth century, the French mathematician and economist Antoine Augustin Cournot put forward a new kind of historical-philosophical investigation into the scientific body of knowledge. He went far beyond the sharp

10 See Nesselmann (1842, p. 1): “Die Geschichte der Mathematik ist, wie es scheint, sehr frühe behandelt worden.” 11 Positivism was both a specific philosophical school and a broad, intellectual environment, “an atmosphere” (Benrubi 1926, pp. 16–17; Metzger 1930 (1987), p. 113). On the meaning of words such as scientism and positivism, see Schöttler (2012, pp. 253–254). 12 Comte had an enduring influence both in French-speaking countries and in England. Going beyond Comte’s sharp scientism, William Whewell delved into the philosophical structures of scientific thought in his The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History (Whewell 1847, vol. 1, pp. v–x, 1, 7, and 14; Whewell 1847, vol. 2, pp. 321–322, 324, 326, and 329). An intermediate philosophy between Comte’s and Whewell’s can be found in Mill’s (1848) A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. For a wider analysis of French and English positivist environment, see Bordoni (2017b, pp. 21–25).

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scientism of the Comte’s school because his historiographical approach involved a detailed inquiry into the hidden or tacit philosophical foundations of science.13 In his 1861 book, Traité de l’enchainement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l’histoire, he stressed that the emergence of modern science had changed our patterns of explanation just by introducing history in science. Modern science had emerged when time and history had come into play, when Copernicus and Tycho Brahe’s purely geometrical models were transformed into physical models, wherein physical systems evolved over time (Cournot 1861, pp. II–VII). History had come into play also in life sciences, when scholars had discovered that living species had appeared and then disappeared over time: Nature was not compelled “to act always in the same way in the same situations,” and “time was involved in an intrinsic way in the laws ruling Nature” (Cournot 1861, pp. 223, 272–273, 277, and 284).14 Cournot’s history of science involved a complex historiographical framework wherein two different scientific traditions were at stake. A steady progress had taken place in sciences such as astronomy, optics, and mechanics since the dawn of Middle East and Greek civilizations. They were sciences that could rely on a long history of subsequent systematizations until “a revolutionary crisis” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the other hand, there had been no progress in the wide field of phenomena dealing with “heat, magnetism, and electricity” for many centuries. It was a field of scattered, empirical knowledge that did not manage to gain a substantial emancipation from its “childish condition” until the nineteenth century, when actual progress and systematization took place (Cournot 1872, pp. 292–294).15 Cournot pointed out the impossibility of getting rid of the meta-theoretical investigations that “positivist philosophers” had discarded together with metaphysics. He stressed that “a body of purely empirical knowledge is not a real science”

13

After becoming Dean in Grenoble, in 1838, Cournot was appointed General Inspector of Public Education. In the same year, he published a short book on the mathematical theory of economics, Recherches sur les principes mathématiques de la théorie des richesses, and in 1843, a longer book on statistics and probability, focusing on their philosophical and scientific foundations. In 1851, in the book Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances et sur les caractères de la critique philosophique, he undertook a sophisticated analysis of scientific practices, just highlighting the role of statistics and probability. For Cournot’s biography, see Moore (1905, pp. 521–543). 14 It is worth stressing that Cournot rejected any reductionism, in particular the reduction of life sciences to chemistry and physics. He restated his anti-reductionism in the 1872 book Considérations sur la marche des idées et des événements dans les temps modernes. His philosophical stance was not shared by many authoritative scientists. For instance, in the same year, the renowned German physiologist Emile Du Bois-Reymond claimed that scientific knowledge consisted in “reducing all transformations taking place in the material world to atomic motions.” A strict reductionism led him to a strict determinism: the universe was ruled by mechanical necessity (Du Bois-Reymond 1872, pp. 441–444 and 446). For more details, see Bordoni (2017a, pp. 64–72). 15 It is worth remarking that, only a century after Cournot’s investigations, in the second half of the twentieth century, scholars inquired extensively into the differences between the two traditions. See Thomas Kuhn’s interpretation of “classical” and “Baconian” sciences (Kuhn 1976, pp. 4–22).

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(Cournot 1875, pp. 371–376). This historiographical and epistemological perspective was not in tune with the most radical positivist historiography and epistemology. The influential positivist Émile Littré and other positivists went on celebrating a simplified cult of progress. They underestimated the complexity of the history of sciences: actual history showed stages of stagnation and regression besides stages of progress. The more dogmatic positivist Pierre Laffitte insisted on scientific empiricism, on historiographical determinism, and on the “universal religion” as the final achievement of “western evolution” (Littré 1873, pp. IV–VII; Laffitte 1876, pp. 1, 13–14, 18, and 30).

German Histories of Science In 1863, in the book Mathematische Beiträge zum Kulturleben der Völker, Moritz Cantor, professor of mathematics at Heidelberg, addressed some historiographical issues such as the problematic link between the history of mathematics and philology, the complex network of scientific influences unfolding over time, and simultaneous discoveries (Cantor 1863, pp. 3–4). In 1880, in the first volume of his masterpiece, Vorlesungen über Geschichte der Mathematik, he stressed the recent progress in the history of mathematics. From the very first pages, we find many remarks and quotations on the linguistic and anthropological origin of numerals and on the high level of Babylonian scientific accomplishments. He frequently avowed his confidence in the reliability of ancient sources (Cantor 1863, pp. VI–VII, 5–6, and 357–360).16 Two main commitments were at stake in German history of mathematics. On the one hand, we find Moritz Cantor’s constant link between “the history of mathematics and the general history of human civilisation” and the inquiry into “the origins of mathematics . . . among different peoples.” On the other hand, the Danish mathematician Hieronymus Zeuthen paid attention to mathematical development for the benefit of mathematicians (Lützen and Purkert 1994, pp. 2, 12, and 24). However, all these histories of mathematics rested upon the accurate analysis of sources and the awareness of the transformations experienced by mathematical languages and concepts over time. Some leaned toward a pure historical commitment and others toward a historical-didactical commitment. Even intermediate attitudes appeared: for instance, the French Paul Tannery leaned toward Zeuthen even though Cantor himself did not miss to stress the value of Tannery’s research.17 16

Cantor attended Arneth’s lectures in Heidelberg, Gauss and Wilhelm Weber’s lectures in Göttingen, and those of Lejeune Dirichlet in Berlin. He also met Chasles in Paris in 1860 (Lützen and Purkert 1994, pp. 2–3). 17 For the influence of Chasles on Cantor and Zeuthen, see Peiffer (2002, p. 22): “CHASLES played a major role in establishing the history of mathematics as a subdiscipline of mathematics. Through his immense reputation, . . ., CHASLES exercised an influence on many mathematicians, French and foreign, including Hieronymus ZEUTHEN and MORITZ CANTOR, that is still under-appreciated.”

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In the book Zeuthen published (in 1884 in Danish and in 1886 in German) on conic sections in antiquity, Die Lehre von den Kegelschnitten im Altertum, he acknowledged his debt toward Tannery and the Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg (Zeuthen 1886, p. XIII). Not only did the ancient theory of conic sections attract Zeuthen for its intrinsic historical value but also for the possibility of highlighting different mathematical languages. He analyzed the rational strategy of Greek mathematicians; his aim was just unveiling their pathways of discovery (“die so gefunden Entdeckungswege”). He also pointed out the double nature of geometry in ancient times: it was a set of specific contents, and, at the same time, a general language for a cosmological-physical theory (“als Organ für die allgemeine Größenlehre”). He focused on the reconstruction of Apollonius’ texts, on the comparison with Archimedes and Euclid’s texts, and on a reinterpretation of those mathematical contents “by means of more recent language and representations” (Zeuthen 1886, pp. VII–XI). When he published (in 1893 in Danish and in 1896 in German) Die Geschichte der Mathematik im Altertum und Mittelalter, his historiographical stance emerged once more. From the outset, he stressed that his history of mathematics was addressed to students and teachers of mathematics in order to help them to better understand the discipline. He specified that his investigations dealt only with the most renowned mathematicians: for “remarkably complete and reliable” historical details involving lesser-known mathematicians, he advised readers to turn to Cantor’s Vorlesungen (Zeuthen 1896, pp. I–III and V–VI).18 An interesting instance of German history of science can be found in the manuscript the physicist Johann Christian Poggendorff left unpublished at his death in 1877: it was published in 1879 under the title Geschichte der Physik. From the outset, Poggendorff specified that the progressive nature of science should not prevent scientists from the effort of understanding and giving a historical account of the complexity of scientific practices. More specifically, his historiographical approach attempted to highlight the complex network of achievements and detours and the hidden or tacit pathways of discovery. Just like Zeuthen, he aimed at unveiling how scientists had arrived at their discoveries or invention (“. . . wie sie zu ihrer Entdeckung oder Erfindung gekommen sind”) (Poggendorff 1879, pp. 1–2).19 18

In 1936, the Belgian historian of sciences George Sarton pointed out that Cantor’s account of “ancient and medieval period and oriental mathematics in general” was definitely “insufficient”: his history of mathematics should be “entirely rewritten.” However, many details had already been corrected by the historian of mathematics Gustaf H. Eneström and his collaborators in the journal Bibliotheca Mathematica. With regard to Zeuthen, Sarton remarked that “he was himself a creative mathematician and had a keener sense of mathematical subtleties than Cantor” (Sarton 1936 (1957), pp. 42 and 44). 19 In 1834, after having got his PhD from the University of Berlin, Poggendorff became extraordinary professor of physics in the same university, and there he remained until his death in 1877. For many years, he was in charge as the Annalen der Physik und Chemie’s editor, the best-known and the most authoritative scientific journal in German-speaking countries in the nineteenth century. This was his lifework, the translation of foreign papers included. In 1863, he published an extensive,

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He focused on the emergence of modern science and more specifically on the body of knowledge that had already been labelled “physics” in German-speaking countries since the early nineteenth century. He looked upon modern physics as an outstanding outcome of modern civilization and, at the same time, as a practice that enhanced and strengthened that civilization. He insisted on the deep and enduring link between science, history, and anthropology. This connection between the specific field of scientific practices and human experience in general was deeply rooted in contemporary German historicism (Poggendorff 1879, p. 3). Poggendorff’s specific historiography of science entailed the superposition between two different historical processes. The first one consisted of a series of short-term cultural transformations involving progresses, regressions, and stagnations. The second one consisted of a long-term advancement of science and civilization. This progressive trend over more than two millennia could be divided into four stages: the classical antiquity, the medieval stage, then the “progressive” one (“fortschrittlich,” namely, the so-called scientific revolution), and eventually the most recent stage of advancements in the old sciences and emergence of new sciences. He distinguished the scientific revolution in a broad sense, which could be associated with the name of Copernicus, from the more specific revolution in physics, which occurred later and could be associated with the name of Galileo. According to Poggendorff, only the physical revolution represented a real breakthrough in science (Poggendorff 1879, pp. 3–6). The seventeenth-century transformation in physics could be looked upon as a reinterpretation of Greek mechanics and optics; more specifically, Newton’s science could be considered as “the accomplishment of the old physics.” This is an interesting historiographical thesis: Poggendorff considered ancient mechanics and optics as consistent and refined bodies of scientific knowledge. Therefore, scientific progress consisted of two subsequent stages: the transformation-accomplishment of the ancient body of knowledge, which took place in the seventeenth century, and the creation of new scientific fields, around the mid-nineteenth century. Poggendorff himself had witnessed the emergence of electricity, magnetism, thermodynamics, and chemical physics as new fields of research (Poggendorff 1879, pp. 6–7).20 When Ernst Mach published his masterpiece, Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung historisch-kritisch dargestellt, in 1883, he could rely on a meaningful tradition of histories of science. In reality, his research program had already been put forward in 1872, when he published the booklet Die Geschichte und die Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit. More radically than Poggendorff, Mach inquired into principles, methods, and conceptual models of physics, conflating history, historiography, and epistemology. History represented a cultural tool for the comprehension of science as a stratified body of knowledge and for the description of science as a set of actual scientific practices. His meta-theoretical research encyclopedic Handwörterbuch on the history of exact sciences in two volumes, with biographies of many scientists and short accounts of their achievements and publications. 20 We have seen that this historiographical thesis had already been put forward in Cournot (1872, pp. 292–294). See also footnote 15.

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followed two different pathways: the historical-historiographical and the foundational-epistemological. History showed “the variability of views” and the intrinsically provisional nature of scientific enterprise. As Droysen had already pointed out, scientists and their theories are embedded into history (Mach 1872, p. 3). Following the emergence of the new physics in the texts of Stevin, Galileo, Torricelli, and Huygens, Mach realized that the principle of conservation of energy was based on the principle of the impossibility of perpetual motion or motion from nothing. The subsequent mechanical interpretation narrowed the scope of the original principle. Physics could progress without relying on the mechanical worldview: mechanism was “not necessary for the knowledge of the phenomena.” It could “be replaced just as well by another theory,” and sometimes “mechanical conceptions can even be a hindrance to the comprehension of phenomena” (Mach 1872, pp. 18–19 and 30). Scientific practices required an “economic” or synthetic strategy and some intuitive skills. The economy or synthesis should trace back a great number of experiences to a few fundamental facts and principles.21 This kind of economy of thought was nothing else but the theoretical side of scientific practices. But these practices also involved non-scientific issues: the choice of fundamental principles among the huge amount of empirical and experimental knowledge depended on anthropology and history (“das hängt von der Gewohnheit und von der Geschichte ab”). In other words, the history of science and the history of civilization influence what the scientists think and do at a given time (Mach 1872, pp. 31–32).22 Clarifying the foundations of science was Mach’s main commitment also in 1883. History was an essential intellectual tool for the pursuit of that aim. In no way was Mach merely interested in “technical details” for themselves. He was rather interested in unearthing methods and implicit assumptions underlying those details in order to unveil the theoretical and meta-theoretical core of mechanics. Mechanics deserved a careful historical investigation just because it was deeply rooted in our anthropology and in the basic needs of human communities (“Die Beziehung der Naturvorgänge zur Befriedigung unserer Bedürfnisse”). Mach looked upon science as the outcome of a process of adaptation of human beings to nature and then of “adaptation of thoughts to facts.” The history of science was the history of adaptation

Mach’s frequent mention of the “economy of thought” has led many historians and philosophers to speaking of Mach’s empiricism. However, even philosophers who lean toward this thesis have acknowledged that “Mach’s empiricism is complicated.” According to Paul Pojman, such empiricism would be mitigated by “the belief that knowledge is a product of evolution, that our senses, minds, and cultures have an evolutionary history.” Mach’s historical research might be looked upon as “archaeologies of science, digging at the past to critically elucidate the present” (Pojman 2020, online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). 22 See Banks (2021, p. 273): “It is very wrong to say that Mach was sceptical of laws or abstract principle and believed only in economical lists of particulars. His view of economy is much more subtle than that.” 21

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and economy because “the economy of comprehension and communication is the very nature of science” (Mach 1883, pp. V–VI, 1–2, and 4–6).23 Even Mach’s 1896 book Principien der Wärmelehre was devoted to “a theoretical-critical clarification of the foundations of the theory of heat” through a historical investigation. He remarked that cumulative progress is not a necessary law in human history in general as well as in the history of science in particular. In accordance with what he had pointed out since 1872, Mach stressed that history makes us aware of the plurality of points of view and makes us aware of “their emergence, transformation, and decay” (Mach 1896, pp. V and 1–2). Once again, the concept of economy allowed Mach to connect the history of science to anthropology and the general history of mankind. Economy was intrinsically linked to the search for success and progress. The effectiveness should not be exclusively intended in the material sense. Mach insisted on the intellectual effectiveness, which means a consistent and unitary worldview, a worldview as complete and stable as to include new phenomena still to be discovered (Mach 1896, pp. 366 and 391).24 Mach’s tight link between science and life was deeply rooted in German historicism: science is a historical and collective enterprise, which is rooted into history and anthropology. According to this philosophical and scientific stance, the “separation of man and nature can only be achieved artificially”: it is true that knowledge stems from life, but it is also true that “knowledge itself promotes life” and human progress (Haller 1991, pp. 217 and 227).25 This historical leaning persisted in the German scientific community. In the book the physicist Ernst Gerland published in 1892, we find a history of physics from

Mach’s concept of “economy” has been widely debated by historians and philosophers, and the interpretation of this concept always depends on the philosophical classification of Mach’s thought. When Mach is considered as an empiricist, its “economy” undergoes an empiricist nuance; when Mach becomes a pragmatist, even its “economy” leans toward pragmatism, and so on . . .. The fact is that “the economical role of science” (“die Oekonomie der Wissenschaft”) made reference to any rational procedure that helps us set the empirical body of knowledge in order. In the context of Mach’s research, the adjective economical and the noun economy essentially mean theoretical systematization. According to Mach, there is no science without rational or theoretical practices (Mach 1883, pp. 452 and 454). 24 In 2004, Erik Banks pointed out Mach’s awareness of the intrinsic tension between the “uniqueness” of individual events and “abstract laws and schemata, however necessary these were for the pursuit of science.” There was a conflict between “his heraclitean view of nature as a limitless non-repeating flux and his commitment as a scientist,” namely, “the view that nature repeats itself with sufficient regularity to frame true laws and symmetries” (Banks 2004, pp. 23, 25, 27, and 29). In other words, science requires “the economy of thought” that leads from individual events to laws and theories. The search for synthesis or economy is the core of scientific practices. 25 During the twentieth century, many philosophical labels were put forward in order to qualify Mach’s intellectual enterprise: phenomenalist, empiricist, instrumentalist, pragmatist, etc. Because of “the increasing tendency to think of science in formal terms,” sometimes, Mach has been looked upon as some kind of “a pre-logical positivist.” Probably “historicist naturalism” is the most reasonable label for qualifying Mach’s stance (Preston 2021, p. 7). It is also reasonable that “Mach’s historicist naturalism be looked upon as an original form of pragmatism” (Uebel 2021, p. 99). 23

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Babylonians and Egyptians to recent research on spectral analysis, physiological optics and acoustics, and astrophysics. Gerland’s history was rich in technical and chronological details, and it was interspersed with some historiographical cogitations.26 He remarked that the development of physics was not different from other cultural transformations, wherein “old and new often coexist, the latter enthusiastically received by the younger generation, the former tenaciously defended by the elders” (Gerland 1892, pp. 4–5). Approaching the nineteenth century, Gerland specified that his aim was not the popularization of recent achievements in physics, but the investigation of what was hidden or tacit in those scientific achievements. More specifically, he was interested in what linked the present to the past and in highlighting the past viewpoints that had been lost in present theories. He also stressed the widening of physics in the nineteenth century, which was leading to new theoretical unifications and to powerful technologies that were changing human behaviors and habits. Echoing Poggendorff’s historiographical approach, Gerland found that long-term progress stood beside short-term oscillations in the approach to truth. He found that not always does scientific progress “proceed at a steady pace,” and “it often took the wrong course, and science had to turn back.” Although “science lacks and will always lack the criterion of pure truth” (“das Kriterium reiner Wahrheit fehlt und immer fehlen wird”), “it has well proved that its paths do not lead away from truth, but rather in ever greater approximation to it” (Gerland 1892, pp. 209–210 and 326–327).

French Histories of Science Cournot’s history of science appears as a philosophical history that was put forward in the adverse intellectual environment of the 1860s.27 Still in 1881, after Cournot’s death, in a summary of Comte and Laffitte’s doctrines, the physician and philosopher Jean François Robinet insisted on a naive philosophy of science, which was based on a strict empiricism, and on a naive historiographical framework: positivism was looked upon as the crowning achievement of “an intellectual revolution triggered off by Thales and Pythagoras” (Robinet 1881, pp. 6–7 and 10). This historiographical approach is also displayed in the histories the influential chemist Marcellin Berthelot published in 1885 and 1886. In the two books, Les origines de l’alchimie and Science et philosophie, science merely relied on “the coarsest facts” and on the certainty of direct observation. According to an empiricist and reductionist approach, history of chemistry and alchemy from ancient times to the Renaissance enjoyed a comforting, continuous progress, which was based on the 26

Gerland lectured in physics and electrotechnics in a peripheral institution, the Königliche Bergakademie in Klausthal (Royal Institute of Mining Engineering in Clausthal, in Lower Saxony). 27 According to the historian of philosophy Isaac Benrubi, Cournot’s intellectual pathway does not suit “a definite summary and a sharp classification” (Benrubi 1926, pp. 89–90).

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accumulation of new facts and discoveries (Berthelot 1886, pp. V, VII, 4–5, and 9–11). However, Cournot’s critical approach reappeared in 1883, in the Swiss philosopher and theologian Ernest Naville’s book La physique moderne – Études historiques et philosophiques. His historical investigation showed the dynamic nature of science as a body of knowledge that branched out in different directions. Scientific practices and the actual pathways of discovery could not merely consist in merging empirical data with logical and mathematical procedures leading to rational truths. On the track of Cournot’s philosophical history, Naville’s historiographical framework highlighted the complex development of science over time as a practice that was marked by fallibility and probability (Naville 1883, pp. 28, 32–35, 41–47, and 50–54). According to Naville, the birth and death of scientific theories were the essential feature of scientific progress: it was just the caducity of theories that protected science from involution and decadence. Naville thought that science was just what it was left after a series of theories had died. The process of emergence, development, and crisis of physical theories was consistent with the relentless search for order and harmony. The crisis of a theory prompted scientists to find a more satisfactory order. The shortcomings of theories could not put in danger the reliability of scientific practices because the long-term historical process should lead to better interpretations of the world. We find in Naville a sophisticated representation of science as a historical and dynamic body of knowledge that could not be reduced to a collection of empirical procedures and rational truths (Naville 1883, p. 55). In 1887, the engineer and mathematician Paul Tannery published a study on the ancient science, Pour l’histoire de la science Hellène. Besides mathematical competence and philosophical sensitivity, he could rely on the knowledge of ancient Greek. His careful historical reconstructions were based on original sources and ancient commentators and allowed him to also explore the reception of ancient texts in the antiquity and the Middle Ages. He relied on a historiographical framework that gave up any a priori cult of progress and showed stagnations and downfalls besides progress and accumulation of knowledge. Although he was acknowledged as one of the most authoritative historians of ancient science, he never held an academic position because of the dogmatic positivism that dominated French academic environment (Duhem 1903, p. 216; Brenner 2003, pp. 184–185).28 He criticized the histories of science that followed time frames and classifications of the history of philosophy making use of labels and concept borrowed by modern philosophy. He rejected the abstract continuity that some philosophers assumed in order to show the persistence of themes and thoughts over time. He preferred a historical approach that he labelled “scientific history” (in opposition to a “philosophical history”), namely, a history that accepted discontinuities and a plurality of

28

For a reconstruction of the events that prevented Tannery from being appointed to the Chair of “Histoire Générale des Sciences” at the Collège de France, see Milhaud (1906, p. 14), Brenner (2003, pp. 5 and 101), and Chimisso (2008, p. 85, fn 1).

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derivations. The detailed analysis of primary and secondary sources could disclose a complex network of filiations and influences, alongside the spread of misleading interpretations (Tannery 1887a, pp. 10–11, 14, and 18–19).29 In the same year, Tannery also published a book on Greek geometry (La Géométrie Grecque) wherein he stressed that a reliable history of mathematics had to account for “the events and the causes” that had led to stages of “past decadence” (Tannery 1887b, pp. V–VI, 4, and 8–9). In his historiographical perspective, it was important to ascertain how the mathematical traditions had been conveyed over time. He focused on the development of geometry between Pythagoras and Euclid, more specifically on Eudoxus of Cnidus and Theaetetus of Athens. He also investigated the reception of Euclid’s Elements and the widespread practice of writing commentaries on it (Tannery 1887b, pp. 94–95, 98–99, 127, and 165–166).30 Tannery left a meaningful heritage in France: he inspired the mathematician Gaston Milhaud, who acknowledged the intellectual debt his 1893 Leçons sur les origines de la science grecque. According to Milhaud, scientific progress stemmed from new and contrasting interpretations, when “a new explanation of the same phenomena” emerged. The struggle for life among interpretations stood beside the accumulation of new empirical knowledge. The complex interplay between experimental and theoretical practices was the hallmark of modern science (Milhaud 1893, pp. 4, 11–13, 16–18, and 21–28). In contrast with the empiricism of the Comtean tradition, his philosophical history of science looked upon scientific practices as an act of mathematization and linguistic reinterpretation.31 Berthelot, Tannery, and Milhaud’s historical interests stemmed from their scientific practices. After graduating at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the younger physicist Pierre Duhem followed a similar pathway. Since the late 1880s, he underwent the demanding task of unifying mechanics, thermodynamics, and chemistry. His design of unification rested upon the two principles of thermodynamics, which therefore became principles of universal value. The mathematical engine that should realize the unification was a generalization of Lagrange’s Analytical Mechanics. He labelled Energetics this generalized mechanics, which updated the Energetics the Scottish engineer William John Macquorn Rankine had put forward in the 1850s. Rankine had generalized the concept of mechanical work

29

On the influence of German history of philosophy on Tannery and more specifically on the philosophical background of the conception “of history of science as complementary to history of philosophy,” see Catana (2011, pp. 517–523). 30 George Sarton praised Tannery for having early understood the plurality of skills and sensitivities the history of science required More specifically, Tannery combined “a philological precision with a wide and profound scholarship, and a remarkable philosophical awareness” (Sarton 1954, p. 321). 31 On Milhaud’s institutional role in the establishment of a chair of philosophical history of science in France, see Chimisso (2008, pp. 25–26).

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in order to represent many kinds of physical and chemical actions: thermal work, electric work, etc.32 In Duhem, we find Mach’s conception of history as a cultural tool for the comprehension of science: the actual scientific practices and the pathways of discovery were embedded in their histories. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether Mach’s 1872 booklet on the conservation of energy or the more influential 1883 book exerted any influence on Duhem. However, the two scholars had in common the interest in a critical and historical analysis of scientific theories, as a meaningful exchange of letters can testify. Some differences can be found in the role played by scientific theories: Mach acknowledged the pragmatic function of theories in the systematization of the empirical body of knowledge, whereas Duhem attributed a creative power to theories and abstract generalizations. More specifically, Duhem also focused on theoretical processes that drove experimental practices.33 For Duhem, the year 1892 represented the starting point of two intellectual enterprises: the great design for unification of classical physics and meta-theoretical inquiries into science. The two tasks were tightly intertwined since the unification of theoretical physics required a logical and historical analysis of the foundations. The meta-theoretical enterprise involved two different strategies: a historical inquiry into specific principles, general assumptions, and methods of scientific practices, and a logical clarification of those principles, assumptions, and methods. Soon Duhem realized that the two strategies could not be artificially disentangled: the logical analysis could not be separated from the historical investigation. Moreover, historical research required historiographical frameworks more sophisticated than the optimistic accumulation of knowledge of positivist tradition. In 1892, in the first part of his Commentaire aux principes de la Thermodynamique, Duhem represented the history of physical theories as a sequence of fluctuations (“Toute science avance comme par une sÉrie d’oscillations”). At first, a theory has to fight for gaining the agreement of the scientific community, but then it might become a powerful tool for the solution of problems. A successful theory can rely on experimental corroborations and a plenty of applications. However, scientists cannot prevent natural phenomena from slowly accumulating “problems that cannot be addressed and contradiction that cannot be solved.” At this stage, scientists

32

On Duhem’s design for a generalized mechanics, see Bordoni (2012a, pp. 238–43) and Bordoni (2012b, Chaps. 6–10). Duhem’s generalized mechanics or Energetics should not be identified with Georg Helm and Wilhelm Ostwald’s Energetics, which dealt with the universality of the principle of the conservation of energy and on the replacement of mass with energy as the fundamental physical entity. On the friendship between Duhem and Ostwald, see Brouzeng (1981, vol. 2, pp. 226–228). 33 Mach’s Mechanik was translated into French only in 1904, whereas Mach’s follower Friedrich Adler translated Duhem’s 1906 La théorie physique into German in 1908. Mach himself wrote the introduction.

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usually begin to question the foundations of the theory, questioning what could be preserved and what should be dismissed (Duhem 1892a, p. 269).34 From 1892 to 1894, Duhem published some papers explicitly devoted to metatheoretical issues dealing with the nature and structure of physical theories, physical experiments, and metaphysical assumptions.35 He stressed that scientific practices went far beyond the mere alliance between “experience and mathematical analysis.” The history of science had to disentangle “the confused and inextricable accumulation” of laws derived by experience (Duhem 1892b, p. 175). In the struggle of modern science against the old physics of qualities, the former had disregarded the complexity of the physical world, focusing on a simplified geometrical-mechanical world. At the end of the nineteenth century, Duhem found that complex and irreversible processes could actually be described by a suitable mathematical theory.36 On the track of Cournot, Naville, and Tannery, Duhem outlined a complex historiography where both long-term progress and short-term fluctuations were at stake in the history of science. Birth and death of theories left behind a permanent and valuable heritage: new theoretical entities, new mathematical procedures, and new empirical laws (Duhem 1894, pp. 122 and 125). Duhem managed to translate this complex historiographical framework into an impressive metaphor. When waves go towards the beach, a water layer ripples and swarms into the dry sand before retreating from the beach giving up its conquest. Waves fade away and let the sand dry up before new waves come one after the other. This superposition of waves that rise and then collapse seems a shallow effort of the sea, an idle combination of foam and noise. Nevertheless, two hours later, the beach that had been trodden by our footsteps is now sleeping under deep water: during the relentless oscillations of water back and forth, the Ocean tide has really gone up. (Duhem 1894, p. 125)37

In 1896, in the book ThÉorie thermodynamique de la viscositÉ, du frottement et des faux Équilibres chimiques, Duhem merged the search for a generalized mechanics with his meta-theoretical investigations once more. He discovered that the

34

Duhem’s representation of the history of science as a periodical series of dull applications and exciting revolutions was developed 70 years later in a completely different intellectual context. See Kuhn’s “normal” and “revolutionary” stages in the history of sciences (Kuhn 1962 (1996), pp. 10 and 111). In that context, Kuhn did not mention Duhem. 35 At that time, Duhem was “maitre de conférences” at Lille University; for further biographical details, see Brouzeng (1987, p. 54). 36 Duhem’s meta-theoretical design was better unfolded only afterward in a book he published in 1903, L’évolution de la mécanique (Duhem 1903 (1992), pp. 199 and 218–219). 37 The original passage deserves to be quoted: “Ainsi, sous les théories qui ne s’élèvent que pour être abattues; sous les hypothèses qu’un siècle contemple comme le mécanisme secret et le ressort caché de l’Univers, et que le siècle suivant brise comme des jouets d’enfant, se poursuit le progrès lent, mais incessant, de la physique mathématique” (Duhem 1894, p. 125). Stoffel pointed out the striking analogy between Duhem’s passage and one of Pascal’s Pensées on cyclic, historical processes (Pascal 1951, p. 417; Stoffel 2007, pp. 292–293). I point out the analogy with Naville’s passage on the slow, scientific progress underlying the appearance and disappearance of theories (Naville 1883, p. 55).

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behavior of velocity in explosive chemical reactions was akin to what Aristotle’s theory of motion expected when air’s resistance vanished. In the context of Aristotle’s physics, a body in motion in empty space, without any viscous medium such as air, gets an infinite velocity. The general equations Duhem had put forward in the second part of the book contained both inertial and dissipative terms. When he let dissipative terms drop, pure mechanics emerged. When he let inertial terms drop, some mathematical simplifications led to explosive chemical reactions, which could be looked upon as a new implementation of Aristotle’s motion without resistance. In other words, pure mechanics and chemical reactions represented the opposite poles in Duhem’s generalized mechanics or Energetics. The two poles also represented two historical traditions, namely, Aristotelian physics and modern physics. The unifying power of Duhem’s equations could encompass ancient and modern science in a common mathematical framework (Duhem 1896, pp. 89–131).38 Duhem’s intellectual enterprise represents a step forward in the direction that Mach had already explored, namely, the intrinsically historical nature of science both as a practice and as a body of knowledge. Theoretical physics led Duhem to historical investigations and historiographical interpretations. In its turn, historical research and historiography helped him to frame his physical theories in the context of the history of science. This complex, circular, intellectual pathway helps us understand the meaning and usefulness of that militant history of science.

Concluding Remarks Since the emergence of modern science in the seventeenth century, scientific contents and scientific practices have been transforming over time. Moreover, science has been transforming society, and conversely, society has been transforming science. These transformations are still at work.39 We should also take into account the transformations experienced by the image of science, namely, the belief in what science should be and what scientists should do. We even find correspondent transformations in the social commitments of scientists and the expectations of ordinary people. The awareness of all these transformations just emerged in the late nineteenth century in continental Europe. In that century, scientists began to look upon science as a dynamic landscape. Some scientific achievements, such as Darwin’s theory, could be depicted as revolutions, whereas some others, such as the electromagnetic theory, seemed better qualified as evolution and systematization. Nevertheless, what about Boltzmann’s statistical approach to thermodynamics? Systematization or revolution? Different scientific and historiographical perspectives led to different answers. For instance, Duhem thought that statistical thermodynamics represented neither a revolution nor a progress because 38

For a detailed reconstruction of Duhem’s 1896 generalized mechanics or Energetics, see Bordoni (2012b, pp. 209–237). 39 For instance, more than 10 years ago, Paul Forman pointed out the markers of “the transition from modernity to postmodernity” in science (Forman 2010, pp. 157–158).

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he deeply distrusted microscopic and mechanical models of matter. In brief, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, scientists became accustomed to developments and branching of the scientific body of knowledge over time and got acquainted with the different interpretations of scientific theories.40 In the previous pages, we have seen the emergence of a widespread historical sensitivity about science. In some cases, this sensitivity could rely on a sophisticated historiography, which stemmed from the awareness that both long-term progress and short-term series of growths and decays occurred in the history of science. This awareness of the complexity of scientific tradition can be found both in some French scholars from Cournot to Duhem and in some German scholars from Cantor to Mach. These militant scientists-historians and mathematicians-historians started out a research tradition that flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century, then faded away in the first half of the twentieth century, but reemerged in the second half of the same century. Beyond different philosophical nuances, they shared a common commitment. For instance, both Mach and Duhem did not rely on mechanics as the main language and the last theoretical horizon of physics. Both relied on phenomenological/abstract thermodynamics, which was looked upon as more general than the mathematical models of microscopic masses in motion (Banks 2004, p. 24). Mach’s concept of “economy” is not so different from Duhem’s process of abstraction (later labelled “natural classification”) leading from interpreted facts to laws and subsequently from laws to theories (Haller 1991, p. 223). According to Mach, science is rooted into anthropology, and according to Duhem, science is rooted in common sense. Mach made reference to processes of evolution/selection in the rearrangement of the scientific body of knowledge. These processes were both biological and intellectual. Duhem stressed the existence of unavoidable, theoretical elements in the complex network of scientific practices, even in the design of experimental equipment. He also highlighted the existence of a plurality of consistent theoretical framework for representing the same sets of empirical data and empirical laws. In the end, Mach and Duhem represented the starting point of the professionalization of meta-theoretical research on science, which later split into history of science and philosophy of science and developed in the twentieth century. At the same time, they represented a provisional crowning achievement of research that emerged in continental Europe around the mid-nineteenth century.

It is worth stressing that this network of cultural transformations “was as yet understood, or even observed, by relatively exiguous numbers of men and women in a handful of countries” (Hobsbawm 1989, p. 243). At the same time, the technical and social progress was really enjoyed by large communities, more specifically large cities’ inhabitants. They could actually rely on electric lighting, electric means of transportation, and electric means of communication. See footnote 3.

40

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Cross-References ▶ Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History: Toward a Rapprochement Between Disciplines That Never Ruptured ▶ Historiography of Science and the Relationship Between History and the History of Science ▶ Pierre Duhem: Between the Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History ▶ The French Style in the Philosophy of the Sciences

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Feynman’s Frameworks on Nanotechnology in Historiographical Debate Raffaele Pisano

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Contents An Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Steps of a New Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Structure of This Chapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Defining Nanotechnology in the Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plenty of Room, Crossing the History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nanotechnology as a Hidden Scientific Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Is a Founding Document Necessary? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Should We Consider Feynman a Necessary Pioneer? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Addendum to the Historiographical POR Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reading POR in the Timeline Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historiographical Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Is POR an Evident Cornerstone? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historiography of a Scientific Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Since the early 1950s, the research in the nanoworld has continued its unceasing exploration and achieved new results in the field of Pure Sciences, Applied Sciences, and Technology as such. In late 1959, Richard Phillips Feynman (1918–1988) gave a famous lecture for the American Physical Society of Pasadena members, in which he explored the possibilities offered by research in miniaturization that were yet to come named “There’s Plenty of Room at the

R. Pisano (*) · A. Durlo IEMN, Lille University-CNRS, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_26

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Bottom.” According to the current historiographical and scientific narrative, this chapter constitutes the milestone nanoscientists have been inspired from. Self-assembling machines, atom manipulation, nano-transporters in Medicine, new advanced materials like fullerene and graphene, and innovations in the field of electron microscopy are some of the results obtained and whose origins can be traced back to Feynman’s article. Feynman’s legacy has been consolidated in the following decades, and “Plenty of Room” appears today as the framework from which all research in the field of Nanotechnology has taken off. Yet, this chapter has also opened an interesting historiographical debate, regarding its influence as a founding document of a new discipline. Is this Feynman’s work really the early inspiring frame of nano research? In literature, it is possible to find examples where different points of view are reported, and the opinions of authoritative researchers constitute interesting different points of view. We intend to establish a historical – and historiographical – interplay and parallel among the different interpretations possible in a current historiographical debate. Keywords

Feynman · Plenty of room · Taniguchi · Drexler · Toumey · Nanotechnology · History of physics · Epistemological debates · Nanoscience

An Outline The First Steps of a New Science In this chapter, we deal with the American physicist, and 1965 Nobel Prize winner for Physics, Richard Feynman (1918–1988), who earned a place of merit in the history of science after the Second World War and in the history of Physics in particular. Feynman is recognized as one of the pioneers of Nanotechnology and is credited to have placed the roots of this science (Edwards 2006). His famous Caltech lecture of 1959, then published as There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom (henceforth POR; Feynman 1960), is one of the most famous documents in the history of science. The definition of Nanotechnology through its founding father, Norio Taniguchi, who first mentioned this term in 1974, is also given. The developments and modifications that this concept has undergone over time are examined, showing how different agencies have progressively attempted a formal definition. Different interpretations of POR through which it is possible to trace both the paper and its author to different interpretations were suggested by Christopher Toumey (2008), opening an interesting discussion from a historical and epistemological point of view. In the same way, the reader is able to reevaluate, in this specific context, the figure of Richard Feynman and his role, presumed or real, as the founding father of Nanotechnology as we know it today, a role that is often attributed to him in the specific literature.

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We will discuss in detail four possible interpretations of this paper, leaving the debate open, since the historiographical research reflects the historian’s approach and the interpretative paradigm.

The Structure of This Chapter In this chapter we present the following subjects: • In the Introduction section, we describe the role played by POR in the scientific literature. We will deal with some significant excerpts and explore the ways Nanotechnology is defined through. From the very first appearance of this word to the more recent definitions, we are going to show our readers how the concept has evolved and how today no unique definition is yet existing. We will consider how the different agencies decline this idea has been evolving and how, today, the different agencies decline the term according to their necessities. • Afterwards, we will analyze the role played by POR in the historical timeline with regard to the examples where it appeared in literature and its consequent historiographical interpretation, to show how considered and rated is this work when it is a matter of Nanotechnology. • An interesting point of view, proposed by Cristopher Toumey, is then discussed because of his three different ways of reading POR in the history of science and, together with them, a new point of view upon the figure of Feynman himself is possible. • We conducted short research to find out how many times the script was mentioned and when, since its first publication, to give an overview of the trend of quotations. • We conclude by discussing whether POR may be considered the cornerstone for the history of Nanotechnology, the indispensable document without which nothing would be possible.

Introduction There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom On December 29, 1959, in Pasadena, Richard Phillip Feynman gave a lecture at the annual meeting of members of the American Physical Society. The transcript of his speech became one of the most famous articles in the history of Physics and, today, it is often mentioned in authoritative publications on Nanotechnology (Cfr. Bayda et al. 2020; Drexler 1986; Durkan 2019; Edwards 2006; Romero 2016; Sharon 2019; Toumey 2008). Just the following year, in February 1960 in fact, Caltech’s Engineering and Science magazine published an article based on the text of the lecture, under the full name There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom. An invitation to enter a new field of

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physics (Fig. 1; Toumey 2005). The first edition of the transcription of the original speech was made possible thanks to the passionate work of an anonymous Feynman admirer (Lear 1960). Using a magnetic tape recorder, this unknown participant recorded every moment of the American physicist’s talk and then transcribed it meticulously, verbatim. Thus, the article we know today would be the exact account of what was said that evening. The only parts missing are the jokes that Feynman used to insert in his speeches, perhaps to keep the attention alive (Ivi).

Fig. 1 In this issue of Engineering and Science lies “Feynman in a new field” (Feynman 1960, p. 22). (Source: With courtesy and kind authorization of Christopher Toumey)

These cuts were made, probably, as an editorial choice, to allow easier publication in the Caltech magazine and in no way affect the scientific content of the conference. POR (Fig. 2) was considered, and still is considered by many scientists and authors in the field of the nanoworld, to be the founding paper of an exciting new set of research paths, which today are grouped under the collective name of Nanotechnology, practical applications of a science that investigates the physical world at the nanoscale, and which has taken the name Nanoscience.

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Fig. 2 The first page of POR, the famous script from Richard Feynman. (Feynman 1960)

A question may arise: is this paper to be considered an evident milestone, mandatory to start a new branch of Physics, or is it just an important document in the history of science? How important POR has become in the historical landscape of science can be easily deduced from the following observation. When consulting

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the historiography on Nanotechnologies, the reader is very likely to come across introductory historical paragraphs – more difficult entire chapters, since comprehensive books on the history of Nanotechnology appear not to have been published as of now – which mention POR as an essential starting point, referring precisely to Feynman’s intuition towards this research and emphasizing how much the article has been a source of inspiration for researchers. By picking up the manuscript, and reading some of its passages, one can grasp those ideas that made it popular and may have inspired the research. I would like to describe a field, in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle. This field is not quite the same as the others in that it will not tell us much about Fundamental Physics (in the sense of, “What are the strange particles?”) but it is more like Solid-State Physics in the sense that it might tell us much of great interest about the strange phenomena that occur in complex situations. Furthermore, a most important point is that it would have an enormous number of technical applications. What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale. As soon as I mention this, people tell me about miniaturization, and how far it has progressed today. They tell me about electric motors that are the sizes of the nail on your small finger. And there is a device on the market, they tell me, by which you can write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. But that’s nothing; that’s the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. It is a staggeringly small world that is below. In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction. Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica1 on the head of a pin? (Feynman 1960, p. 22)

Again: A friend of mine (Albert R. Hibbs) suggests a very interesting possibility for relatively small machines. He says that, although it is a very wild idea, it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon. You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and “looks” around (Of course the information has to be fed out). It finds out which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out. Other small machines might be permanently incorporated in the body to assist some inadequately– functioning organ. (Ivi, p. 30)

Such a statement appears to be prophetic. One of the most fruitful applications of nanoworld is, for example, Nanomedicine. Important results are obtained because nanoparticles are capable to deliver the active ingredients where necessary, inside the body, without affecting other organs or tissues. Based on these brief considerations, we propose to investigate the validity, or otherwise, of the interpretative paradigm that has set POR as a milestone in the history of Nanotechnology.

1

This is the way it is spelt in the original paper. The same can be said for the misspelt words in the second quotation.

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Defining Nanotechnology in the Years In order to give the most complete picture of our discussion, which focuses on the moment of birth of Nanotechnology as we know it today, let us briefly review the evolution of the concept of Nanotechnology itself, through the definitions that have been used over time to describe its contents. In 1974, the Japanese engineer Norio Taniguchi (1912–1999) at the University of Science in Tokyo (Fig. 3) was the first scientist to explicitly use the term “Nanotechnology” to describe the processes that take place on semiconductor materials at the nanoscale. Fig. 3 Norio Taniguchi. (Public domain)

The word first appeared in his fundamental article On the Basic Concept of ‘Nano-Technology’ published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Production Engineering, issued in English in Tokyo, in 1974. This is an excerpt from the paper, where it is historically interesting to notice that Taniguchi talked about “Nano-Technology” while today the accepted version of the word is “Nanotechnology” (Fig. 4). ‘Nano-technology’ is the production technology to get the extra high accuracy and ultrafine dimensions, i.e. the preciseness and fineness of the order of 1 nm (nanometer), 10 9 m in length. The name of Nano-technology originates from this nanometer. In the processing of materials, the smallest bit size of stock removal, accretion or flow of materials is probably of one atom or molecule, namely 0.1 ~ 0.2 nm in length. Therefore, the expected limit size of fineness would be of the order of 1 nm. Accordingly, Nano-technology mainly consists of the processing of separation, consolidation and deformation of materials by one atom or one molecule. Needless to say, the measurement and control techniques to assure the

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‘Nano–technology’ is the production technology to get the extra high accuracy and ultrafine dimensions, i.e. the preciseness and fineness of the order of 1 nm (nanometer), 10–9m in length. The name of Nano–technology originates from this nanometer. In the processing of materials, the smallest bit size of stock removal, accretion or flow of materials is probably of one atom or molecule, namely 0.1~0.2 nm in length. Therefore, the expected limit size of fineness would be of the order of 1 nm. Accordingly, Nano–technology mainly consists of the processing of separation, consolidation and deformation of materials by one atom or one molecule. Needless to say, the measurement and control techniques to assure the preciseness and fineness of 1 nm play very important role in this technology. In the present paper, the basic concept of Nano– technology in materials processing is discussed on the basis of microscopic behaviour of materials and, as a result, the ion sputter–machining is introduced as the most promising process for the technology. (Taniguchi 1974; Author's quotations marks) Fig. 4 The title and abstract from the article of Norio Taniguchi where “Nanotechnology” is first mentioned in history. The abstract is transcribed for easier reference. (Taniguchi 1974)

preciseness and fineness of 1 nm play very important role in this technology. In the present paper, the basic concept of Nano-technology in materials processing is discussed on the basis of microscopic behaviour of materials and, as a result, the ion sputter–machining is introduced as the most promising process for the technology (Taniguchi 1974; Author’s quotations marks). This is the first-ever case in the scientific literature of the use of this word, and historically, it constitutes the first formally structured and coherent definition of this scientific discipline. According to the definition subsequently established by the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), USA, Nanotechnology is Science, Engineering and Technology on the nanoscale, where unique phenomena make possible new applications in many fields, from Chemistry, Physics, and Biology to Medicine, Engineering, and Electronics (Bayda et al. 2020, p. 2).

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The accredited definition, according to the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR), today is as follows: Nanotechnology is the term given to those areas of Science and Engineering where phenomena that take place at dimensions in the nanometre scale are utilised in the design, characterisation, production and application of materials, structures, devices and systems. Although in the natural world there are many examples of structures that exist with nanometre dimensions (hereafter referred to as the nanoscale), including essential molecules within the human body and components of foods, and although many technologies have incidentally involved nanoscale structures for many years, it has only been in the last quarter of a century that it has been possible to actively and intentionally modify molecules and structures within this size range. It is this control at the nanometre scale that distinguishes Nanotechnology from other areas of technology. (SCENIHR 2006)

Finally, we may consider three main definitions: 1. The definition according to Norio Taniguchi is specific for a detailed context of production technology. 2. The definition according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative is a specification of the unique phenomena that appear at the nanometric dimension. 3. The definition according to the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks. According to the SCENHIR, Nanotechnology is the science of designing, producing, and using structures and devices having one or more dimensions of about 100 millionth of a millimeter (100 nanometers) or less. From a historiographical standpoint, we compare these three definitions by identifying which specific items they refer to, summarizing the results in the following Table 1: Table 1 The different characteristics that appear in the definitions of Nanotechnology mentioned in the definition analyzed

Feature Dimension of material New properties due to dimension Possibilities of applications Manufacturing properties

Reference ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

The characteristics that SCENIHR mentions are very important; however, other profound considerations need to be made with the utmost care: 1. The first consideration concerns the scale at which scientists operate and that goes down to a nanometer dimension, observing and manipulating matter. 2. The second consideration concerns the importance of operations at the nanoscale. The chemical and physical properties of materials on the bulk/macroscopic scale are known and exploited in technological applications. What makes the characteristics of the materials themselves completely new is their size. Interesting new

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properties appear at the nanoscale, and this is what makes nanoparticles particularly attractive for completely new applications. 3. The third, but no less important, consideration concerns the interdisciplinary nature of Nanotechnology. This branch of Physics ranges from Nanomechanics to Nanomedicine, from Nanorobotics to Nanobiology, and from Nanoelectronics to Molecular Engineering. Continuous progress is being made in each field and it is very difficult to establish precise boundaries within which to enclose the individual fields. The latter consideration (3) confirms that Nanotechnology is a very broad field, whose challenges pave the way for research towards the acquisition of the most diverse results, both scientifically and historically (Cfr. Bussotti and Pisano 2020; Pisano 2020; Pisano et al. 2019; Pisano and Sozzo 2020). New materials and their fields of application have been studied through devices that have been designed and built to investigate Solid-State Physics on such a small scale. Useful tools for manipulating matter, such as the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) or the atomic force microscope (AFM), were conceived and realized to give the researchers the capability to intervene directly on atoms. Nowadays, practically all the branches of science take advantage of Nanoscience and the properties of matter at the nanoscale.

Plenty of Room, Crossing the History Nanotechnology as a Hidden Scientific Revolution Nanotechnology is a discipline which added a hidden scientific–social revolution with the manner to work science in society. Through Nanotechnology, the Physics of the Solid State has been studied from a completely different point of view; the same material has completely different properties depending on its size (Selleri 1989, p. 5; Kuhn 1962). This constitutes a revolution in the interpretation of matter itself, to which certain laws apply at the macroscopic level and different, quantum effects apply at the nanometric level. What is required is a new way of reading the interpretative paradigms of the physical phenomenon itself, certainly not the total abandonment of the previous conceptual system, but a parallel one depending now on the size of the sample and the properties that emerge precisely as a function of it (Zaoui et al. 2017; Copie et al. 2017; Jijie et al. 2017; Szunerits and Boukherroub 2018). In the past, physics without a metaphysical component would have been as partial and incomplete as metaphysics without a physical manifestation (Pisano 2014a, 2017; Pisano and Bussotti 2014a, c, 2016). For the alchemists, there was no reason to separate the material dimension from the symbolic or philosophical one (Canseliet 1978). Only macroscopic properties of matter like color, density, or behavior under

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fire were taken into account. But when Chemistry rose to the level of science and was systematized, the scientific explanation of reactions and their reproducibility was possible, and when Physics broke away from it to become an independent science formalized under its coherent axiomatic system capable of establishing laws, valid under the same conditions, new paradigms of thought were founded, specific to each discipline (Pisano and Bussotti 2014b, 2015a, 2017a, b, 2022; Pisano and Capecchi 2008). Both disciplines gained authority and brought to a series of discoveries that marked the history of man. Around 1900 Physics faced a great crisis brought in because of the world of quanta. Some properties of matter could no longer be described through the laws of what would be called classical physics, since those days. Something new was needed and the paradigm was mined by undeniable anomalies. The famous issues of the beginning of the twentieth century, the Blackbody radiation (1900–1901), the birth of quanta (1900), the photoelectric effect explained by Einstein (1905), gravitational waves (Pisano and Vincent 2018), and the Compton effect (1923), opened the way to Quantum Mechanics and determined the effective crisis of the classical paradigm. The matter was no more the same if investigated at the macroscopic scale or the atom one, and the classical paradigm met its crisis. The invention of more and more refined instruments such as electron microscopes and the possibilities these instruments brought to research allowed man to intervene directly on the most intimate structure of matter and observe brand new and unexpected properties of materials, unpredictable at the macroscopic scale. This was an authentic scientific revolution. This is why we can attribute to Nanotechnology the value of a factual revolution, although we must consider that there are no conflicts between paradigms (Pisano 2014b; Pisano et al. 2023). Scientists are well aware of the fact that Solid-State Physics is to be interpreted according to classical or quantum physics, depending on what dimensions of the analysis are to be taken.

Is a Founding Document Necessary? When a scientific revolution is considered, inquiring about new intellectual ideas and fields comes into play. Sometimes new ideas are associated with a reference text, the cornerstone of the new order of thought, which becomes the starting point of the new scientific development, both practical and theoretical. For example, one can cite Nicolaus Copernicus’ De Rivolutionibus Orbium Caelestium, Isaac Newton’s Philosphiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and Albert Einstein’s Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper (Pisano 2009, 2014a, b, 2024; Pisano and Bussotti 2014a, 2015b, 2017b; Pisano and Capecchi 2007a, b). Each of these writings can be unanimously recognized as a landmark text because of the revolution in thought it triggered (Pisano 2018; Pisano and Capecchi 2010a, b). The same idea can be applied to There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics. It can be recognized as the founding

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document of a new vision and revolution in the field of science, at the level of the structure of condensed matter. Seeking confirmation for such an assertion could be simple if we simply consider the number of citations we can find in the literature in this precise sense and the fact that there has never been any discussion of this interpretation. In this case, some researchers who pursue this interpretation are still alive and have personally met Richard Feynman. In this sense, the discussion of the paper with the author may have led to the reinforcement of this conception. A scientist, probably the one who contributed significantly the most to the amplification of the thought that Feynman encapsulated in POR, is Kim Eric Drexler who, in his seminal text Engines of Creation, mentioned this concept. On December 29, 1959, Richard Feynman (now a Nobel laureate) gave a talk at an annual meeting of the American Physical Society entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. He described a non-biochemical approach to Nanomachinery (working down, step by step, using larger machines to build smaller machines), and stated that the principles of Physics “do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering [misspelling] things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big [. . .]”. In brief, he sketched another, nanobiochemical path to the assembler. [. . .] Richard Feynman saw in 1959 that nanomachines could direct chemical synthesis, presumably including the synthesis of DNA. Yet he could not foresee neither the time nor the cost of doing so. (Drexler 1986, pp. 40–41; Original wording)

Drexler inserted these considerations in a paragraph of Engines of Creations – Pitfalls of Prophecy (Drexler 1986, p. 40) in which he commented on the value of prediction, in the scientific field. Drexler’s idea was that, despite the inherent difficulty of such speculation, the prediction must always be implemented. Drexler went into considerations through which he tried to reinforce his own view. The nuances of detail and competitive advantage that select winning technologies make the technology race complex and its path unpredictable. But does this make long-term forecasting futile? In a race toward the limits set by natural law, the finish line is predictable even if the path and the pace of the runners are not. Not human whims but the unchanging laws of Nature draw the line between what is physically possible and what is not–no political act, no social movement can change the law of gravity one whit. [. . .] We have only recently begun to evolve a tradition of technological foresight. (Ivi, p. 41)

In his remarkable text Nanosolutions for the twenty-first Century (Drexler and Pamlin 2013), Drexler and his co-author Dennis Pamlin were even more explicit about the role of Feynman and POR. In 1959, Nobel prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman proposed the fundamental concept of atomically precise fabrication: using nanoscale mechanical devices to build atomically precise structures by manipulating matter at the atomic level [. . .] In 1986, the concept of atomically precise manufacturing was popularized under a name that was, at the time, not in active use: ‘Nanotechnology’. (Drexler and Pamlin 2013, p. 24; Author’s quotation mark)

In the bibliography of the quoted text, the reference leaves the reader in no doubt.

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13. In 1959, Richard Feynman proposed that nanoscale mechanical devices could build atomically precise structures by manipulating matter at the atomic level: “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” (Ivi, p. 99; Author’s quotation mark)

We can notice that in this recent book (Drexler and Pamlin 2013), Feynman’s name appears only twice (p. 24 and p. 99), in the quotations we have given, and despite this small number of references, the link between the idea of Nanotechnology, the character, and the seminal paper is evident nonetheless. No mention is made of the man who actually coined the term Nanotechnology, Norio Taniguchi, whom we have already mentioned. In several other books, it is possible to find quite similar quotations, which follow the same narrative thread, remaining faithful to this basic interpretation. The brilliant book The Nanotech Pioneers (Edwards 2006) by S.A. Edwards dedicated a special paragraph to the figure of Feynman, where the author quoted POR underneath the light of Feynman’s personality. Feynman was also known to have a great sense of humor [. . .]. Which is probably why most of his audience at the American Physical Society on December 29th, 1959, did not take his lecture that day too seriously. The lecture was entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. [. . .] In his short essay, Feynman anticipated much of what we see developing in Nanotechnology today. He pointed out that the electron microscopes of the day were operating well below their limit of resolution. He challenged physicists to improve the resolution such that the machines would be powerful enough that biologists could see directly the interaction of molecules within cells, that DNA might be sequenced simply by looking at it. He even suggested that miniature robots that could operate within our bodies [. . .]. Feynman suggested a top–down approach toward manufacture whereby miniature tools sets would be used to make more miniature tools sets, which would in turn make yet smaller tools, until finally we would be able to work at the nanoscale. [. . .] Actually, nobody seriously began moving in that direction for another twenty years. Feynman’s lecture, though published in 1960 was largely forgotten. Feynman’s own autobiography doesn’t even mention the Room at the Bottom talk [. . .]. (Edwards 2006, p. 16)

It is interesting to note this kind of oblivion into which POR, whom Edwards quoted, would fall and to which we shall return later. In Pradeep’s exceptional text Nano: The Essentials (Pradeep 2007), the words we can read today are, in fact, the same as those used by Drexler, with the exception of the formatting of the article’s title. On December 29, 1959, the Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society entitled “There’s plenty of room at the bottom.” (Pradeep 2007, p. 10; Author’s quotation mark)

Even an absorbing reading text like “Nanoworld,” by P.G. Romero (2016), linked Feynman and POR to the very early days of Nanotechnology. One of the first messages that announced and amplified the possibilities of Nanotechnology was launched by physicist Richard Feynman [...], who gave a lecture at the American Physical Society congress held on December 29, 1959, entitled “There’s plenty of room at

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the bottom”, in which he speculated on the manipulation of individual atoms. However, his vision was ignored for many years, until the convergence of nanotechnics and nanomaterials made possible the emergence of Nanotechnology. Only then did we rediscover Feynman’s vision of what he had not yet been able to call Nanotechnology [...]. (Romero 2016, p. 28; Author’s quotation mark)

Romero considerately cited Taniguchi as the first researcher to coin the term Nanotechnology; moreover, it is curious how the excerpt we have quoted begins with “one of the first messages that announced and amplified” (Romero 2016, p. 28) and then slides to “his vision was ignored for many years” (Ibidem). In Romero’s historical reconstruction, therefore, Feynman’s message was not immediately understood in its entirety at the very beginning. In 2019, the high-level Mathematics and Physics text Mathematics and Physics for Nanotechnology by P. Di Sia brought Nanophysics back to Richard Feynman, rather loosely. Nanophysics is commonly referred to as an intuition of Richard Feynman; in a famous conference of December 1959 by California Institute of Technology, he made forecasts around the possibility to control the matter and to realise devices at atomic scale [. . .]. (Di Sia 2019, p. 2)

No mention is made to the title of POR and no in-depth study is made because the history of science is not the focal point of his work. The idea of Sanders in his interesting book Basic Principles of Nanotechnology follows: Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who presented a now famous lecture on atom-by-atom assembly. The lecture is often credited with kick-starting Nanotechnology. (Sanders 2019, p. 5)

Here the focus is shifted to the conference itself and no longer to Feynman, who could thus be relieved of the historical responsibility for the authorship of Nanotechnology; the author, moreover, underlines the fact that the conference has only recently gained notoriety when he says “a now famous lecture” (Sanders 2019, p. 5). In outstanding Sharon’s book History of Nanotechnology. From Prehistoric to Modern Times (Sharon 2019), the issue is addressed in a general way, but the author’s words are very exact and explicit. It is generally considered that the modern-day history of Nanotechnology started from a speech by Richard Feynman entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, which was given at an American Physical Society meeting at the California Institute of Technology in 1959 in which he identified the potential of Nanotechnology. He did not use the word Nanotechnology. He only stated the possibility of manufacturing small machines and objects with atomic precision. Norio Taniguchi first used the term “Nanotechnology” in 1974. (Sharon 2019, pp. 214–215; Author’s quotation mark)

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Above, the beginning of Nanotechnology is traced back to Feynman’s speech. It is noticed that Feynman never used the word Nanotechnology. In the following, the attribution of this term is correctly traced back to Taniguchi. Another interesting point of view is expressed by Durkan in a very good way in his text Size Really Does Matter (Durkan 2019), where he pointed out that “there’s plenty of room at the bottom” is a refrain that he has heard so many times, that it has entered his mind like a woodworm. Durkan said that this sentence was a fundamental point and proved prophetic. His comments and remarks are addressed to POR. [. . .] many of these predictions about Nanotechnology have come true, so his insightful talk back in 1959 has served as a valuable roadmap, at least in hindsight. Feynman’s talk is now the most commonly cited in the history of Nanotechnology, even though the field really kicked off over 20 years after he gave it, and it only became widely known by that generation of scientists after the publication of Eric Drexler’s book on molecular machines in 1986 wherein Drexler took Feynman’s ideas quite a bit further and into the public domain. (Durkan 2019, p. 21)

Durkan then remarked that POR seems to be the most cited paper in the history of Nanotechnology. Such a statement could lead us to think of this article as the essential starting document for the history of the nanoworld. In this respect, it is interesting to read Bensaude-Vincent and Simon’s remarkable wording (Bensaude– Vincent and Simon 2019) because they quote both Feynman and Drexler in two different ways. Is there still room at the bottom? The question providing the theme for the present issue of Philosophia Scientiae is, of course, adapted from Richard Feynman’s well-known speech at the 1959 meeting of the American Physical Society. On this occasion he attracted physicists’ attention to the vast potential of working at the scale of the nanometer if not the ångström using the catchy title: “Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. This hookline from a famous Nobel laureate physicist served as a motto for the emerging field of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (which we will here abbreviate to Nanoresearch) in the early 2000s. (Bensaude– Vincent and Simon 2019, p. 5)

A subsequent quote on Drexler restored the importance of the amplification of Feynman’s ideas through the work of Drexler himself. Feynman’s futuristic visions of miniaturised machines and information systems were communicated to a wider general public by K. Eric Drexler, the self-appointed prophet of the coming nanotechnological revolution, in his successful 1986 book Engines of Creation. In his energetic campaign for a Nanotechnology revolution, Drexler featured Feynman as the founding father of the Nanotechnology era. (Bensaude–Vincent and Simon 2019, p. 6)

These are very clear words and reinforce the idea of Feynman as the father of Nanotechnology through Drexler’s thinking, which is oriented in this sense. Bayda and his colleagues identify Feynman as the founder of Nanotechnology. The statement is very firm in its terms.

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The American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman introduce the concept of Nanotechnology in 1959. During the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, Feynman presented a lecture entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” at the California Institute of Technology. In this lecture, Feynman made the hypothesis “Why can’t we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia (at this point Bayda corrects the original misspelling) Britannica on the head of a pin?”, and described a vision of using machines to construct smaller machines and down to the molecular level. This new idea demonstrated that Feynman’s hypotheses have been proven correct, and for these reasons, he is considered the father of modern Nanotechnology. (Bayda et al. 2020, p. 2)

The fact that atomic manipulation, carried out in the 1980s, made it possible to intervene at the nanoscale and confirmed Feynman’s vision, and Bayda suggested that for this precise reason he can be crowned as the father of Nanotechnology. Further on we can read: After Feynman had discovered this new field of research [. . .]. (Ibidem)

Here the attribution of the authorship of Nanotechnology to Feynman seems to be evident. The examples we have gathered so far in our paper provide different points of view regarding the interpretation that can be given to POR. We have seen that POR can be regarded as the most cited document of Nanotechnology (Durkan 2019, p. 21) even though it saw the light of day, for all intents and purposes, 20 years before the rise of Nanotechnology itself. POR is also often referred to as the founding document of the new nanoworld science (Sharon 2019, pp. 214–215; Drexler and Pamlin 2013, p. 99), the inspiration that opened the door to modern Nanotechnology. According to another possible interpretation, POR itself was not an inspirational document, but rather the title was used as a “motto” for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (Bensaude–Vincent and Simon 2019, p. 6). Therefore, POR is sometimes referred to as the seminal paper, and sometimes it is used only as the title of the conference.

Should We Consider Feynman a Necessary Pioneer? We now aim to analyze how a different interpretation of Feynman’s role in the history and historiography of Nanotechnology is also possible. We observed these two main historiographical interpretations. 1. The first dates the birth of Nanotechnology to December 29, 1959, and Richard Feynman, with absolute certainty. According to this interpretation, without Feynman’s vision, which would later be amplified by Drexler, and without the POR transcript that allowed Feynman’s thought to be disseminated, Nanotechnology would lack both a founding father and an essential reference document. 2. A second interpretation relieves, in a more or less partial way, Richard Feynman of the paternity of Nanotechnology at all costs; POR becomes the account of a conference during which “the scientific audience was captivated” (Lear 1960).

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In principle, none of these interpretations is a priori wrong. In what follows, however, we shall also examine another point of view, supported by direct evidence, from which we believe a new discussion can be opened up concerning the interpretation of POR and its role in the history of Nanotechnologies.

Addendum to the Historiographical POR Debate In 2008, Christopher Toumey focused on the validity of the paradigm that wants POR as an essential document in the history of Nanotechnologies and made some reflections that he supported with interesting interviews with those scientists who, for different reasons, have applied their knowledge in the nanoworld. Toumey’s conclusions (Toumey 2008) suggest a breaking of paradigm, as understood by most. As histories of Nanotechnology are created, one question arises repeatedly: how influential was Richard Feynman’s 1959 talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”? It is often said by knowledgeable people that this talk was the origin of nanotech. It preceded events like the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope, but did it inspire scientists to do things they would not have done otherwise? Did Feynman’s paper directly influence important scientific developments in Nanotechnology? Or is his paper being retroactively read into the history of Nanotechnology? To explore those questions, I trace the history of “Plenty of Room,” including its publication and republication, its record of citations in scientific literature, and the comments of eight luminaries of Nanotechnology. This biography of a text and its life among other texts enables us to articulate Feynman’s paper with the history of Nanotechnology in new ways as it explores how Feynman’s paper is read. (Toumey 2008, p. 133)

POR was, at least in several cases, a fundamental document without which the light of research in Nanotechnology would probably not have been turned on. To frame the issue first from a historiographic and epistemological point of view, it is interesting to note that three possible interpretations of POR are presented, which could also be applied to other scientific cases similar to ours. In this case, in the following we present three main addenda – historiographical interpretations to the debate: 1. One is based on the assumption that important scientists and researchers, at whatever level, could not have conceived their ideas, or even obtained the results thanks to which they have gone down in history, without POR. This perspective fully reflects the paradigm that we can find in literature. This interpretation is given the name Apostolic Succession, a name that does not lack some religious connotation (Toumey 2008, p. 135): I imagine three different ways of reading “Plenty of Room” into the history of nanotech. According to the first, it can be affirmed that certain important people might not have thought what they thought, and might not have done what they did, if Richard Feynman had not bequeathed “Plenty of Room” to us. This is a theory of Apostolic Succession [. . .] Feynman is the First Apostle of Nanotechnology, “Plenty of Room” is his precise blueprint, and nanotech is the intentional execution of his vision. As W. Patrick McCray

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2. Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) is the father of Genetics as we know it, thanks to the results he first obtained and published. However, it is equally certain that later in time, other researchers, notably Hugo DeVries (1848–1935), Carl Correns (1864–1933), and Erich von Tschermak (1871–1962), independently rediscovered the same laws established by Mendel, without having been influenced by his work, let alone being aware of it. This point of view can be similarly shifted to Feynman’s work. He was, without a doubt, one of the most influential scientists of the last century, but it is not necessary to attribute to him the paternity of the first vagaries of Nanotechnology. Gregor Mendel deserves credit for priority, but that ought not to be over-interpreted as directly inspiring or influencing the later geneticists. If we value Richard Feynman the same way, we relieve him of the responsibility of planning and predicting Nanotechnology in minute detail. (Toumey 2008, p. 135)

3. The Nostradamus-like reading gives an interpretation precisely in the style of his famous work Les Prophéties (The Prophecies, or the Centuries; Nostradamus 1555). According to this (Toumey 2008, p. 135), no one was able to immediately understand Feynman’s thought in 1959; POR was a visionary and, in some ways, obscure text. It is thanks to the discoveries that have been made over the decades, up to the present day, that we can give the right meaning to Feynman’s words, just as today we can correctly interpret Nostradamus’ words, in the light of the events that have taken place. The third possibility is to read Feynman the way some people read Nostradamus. [. . .] The classic problem of reading Nostradamus is that the relation between his prophesy and later events is so thoroughly ambiguous that events can never be interpreted to dis-prove his visions. You can read him after the fact as a source of true prophesy, if you are so inclined, but the built-in ambiguity prevents anyone from demonstrating conclusively that he was writing false prophesy. What this means for Richard Feynman and his 1959 talk is that we can add intellectual credit to a man from the recent past – who already has plenty of wellearned credit – by finding prophesies-come-true in the passages of “Plenty of Room.” [. . .] The nano-Nostradamus interpretation lets us see Feynman everywhere in nanotech, but this is a very sloppy way to relate an early text to later events. Bad for nano and pointless for one’s memory of Richard Feynman. (Ivi)

In Toumey’s opinion (Ivi) with which we can agree, this last approach is the weakest of the three and is reduced to a mere attempt to bring back to the present a text published in the past, linking old words to later events.

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Reading POR in the Timeline Literature The first printing of the transcript of the lecture was made by Engineering & Science magazine and was published in February 1960 (Feynman 1960). Another summary of the lecture was published by Saturday Review shortly afterwards, in April of the same year, under the title The Wonders That Await a Micro-Microscope; Popular Science published an interesting and well-done condensed version of the original, entitled How to Make an Automobile Smaller Than This Dot, the following November. Although this publication was, in fact, an abridged version of the original, all the salient points of Feynman’s speech are mentioned in the text. In 1960, Plenty of Room was also mentioned in Science News and Life (Regis 1995, pp. 72–73). Then it was published as a concluding essay – albeit without the subtitle in Engineering & Science – Miniaturization published by Horace Gilbert (Feynman 1961). Several years later, Feynman discussed the issue of atomic miniaturization again, on February 23, 1983, at the Jet Propulsion Lab, in a talk entitled Infinitesimal Machinery that he described as There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom. Revisited. During his talk, Feynman reaffirmed his original views and reworked the methods and applications he had introduced more than 20 years earlier. Two years after contributing to the commission for the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, Feynman died, and POR reappeared in publications such as books and newspapers, following the American physicist’s renewed popularity. In 1991, Science magazine republished the text, citing Engineering & Science as the main source from which it was reprinted. The following year, the Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems included POR in its first publication (volume 1, released on March 1, 1992). It is curious to note that in the notes to the article there is an error, no doubt a misprint, which dates Feynman’s lecture as December 26th instead of the 29th. All sources referring to POR, with this exception, are unanimous in reporting the 29th, which we agree with. The following image demonstrates the unusual error (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5 A screenshot of the https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/128057 webpage. The wrong date, which is obviously a typo, is readable in the first line. (Source: Andrea Durlo)

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The Foresight Institute, founded in 1986 by Eric Drexler, reports Richard Feynman’s vision through POR on its website and, interestingly, refers to the term Nanotechnology without making any reference to Taniguchi. In 1999, Jeffrey Robbins included POR in his famous collection of Feynman’s short writings, published as The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (it is Chap. 5, more precisely), while Anthony Hey included it in his 2002 volume on Feynman’s comprehensive work on computation, Feynman and Computation (Hey 2002, Part II, Chap. 7). The script is now readily available on various sites such as Caltech, Zyvex, and the National Nanotechnology Institute (National Nanotechnology Institute 2001). Some considerations must be made about the posthumous article Infinitesimal Machinery (Feynman 1993) published in the Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems in 1993, a decade after Feynman’s talk at Caltech. This article is, in effect, a recapitulation of the topical that had so entertained the participants of the American Physical Society, but which had not always gained attention. There is no mention of it in the exciting book The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1994), written by Jagdish Mehra, nor in another well-known book Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (interestingly, the two texts share the same subtitle) by James Gleick (1992). Both texts quote POR, but it is interesting to note that Gleick claims that Feynman had never returned to the subject of POR, implicitly stating that he was not familiar with Infinitesimal Machinery (Toumey 2008, p. 140). From 1993 to the present day, through an online search, there are only three mentions of Infinitesimal Machinery.

Historiographical Approaches Nanoscale research envisages both the feasibility and potential of actively working to assemble models, objects such as tubes, robots, and other artefacts in the nanoworld but capable of solving specific problems in the macro-world (Maldonado 2007, pp. 4–5). This is followed by the exploitation of the phenomena and properties of materials at the nanoscale. This set of fundamental operational characteristics that can be traced back to Nanotechnology marks it out as a revolutionary change in the landscape of modern science. This concept was already historically–historiographically approached by Kuhn (2008 [1987]) when he observed that a revolutionary change in the world of science is by its very nature problematic, as it implies a series of discoveries that cannot be reconciled with the established traditional concepts already held by the community (Ivi, pp. 21–24). The way of thinking about and describing the phenomena one is confronted with, the way of making them one’s own, requires one to change one’s outlook. Research in the nanoworld possesses precisely these peculiarities: having to deal with quantum phenomena, which cannot be perceived in the world of classical physics, and being confronted with entirely new situations involving matter at the nanometric dimension, antithetical to what we observe in the macroscopic world. Nanotechnology is not an addendum to the body

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of scientific knowledge held by the community: it is a rather genuine paradigm revolution. The historiographical debate on Nanotechnology documents allows us to provide a spectrum of historical–epistemological standpoints–interpretations about the historical framework and context. The emblematic case we want to bring to the reader’s attention is There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom and its interpretation in the scientific context as a source document of the ideas that led to modern Nanotechnology; e.g., one can read Toumey (2008) and the literature that he suggested to set conceptual approaches and related interpretations into the history of Nanotechnology. From a historical point of view, the emergence of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology is usually traced back to the second half of the twentieth century, when Feynman (1960) referred in one of his lectures to the possibilities offered by manipulating materials on an atomic scale. Over the years, the development of various investigative instruments such as the scanning tunnelling microscope enabled the scientific community to manipulate and obtain new materials and machinery at the nanoscale. According to the historiographical literature consulted, Nanotechnology has seen exponential growth over the last decade, due to the interest it has generated and the advances it offers to research areas such as industry, health, the environment, and national security issues. At present, Nanotechnology is characterized as a highly interdisciplinary field of research, the development of which is highly dependent on knowledge of other sciences, e.g., Physics, Chemistry, and Materials Science, on progress in their specific fields (Muñoz–Écija et al. 2017, pp. 1–2) and on the ability of individual researchers to enter into relationships to build such complex scientific knowledge. Based on the aims of this article, we analyze the significance of POR in the specific literature, trying to study its place in the historical and epistemological landscape. Therefore, the following historiographical questions–approaches arise: 1. What is the historical and successive historiographical role of the article There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, transcript of the lecture given by Feynman in December 1959? 2. What is the way in which the historical–scientific literature on Nanotechnology presents Feynman’s article? 3. How have his other possible interpretations been received? 4. Who has brought forward different interpretative instances? Concerning (1) The role attributed to There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom is, at first glance, almost unequivocal: it is considered the document of origin of modern Nanotechnology. Feynman’s paper presented the innovative idea of manipulating atoms as an extremely powerful way of intervening in the chemistry of substances, much more so than synthetic chemistry in the forms in which it was practiced at the time. Following the literature on the subject, its innovative idea appeared rather ignored, if not taken seriously, in the first decades immediately following its publication; it

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was rediscovered in the 1990s thanks to the research of Drexler (1985), who arrived at the concepts of Nanotechnology from a more technical point of view, as he himself later described. The nearly perfect absence of design and analysis of nanomachines and molecular manufacturing is all the more remarkable in light of the clear suggestions made by R. Feynman in a talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” given at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in 1959 (Feynman 1961, original Drexler’s reference). The body of the talk focuses on miniaturization and microtechnology; this section anticipates capabilities like those that are now basic to the microelectronics industry and proposes an alternative approach to miniaturization (using machines to build smaller machines, which build still smaller machines, and so forth) that has not, in fact, been followed. (Drexler 1991, pp. 465–466)

From the point of view of content, POR’s text is neither an account of the past nor a meticulous description of the state of the art of science in 1959, although it does contain some assessments of the situation existing at the time of writing, but rather a vision of science from the perspective of future generations. In another part of the current literature–historiography (Drexler 1986; Edwards 2006; Pradeep 2007; Drexler and Pamlin 2013; Romero 2016), Feynman’s work is presented as a fundamental document. Nevertheless, with respect to this literature, nothing is added, contributing to changing the established historical view; no new interpretative contributions are made. The authors (Ibidem) convey almost without question and consequently reinforce the idea that it must be considered the starting point of modern Nanotechnology. In the literature, this appears to be the most commonly accepted interpretation. However, if we consider a document establishing the keywords of the new discipline to be necessary, equally necessary might be the existence of a term defining this discipline. For example, we can consider the term ‘Nanotechnology.” In fact, at that time, this term was not officially coined until 1974, thanks to Taniguchi: ‘Nano-technology’ is the production technology to get the extra high accuracy and ultrafine dimensions, i.e. the preciseness and fineness of the order of 1 nm (nanometer), 10–9 m in length. The name of Nano-technology originates from this nanometer [. . .]. (Taniguchi 1974, p. 18; Author’s quotations marks)

From historical evidence, Nanotechnology is a science. The name is rightly to fix a landmark in the scientific research and environment (i.e., in the past for atoms, electrons, photons, etc.). Historical artefacts such as the cup of Lycurgus or the stained glass windows of Chartres cathedral were made using nanoparticles that even today give materials extremely distinctive colors when interacting with light. Their makers were moving into the field of nanomanufacturing, yet there was no trace of the word ‘Nanotechnology’ at the time. If one claims that Nanotechnology was born at the time the term was coined, then (historiographically) Taniguchi is the father of modern Nanotechnology, and (historically) Feynman’s work loses its meaning in this sense. It is historiographically interesting to notice that Drexler never mentioned

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Taniguchi as the first who coined this word but claimed himself as the one who spread the use of this word. The term “nanotechnology” was first introduced into widespread use (Drexler 1986, original Drexler’s reference) to refer to what is here termed “molecular nanotechnology”, but has increasingly been used to refer to the incremental extension of conventional microfabrication techniques into the submicron size range. Accordingly, some recent discussions of the history, status, and prospects of “nanotechnology” have confused essentially dissimilar concepts, as if “ornithology” were used to describe the study of flying things, thereby stirring birds, balloons, and bombers together into a single conceptual muddle. (Drexler 1991, p. 21 footnote)

What we have gathered so far allows us to put forward the opinion that it does not seem strictly necessary for POR to be the fundamental document for the emergence of Nanotechnology. We have cited artefacts that are nanostructured and were made well before the publication of an article that would seem to have outlined the guidelines of this science. The term “Nanotechnology” itself is relatively recent, but it can be interpreted as a semantic container within which an extremely complex discipline that benefits from the contribution of practically all the sciences can be found. Therefore, one can claim that Nanotechnology was not born in 1959 with Feynman’s lecture, nor was it born in 1974 when the term was coined. It is the result of continuous development, throughout the history of science. Concerning (2) As can be read in the literature (Toumey 2008), Nanotechnology has in any case undergone considerable development and has benefited from the work of researchers who have created fundamental instruments for manipulating atoms and molecules like the electron microscope, without them being aware of POR existence. They were not influenced by Feynman’s work. Therefore, Feynman’s writing (Ivi, pp. 145–146) becomes a historically important document in the landscape of science but is relieved of the responsibility of being the progenitor of a new discipline and the same can be said of its author. This new interpretation constitutes a change of conceptual vision that does not replace the previous one, considering POR as a founding document is a hypothesis that continues to exist alongside the new idea. Concerning (3) A third approach is still possible: the results achieved today are contained in a paper which takes on the value of a prophecy that has been unfolding over time. This interpretation possesses all the characteristics of a historical and conceptual forcing because it claims to necessarily trace back to Feynman’s work what has been achieved in Nanotechnology to date. This methodology is identified in Toumey’s work (Ivi, p. 135), but the author himself classifies it as weak in comparison with other interpretations:

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The nano–Nostradamus interpretation lets us see Feynman everywhere in nanotech, but this is a very sloppy way to relate an early text to later events. Bad for Nano and pointless for one’s memory of Richard Feynman.

Concerning (4) As we read POR, it is clear that what Feynman meant by the word “bottom” is the world of small particles. Nowadays, the title of the talk has become the refrain, the main title of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and may be one of the most beaten sentences in the world of science. An important example that points out this idea is: [. . .] “Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. This hookline from a famous Nobel laureate physicist served as a motto for the emerging field of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology [. . .] in the early 2000s. (Bensaude–Vincent and Simon 2019, p. 5)

Sometimes, the authors adapt the title to their research, such as: I thus genuinely believe that there’s still plenty of room at the bottom, and I invite you all to join us to explore the limits of this room together. (Castellanos–Gomez 2021, p. 2)

In the latter case, the title of the lecture becomes a kind of container within which certain research in the world of Nanotechnology is conducted, without any reference to the original content of Feynman’s article. Here we summarize the main interpretations of POR in the reviewed literature (Table 2). Table 2 The current historiographical key interpretations of POR Founding document Forecast document General document General motto

Drexler Edwards 1986 2006 Di Sia Sanders 2019 2019 Sharon Durkan 2019 2019 Bensaude-Vincent and Simon 2019

We can therefore interpreting POR:

propose

four

Pradeep 2007

Drexler and Pamlin 2013

Romero 2016

Castellanos-Gomez 2021

possible

historiographical

keys

to

1. The first one refers to the article as the founding document of Nanotechnology; without it, we would not have witnessed the development of Nanotechnology to the level it has reached today. This is because POR precisely contains the

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guidelines and goals of the new science. This is the most common quotation of POR in literature. 2. The second historiographical interpretation leads the content of POR back to a forecast document for possible future research. In this way, the text loses the epistemological necessity of constituting an indispensable foundation and at the same time frees its writer from the authorship of Nanotechnology. We pointed out that POR was not known to some scientists who have left fundamental traces in the history of Nanoscience. The text remains of undisputed scientific value but takes on a different significance. 3. A third historiographical key considers POR as the transcript of the 1959 conference only, with no other attributes. 4. The last interpretation takes the title of the conference and readjusts it, with semantic variants, to research in the nanoworld but which has no connection with the actual content of the original article. The role attributed to Feynman in the history of Nanotechnology, in the same documents, is recalled in the following Table 3.

Table 3 Is Feynman the founding pioneer of Nanotechnology in the literature we analyzed? Feynman as the founder of Nanotechnology

Yes Edwards (2006) Drexler and Pamlin (2013) Romero (2016) Bayda et al. (2020)

No Sanders (2019) Sharon (2019) Durkan (2019) Bensaude-Vincent and Simon (2019)

What we want to highlight is that a specific historical event is susceptible to a historiographical interpretation that is in any case subjective. Approaching Feynman’s article inevitably places it within an interpretative paradigm. We understand interpretive paradigms in the sense already introduced by Kuhn, as a construct that circumscribes what the scientist observes and problematizes, with the fundamental characteristic that scientific paradigms that differ from each other are by definition incomparable or incommensurable (Cfr. de Oliveira and Condé 2002). Paradigms that fall into this category are not logical consequences or generalizations of previous constructs/paradigms (Kuhn 1987). The document becomes, according to the interpretation, on the one hand, the indispensable starting point of Nanoscience and, on the other hand, in a more justifiable manner in our opinion, a piece of absolute historical relevance, free, however, of the burden of being the basis of a new discipline.

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The discussion on a source is a fundamental point for historiography, because both the object of the source, the information it contains, and the historian of science are mutually interacting, through the historian’s interpretation of the source itself. We have seen in our discussion how different and sometimes conflicting information can be drawn from the same source (Kragh 1987). In particular, we have seen how it has been extensively documented (Toumey 2008) and how several scientists did not read or were aware of Feynman’s work before making their discoveries, nor did any references to it appear. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate POR in the context in which it saw the light of day, bearing in mind which audience it was intended for and, above all, because, had it not been for an impassioned listener to whom we owe the recording of the lecture, this Feynman thought would probably have been lost forever.

Is POR an Evident Cornerstone? If we want to historiographically schematize the article, we notice that it opens with an introduction and develops into ten paragraphs, before the conclusions. In the introduction, Feynman’s mission statement about the conference is very clear. What I want to talk about is the manipulating and controlling things on a small scale. (Feynman 1960, p. 22)

From an epistemological point of view, Feynman never used the prefix nano in any of the terms of his discourse. The prefix nano, although first introduced in 1947 at the 14th congress of the Union Internationale de Chimie as the thousandthmillionth part, was only incorporated into the International System of Units in 1960. Furthermore, the term nanometer, as a measure of the billionth part of a meter, first appeared in 1963, this measure having previously been known as a millimeter. When he had to measure “at the bottom,” Feynman referred to 10 ångströms, for example. Then, in a rather precise description, Feynman illustrated a process by which letters can be reduced by 25,000 times using an electron microscope. Once the plastic molds of the text had been prepared, it would be enough to reproduce them in silicon to read them, again with the help of an electron microscope. In the following, Feynman shifted the discussion from the strictly practical level to that concerning the compatibility of his statements with what is known, from the scientific point of view. I will not discuss how we are going to do it, but only what is possible in principle – in other words, what is possible in principle according to the laws of Physics. (Feynman 1960, p. 24)

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Five times he pointed out to his audience that what he proposed is always consistent with the laws of physics. We read: I am not inventing anti-gravity, which is possible someday only if the laws are not what we think. I am telling you what could be done if the laws are what we think; we are not doing it simply because we haven’t yet gotten around to it. (Ibidem)

Or: I would like to try and impress upon you, while I am talking about all of these things on a small scale, the importance of improving the electron microscope by a hundred times. It is not impossible; it is not against the laws of diffraction of the electron. (Ibidem)

Yet: There is nothing that I can see in the physical laws that says the computer elements cannot be made enormously smaller than they are now. (Ivi, p. 26)

All these statements seem very prophetic. Feynman expressed his thoughts by always pointing out that he cannot know exactly how to achieve certain results, but that these are not impossible, in principle. The first reading of POR would certainly lead most readers to think that they are dealing with the inspirational vision of a science that has revolutionized our world in just a few decades. Several ideas are suggested in the paper, and some of them have been realized today. In his 1981 fundamental article Molecular Engineering (Drexler 1981), Drexler makes it clear that he is well aware of the contents of POR and from this text he draws inspiration for his subsequent arguments: Feynman’s 1959 talk entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” discussed Microtechnology as a frontier to be pushed back, like the frontiers of high pressure, low temperature, or high vacuum. He suggested that ordinary machines could build smaller machines that could build still smaller machines, working step by step down toward the molecular level; he also suggested using particle beams to define two-dimensional patterns. Present Microtechnology (exemplified by integrated circuits) has realized some of the potential outlined by Feynman by following the same basic approach: working down from the macroscopic level to the microscopic. (Drexler 1981, p. 5275; Author’s quotation’s mark)

Later, in his authoritative volume Engines of Creation, Drexler again quoted POR as a text where Feynman’s inspiring ideas, relating to nanomachines capable of controlling and directing chemical syntheses, are translated into words, although he must had to admit that Feynman himself could foresee neither when nor the cost of such research. In his doctoral thesis, Drexler paid his tribute to Feynman and POR, the ability to inspire research:

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The body of the talk focuses on miniaturization and Microtechnology; this section anticipates capabilities like those that are now basic to the microelectronics industry and proposes an alternative approach to miniaturization (using machines to build smaller machines, which build still smaller machines, and so forth) that has not, in fact, been followed. (Drexler 1991, p. 465)

Considering POR as the inspirational document of the ideas that led to Nanotechnology is not a wrong idea; this is simply one of the different possible interpretations, and it finds its validity in the fact that many of Feynman’s words on this subject have found a realization in the contemporary world. Furthermore, it is essential to bear in mind that the considerations we are making do not in any way concern Feynman as a researcher, let alone as a scientist or popularizer. Our reflection is based on the interpretation of POR as the cornerstone of Nanotechnology. Although it is objectively difficult to trace the exact number of references citing POR, nevertheless, starting from 1960 and considering the correct spelling of the name, a diagram can be drawn which presents to the reader how many times POR has been mentioned in literature. The data were retrieved through a research engine available on the Google Scholar website (Fig. 6).

Citations to "Plenty of Room"

1048 1014 841

5

2

1

3

3

12

64

118

348

Fig. 6 Citations to “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” It is interesting to notice that the article’s popularity increased considerably in the last 30 years only, from 1991 on a few years after Feynman’s death, in 1988. (Source: Andrea Durlo)

In the next chart, again obtained through research in Google Scholar, we detail the very first decades of the development of Nanotechnology. The readers should remember that the first use of the word Nanotechnology was due by Taniguchi in 1974 (Fig. 7).

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How may times POR was mentioned from 1970 to 1990.

4

469

4

3 2

2 1

1

1990

1988

1989

1987

1986

0 1984

1983

1981

1979

1980

1978

1976

1977

1975

1973

1974

1972

1982

0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1971

1970

0

1

1985

1

Fig. 7 A detail of the citations to “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” in the years of the first developments of Nanotechnology. (Source: Andrea Durlo)

The figure above shows the detail of the number of citations to POR from 1970 to 1990. During these decades, STM and AFM were developed and the manipulation of xenon atoms became possible. Heinrich Rohrer (1933–2013), Nobel Prize winner in 1986 for his research in STM together with Gerd Binnig, said that: Binnig and I neither heard of Feynman’s paper until Scanning Tunneling Microscopy was widely accepted in the scientific community a couple of years after our first publication, nor did any referee of our papers ever refer to it. . . It might have been even after the Nobel [Prize] [. . .] I think it had no influence whatsoever. (Toumey 2008, p. 145)

Gerd Binnig, Nobel Laureate with Rohrer for STM, suggested: I have not read [“Plenty of Room”]. . . I personally admire Feynman and his work but for other reasons than for his work on Nanotechnology (which actually does not exist) [Binnig’s brackets]. I believe people who push too much his contribution to this field do harm to his reputation. His contribution to science is certainly not minor and he needs not to be lifted [posthumously] onto the train of Nanotechnology. (Ibidem)

Calvin Quate (1923–2019), who contributed to the development of AFM, wrote that:

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None of this work derived from the publications of Feynman. I had not read the Feynman article and I don’t think Binnig or Rohrer had read it. All they wanted was a better method for examining microdefects in oxides. (Ibidem)

Donald Mark “Don” Eigler, the physicist who in 1989 arranged 35 xenon atoms to compose the letters IBM, a world-famous image also known as The Beginning, said he may have read Plenty of Room when he was a graduate student, long before he manipulated the atoms with STM but he also said: The technical aspects of my work have not been influenced by Feynman’s paper. (Toumey 2008, p. 146)

Historiography of a Scientific Debate Submitting these results to public opinion almost inevitably triggers debates, but these can be traced back to two fundamental levels of discussion: 1. The first level gathers the ideas of those who are in favor and those who are not in favor of the idea that POR is the document from which everything originated, as far as Nanotechnologies are concerned. The opinions of the debates, at this level, dwell on the content of POR and the ideas expressed in it, in order to establish whether they constituted, to all intents and purposes, the essential starting points for the developments that were to come. The testimonies in this sense are discordant. Authoritative researchers had no difficulty in stating that they were not aware of the publication of POR, or that they did not draw enlightening opinions from it. It should be noted that such a viewpoint does not diminish the historical significance of POR at all, nor does it prevent other researchers from claiming the exact opposite, and considering it a milestone in the historiography of science. Our considerations are based on the analysis, in terms of content, of a scientific article, and do not enter into the merits of the historical interpretation of its author, Richard Feynman. In other words, it is possible to consider POR as a non-“prophetic” text, relieving the figure of Feynman from the paternity of Nanotechnology. On the other hand, it is also possible to consider POR as a fundamental article for Nanoscience proper, since some of the ideas it expresses have been realized, and there is nothing to prevent us from considering the text of the 1959 conference as a source of direct inspiration for research. 2. The second level of discussion arises, as Toumey’s direct experience confirms, when the focus of the debate shifts from the objective view of the discourse to a subjective interpretation that completely distorts the object of the question itself. Thus, one no longer dwells on POR, i.e., one does not consider it at all, and Richard Feynman becomes the object of the debate as if the considerations on POR could be considered a simple prelude to a more decisive attack on the figure of Feynman himself. Toumey summarizes these concepts in a paragraph of his article he gives the name The evil anti-Feynman. This is the interpretation to which he was subjected, after the

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publication of his article, by some thinkers whose attention shifted dramatically from the article to its author, a move that Toumey never wanted to make, as we read in his own words. The clamor in defense of Feynman allows us to deduce how the subject of the dispute has been completely misrepresented and how some have felt obliged to defend Feynman against accusations that, on closer inspection, are completely absent. Reflecting on this aspect, it is possible to expand the discussion further. The author himself is not his writing. Those who have felt compelled to defend Feynman have in fact lumped together Feynman’s words and thoughts and the figure of Feynman, considering POR an absolutely indisputable work. To question not Feynman, not his work, but only the possible influence of one of his articles constitutes an intellectual scandal for some. We can consider this fact as a break in a scientific paradigm that has long been accepted: Feynman is the father of Nanotechnology because POR predicted, in some way, some of the results we have achieved today in this field. This paradigm has been reinforced over the decades by all those authors, and there are many of them, who have opened and still open their writings, such as books or articles, with the words In 1959 Richard Feynman gave a lecture . . . . We do not believe that it is a matter of choosing one path over another, but rather of accepting the plurality of points of view, without thinking of undermining – this is absolutely not the aim – the figure of Feynman or the validity of POR itself.

Concluding Remarks In this chapter,2 we considered one of the most famous articles belonging to the history of science after the Second World War, Richard Feynman’s POR, published in 1960. Far from questioning the author’s authority on the world scientific scene, we have concentrated on the interpretation that has been and is being given to the paper in terms of the foundation of Nanotechnology. There are many sources in the literature that begin in almost the same way, with Feynman’s lecture as the essential starting point, thus reinforcing the idea that POR is the document without which Nanotechnology would probably not have been born or evolved as we know it today and that Feynman is recognized as the father of Nanotechnology. In his after-dinner speech Feynman, actually, addressed what in his day was called miniaturization, or micro miniaturization. We analyzed several documents with the specific aim of highlighting different points of view about POR and Richard Feynman in the history of Nanotechnology. As we recollected in Table 2, section “Historiographical Approaches,” different interpretations are possible, although considering POR as the following document of Nanotechnology still remains the most common one in the literature. After that, 2

It is part of a larger PhD research (AD) defence on 16th of June 2023 at the IEMN, Lille University (France) supervised by RP in History of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology into Physics and Mathematics Relationship.

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we analyzed the role attributed to Feynman in the history of Nanotechnology, in the same documents. Here we have shown – see Table 3, section “Historiographical Approaches” – that considering Feynman as the father of Nanotechnology is not granted, sometimes not matching the results in Table 2. We explored the frequency of quotations that POR earned since its publication to nowadays. It appears from the graphics we elaborated that this number increased approximately after 1990. This may be brought back to the works of Kim Eric Drexler, the researcher who revived the name of Feynman and his article and brought to light the concept of Nanotechnology one decade after Norio Taniguchi (Fig. 8).

Citations to "Plenty of Room"

841 5

2

1

3

3

12

10481014

64 118 348

Fig. 8 The diffusion of POR since its first publication. The rise of the data may be attributed to the amplification POR received from the works of Drexler

We have then taken into consideration the writings of Christopher Toumey, in which the author puts forward several possible interpretations, from the classic one that makes POR the beginning of this new science, to the one that considers the text to be certainly authoritative but, supported by the testimonies and support of researchers who have made significant contributions to the history of Nanotechnology, does not consider it indispensable. A third interpretation, certainly possible but weak from an argumentative point of view, sees POR as a text that should be interpreted in the same way as the literary centuries of Nostradamus, i.e., as a text that was obscure at the time of its publication, but which has become comprehensible a posteriori in the light of the discoveries made in physics. Our intention was to analyze how many and what alternatives a reader might consider. In this way, by giving the reader more keys to interpretation, we consider the reading of the history of science more critical and informed. So, evaluating the actual role of ROP, as far as possible, in the context of the historiographic tradition or according to the new proposals developed by Christopher Toumey, following the direct testimonies he has collected, means retracing the history of Nanotechnology. According to Toumey (2008) and correlated literature, three historiographical key interpretations are conceivable (Table 4). On our side, based on the above analyses,

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Table 4 The comparison between the possible interpretations of POR, according to Toumey’s intuitions, describing through which mood (a) we can read the script and (b) make up our considerations, (c) above our four proposals Item I

II

III

Key interpretation according to Toumey (Toumey 2005, 2008) “Apostolic Succession” (Toumey 2008, p. 135; 2005) The reader totally considers that POR is the definitive inspiring document issued by Richard Feynman, on Nanotechnology. In addition, Feynman is the visionary genius. Everything in Nanotechnology derives from POR and everything in history proves that. There is no chance of other points of view; no criticism is allowed. Often, who criticizes POR is intended – by defenders of the apostolic succession – to be attacking Feynman himself This is the most common interpretation of POR and the point of view of Feynman, found in articles, manuals and books, and other issues on the subject (see below). Somehow, this is an axiomatic view of the issue “Mendel-like approach” (Toumey 2008, p. 135) Feynman might somehow have inspired Nanotechnology, but other people came to important results without any knowledge of POR (not Feynman), discovering things, designing and assembling new tools, moving on a parallel path. This way would relieve Feynman off the responsibility of being “father of Nanotechnology.” This is an interesting alternative point of view, depicting an uncommon but feasible hypothesis. Such an interpretation moves away the “holy veil” of absolute certainty on the origin of Nanotechnology and opens a way to discussion “Nostradamus approach” (Toumey 2008, p. 135) We have no evidence (studies, articles, etc.) that, at that time, someone really gave consequence to Feynman’s talk and his successive paper. Discoveries in Nanotechnology are made and the important ones, dated back to the Eighties, are now explainable only through a backwards re-reading of POR. Therefore, only now – and thanks to historical and

Key interpretation according to us (Current article) Founding document Based on our current research, POR is presented as a founding document of Nanotechnology. It appears so in several documents that we studied

The chapters/paragraphs about the history of Nanotechnology begin quoting POR as the fundamental article and Feynman as the beginner of Nanotechnology

Forecasting document According to this second key interpretation, POR indicates different paths and development of research, but it does not include the established way to be necessarily followed

Feynman is not regarded as the father of Nanotechnology

Broad-spectrum document Few examples in literature only comment about POR; just quoting it through the title of the conference only

(continued)

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Table 4 (continued) Item

Key interpretation according to Toumey (Toumey 2005, 2008)

IV

historiographical research – it is possible to clarify the innovative and predictive role played by Feynman’s ideas This interpretation suggests the road back only, to the original idea at the basis of POR. It sounds like this is what it really meant at the beginning Nil

Key interpretation according to us (Current article)

No mention on the contents is made nor attributions to Feynman himself are proposed Manifesto document We have found and reported evidences of papers where “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” is a container title for different researches in Nanotechnology, not strictly related to the content of the original paper

we add four historiographical keys to the history and historiography of Nanotechnology. We added a fictional title to each approach. The reader finds that our first two keys of interpretation (Table 4) are quite similar to the corresponding ones from Toumey. The remaining two are a novelty in this historiographical debate. For each item, we added a final short comment in italic style. We have therefore examined There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom from a different series of new points of view, those which we have included in the table above. 1. The first approach, relating to the Apostolic Succession, is the one we can define as the “classic approach,” the one that in literature makes authors say that POR is the document from which Nanotechnology flourished, and Richard Feynman is its founding father. This interpretation is the most common and has the consequence of creating an initiator of a new discipline, on the one hand, and giving history the reference document, on the other hand. In this way, we find ourselves in one of the situations relating to the history of science, when we face an authoritative figure and his work that seals the passage of an epoch. We have cited examples such as Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. According to this interpretation, Feynman could be rightfully included in the history of Nanotechnology, with the significant role of initiator of this new research. 2. The second approach is linked to Gregor Mendel. He was able to formalize the laws of Genetics completely unaware that other researchers attained the same results, without knowing about Mendel himself. The idea is that research in Nanotechnology was born and progressed independently of POR and that the scientists who contributed fundamental results to it and who, like Feynman, was awarded the Nobel Prize, for example, did not benefit from the ideas we can read in that article. It is precisely the protagonists of the history of Nanotechnology

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who confirm, in interviews with Toumey, that they were not aware of POR at all, i.e., that they did not draw such a decisive inspiration from it. 3. The third one is an approach that even in Toumey’s words is the weakest from an argumentative and epistemological point of view. POR is considered to be a document that has remained obscure and has only been understood under the light of the results achieved in Nanotechnology research. This interpretation, although legitimate, appears to be the least acceptable, compared to the epistemological strength of the previous two. We support the view that POR is absolutely a fundamental document in the history of science, but not necessarily the founding document of Nanotechnology. We do not feel the need to be in possession of a founding and indispensable document. Having presented the points of view we have listed, we believe we have shown the various possibilities of interpretation, which we leave to the reader. We have seen how this change of perspective results in a rigid position on the part of those who feel Feynman is threatened by an attack that, in reality, does not exist at all. This happens because a free interpretation was made of the initial question: was POR, in fact, an indispensable document for the history of Nanotechnology? The variety of answers given by the scientists reflects the logical variety of their points of view and the real contribution that this article has made to their research. The center of the dispute remains the article itself, not the figure of Richard Feynman. We have proposed an additional – and – different historiographical point of view analyzing the way POR is scientifically proposed and historiographically spread in the literature; we came to four possible different interpretations (Table 4) to be discussed. New considerations can be made to the original article, avoiding every consideration about the figure and the importance of Richard Feynman in the scientific landscape, as many are his fans. The reader is free to consider him the founder, an inspirer, a contributor, or just a scientist who was capable to see beyond but unwilling to be the founder of a new discipline. No doubt that with Feynman’s article and his research, the historical via to develop Nanosciences–Nanotechnology was projected. Finally, what seems very interesting to us is the possibility of re-reading this article from a different point of view. Not only that but also the possibility of directly consulting researchers involved in the same field of Nanotechnology allows us to benefit from a direct testimony without interpretative filters. Acknowledgments We want to thank the referees for their careful reading of our manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions. We also express gratitude to Dr Julie Robarts (University of Melbourne Australia) for her observations on the English language; eventual remaining English mistakes are our own. Author Contributions Raffaele Pisano and Andrea Durlo wrote the manuscript. Conflicts of Interest The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Cosmopolitical Propositions: A Historiographic Analysis of Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives on Sciences

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ontological Turn in Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cosmopolitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Historical Narratives Are Written in the Field of Cosmopolitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bruno Latour’s Symmetrical Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Isabelle Stengers’ Cosmopolitical Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Climate Changing” Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Final Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Recent advances in anthropology, in a general sense, and, more specifically, in laboratory anthropology, have encouraged proposals for metaphysical renovation, which deviates from the modern idea of an absolute and permanent separation between nature and society. Anthropologists such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Phelippe Descola have shown how different groups enable the existence of not only different cultures, but also different natures, which rather than simply denoting multiculturalism, also describes multinaturalism. Likewise, science studies – especially Bruno Latour’s studies on laboratory anthropology – have also indicated the possibility of a metaphysical conception in which ontology, epistemology, and politics are not separated a priori. These insights point at the existence of cosmopolitics, in which several human and nonhuman actors take part in shaping reality – a notion coined by philosopher Isabelle Stengers. This is a conception that defies conventional metaphysical guise and the very divisions of

N. W. Lima (*) Physics Department, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_27

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philosophy (ontology, epistemology, and politics), which holds serious repercussions on how history of science can be narrated, and on history itself. This chapter intends to provide an overview of the ontological turn of anthropology to carry out a historiographical analysis of research studies built on cosmopolitical theory – that is, how it impacts on their conceptualization, narrative structures, and methodological choices. To this end, historical studies by Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Dipesh Chakrabasty are analyzed and interpreted together to indicate methodological guidelines for composing historical narratives from a cosmopolitical point of view. Keywords

Cosmopolitics · Political epistemology · Ontological epistemology · Laboratory’s anthropology

Introduction Traditionally, anthropology has been a field of study in which researchers devote themselves to the investigation of the diverse forms of living to find the principles that justify and explain the diversity found (Descola 2016). In this sense, the usual, or expected, approach of the anthropologist is to develop an ethnographic (or ethnological) study of often distant peoples, not yet affected by the modern world. Even when anthropology turns to a closer collective, it is usually devoted to the typically peripheral groups of society: those excluded or marginalized from so-called modernity (Latour and Woolgar 1986). However, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, this logic began to be challenged, as several researchers began to dedicate themselves to the ethnographic study of laboratory practices (Woolgar 1982). In other words, scientific practice – a milestone in the development of modernity – became subject to analysis in its human dimension. Such a change of perspective was accompanied by an urge to distrust the privileged epistemological status of science: while the (absolutist) epistemologist narrates science through its epistemological distinguishable features (arguing that scientists do what they do because they are acting rationally), the anthropologist describes what the scientist does and explains such action by appealing to its human dimension, as if explaining the action in any other group. Equally at odds with the traditional epistemological narrative, studies such as the strong program in sociology (Bloor 1991), science studies (Jasanoff et al. 2001), and laboratory studies were undertaken by researchers such as Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar (1986) and Knorr-Cetina (1981). These studies led to a full-blown crisis regarding the epistemological status of science, a series of intellectual exchanges that became known as science wars (Vrieze 2017). More than bringing the absolutism versus relativism discussion to the table, the ethnographic studies of the laboratory raised a series of new questions about the

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meanings, modes of existence, and interrelationships among the products of science themselves, that is, of scientific knowledge. In addition to the epistemological debate, such questions have evoked, on the one hand, problems in the metaphysical foundations of scientific discourse (Latour 1999b), and, on the other hand, in the conceptions about the relationship between science and different spheres of power in society, that is, its political dimension (Latour 2004a). This philosophical unfolding, propelled by ethnographic accounts, has not occurred as an isolated phenomenon, but rather, in some ways, has accompanied the recent development of contemporary anthropology itself, which has sought to investigate the ways that the different possibilities of existence affect power and vice versa, yielding the notion of a politics of ontologies (Holbraad et al. 2014). Such conceptions merge traditionally distinct fields of philosophy (such as epistemology, ontology, and political philosophy) in their concrete and unique manifestation in the seamless fabric of human experience. As the following sections will discuss, further development of the anthropology of science, in parallel with anthropology and philosophy, has led to the development of metaphysical schemas that leap off the canvas of modern understanding of reality (Latour 1993). It denies, for example, the existence of a transcendental nature that serves as a judge for different cultures (Stengers 2018), which could be called multiculturalism, recognizing that each collective has its culture and nature, what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls multinaturalism (Castro 2018). In the encounter of different collectives, there is not only a tension over their cultural elements, but also a dispute over the real itself. Thus, the entities that make up the cosmos affect political disputes, and political disputes affect what goes on to exist or not exist in the cosmos. This conception translates into the notion of cosmopolitics (Stengers 1996), which has also played a key role in the work of Bruno Latour (1999b, 2020b). Although the ethnographic method refers to the study of current, in-action science (Latour 1988a), the metaphysical, epistemological, and political consequences of understanding science in a cosmopolitical framework have had weighty implications for the way that historical narratives can be articulated. Accordingly, a number of different authors have elaborated historical studies from such a perspective (Latour 1988b; Stengers 2010, 2011; Chakrabarty 2009). In this chapter, a historiographical analysis of historical narratives developed in dialogue with the cosmopolitical proposition is presented, assessing the influence of this theoretical framework (metaphysical, epistemological, and political) in the choice of themes, structures, and style of such texts. For this, the so-called ontological turn in anthropology will be outlined according to how this perspective challenges modernist metaphysics. Next, we will resume the concept of cosmopolitics, contrasting the ways in which it arises in the texts of Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and pointing out the implications of these views on science studies. Lastly, the discussion will focus on the discursive characteristics of the historical narratives of three authors (Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Dipesh Chakrabasty), emphasizing how they are impacted by the theoretical framework developed by the authors.

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The Ontological Turn in Anthropology The movement called ontological turn in anthropology is usually associated with the works of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Bruno Latour, and Philippe Descola (Kohn 2015), and is part of a larger movement in this field of research that places under suspicion the modernist metaphysical narrative, which usually associates the study of being with the notion of a thing in itself, a being, rather than a process or a relation. In this sense, the notion of ontological turn should not be understood as homogenous; on the contrary, there are divergences between distinct notions of metaphysics, as well as a plethora of conceptions raised by different authors, who nonetheless have in common the introduction of an alternative to modern metaphysics (Latour 2001). In general, modernists maintain that there is a total and absolute disjunction between two ontological poles: nature and society. “Social” is everything that is constructed by humans, and which hence is contextually situated. Nature, by exclusion, is everything that exists independently of humans, in an objective, autonomous manner (Latour 1993; Kohn 2015). This transcendent nature, an alien to human culture and will, has acted as a judge, or common denominator, across different cultures. In the field of scientific thought, the notion of fact would rest on the possibility of describing an objective element of this nature, independent of any cultural construction – a typical concept developed in the early days of modernity (Whitehead 1925). Different from the modernist perspective, the studies of Philippe Descola point to a dissolution of these disjoint poles into other collectives, showing that such separation is a particular way of understanding reality. As an example, in studying the Achuar peoples, Descola (2016) explains how what we would call natural beings (e.g., plants and animals) assume human aspects, with moral traits, thoughts, and intentions, hence playing a role in changing culture. That is to say, for the Achuar, it is not possible to distinguish between what is natural and cultural, for such a separation would not even make sense. In this sense, Amerindians appeal to perspectivism to describe reality (Castro 1996), which is possible to understand as follows: we humans can see ourselves hunting prey or avoiding predators; but the predators themselves appear to be human for they perceive us as being another animal. For a spirit, they are the human; and perhaps we are not but another being in charge of another function within their perspective. In other words, all beings share the same spirit, yet they live in different worlds. There is not just one material reality – which gives rise to the notion of a multinaturalism. Commenting on this theme, Latour (2004b) recalls a story about the arrival of Europeans in America. While the Europeans wondered if the Indians had souls, the Indians drowned the Europeans to check if they had bodies. It should be noted that, in this conception, there is no point of view according to which we can say who the real human is: everyone is human in their own perspective. As Castro points out, anthropological research allows us to understand that it is possible to embrace metaphysical perspectives other than the ontological, modernist notion(Castro 2018). In recognizing this, Castro asks, “could we not rotate a

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perspective so that it showed that the most interesting concepts, problems, entities, and agents proposed by anthropological theories are rooted in the imaginative efforts of the societies they purport to explain?” (Castro 2018, 20). In this sense, the anthropological method assumes a commitment to the point of view of immanence, drawing concepts from the observed experience itself; this differs from the usual methods of sociology, for they often take constructs of the observer’s society as transcendental. Thus, anthropology embodies the studied people’s concepts, beliefs, and methods, explaining them in its own practice and discourse. Such a reversal of perspective (which, to some extent, embodies the spirit of Amerindian perspectivism) implies what Castro calls the ultimate purpose of anthropology: the permanent decolonization of thought. By making this move, and by assuming alternative metaphysics to modern thought, anthropology does not erase the distinctions between the natural and the social, but renders them more diffuse and tortuous (Castro 2018). In the field of science studies, a similar trend can be found in the works of Bruno Latour. In his seminal work, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, scientists in a neuroendocrinology laboratory are investigated as a collective. Scientific practices are then explained from the ethnographic study itself and are not the object of an epistemological metanarrative. (The notion of metanarrative refers to narratives that are structured on a prior theoretical conceptualization. For example, Lakatos’ rational history presents a metanarrative in terms of progressive and regressive programs.) The constructs that are employed to narrate and explain the events are put together by the researcher from the need that arises in the very process of narrating the experience, and, in the end, the explanatory terms come from the studied collective itself and not from an a priori theory. It is in this context that Latour narrates scientists as a tribe of reader-writers, who use equipment to produce inscriptions (graphs, tables, images), a fundamental element in the type of text produced by these tribes. The scientific fact, in this case, is established collectively, when a particular actant becomes detached from the network of inscriptions that originated it, thus assuming an autonomous reality (Actant is a term derived from Greimas’ semiotic studies, used by Latour to designate something that exists out of a network of other actants. This term is used to replace the notion of objects or things, which would have an autonomous existence.). Until it achieves the status of real, the fact goes through a long process of ontological stabilization, moving away from the position of a simple artifact. It is because of this process that Latour states that facts are socially constructed. The term “socially constructed,” however, has been the source of a number of problems. On the one hand, the strong program of sociology (Bloor 1991) attributes purely social causes to scientific statements, in the sense of being explained by constructs of the observer’s society (thus reifying this ontological pole). Anthropological study, on the other hand, blurs the boundaries between the two modernist ontological poles. For Latour, scientific fact is social but not only social, it is natural but not only natural, it is discursive but not only discursive (Latour 1993). Therefore, stating that a scientific fact is socially constructed means that it is the result of a collective practice: being this collective composed of humans and

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nonhumans, it cannot be reduced to human volition or subjective idealizations (Latour 2001). In the case of the study presented in Laboratory Life, the discovered-created protein is articulated not only by the scientists, but by the laboratory equipment and the inscriptions they produce: it is this heterogeneous network that socially constructs/ discovers the protein. In this sense, the boundaries between the natural and the social are constantly transgressed, and even nonhumans have agency (that is, the ability to affect the world and the performance of other actors). Moreover, in this alternative metaphysics, in which the social and the natural at various points are intertwined, there is no contradiction between the fact of being constructed and being real. On the contrary, the more constructed a fact is, the more real it becomes. Again, in the case of the neuropeptide discovered in the laboratory, it was collectively constructed by the scientists and the equipment. The more real it became, the more equipment was mobilized, more inscriptions were produced, and all this was articulated around a single actant: the peptide. Later, these entries sparked community interest, and more texts were produced, with more entries, more performances and attributes for the same agent. In the end, after much construction, the peptide became so real that it was no longer necessary to mention the original studies that articulated it: one could finally just talk about the peptide. In other words, it was the construction that made it real and autonomous. The development of these ideas led Latour and other authors in the field of science studies, such as Michel Callon and John Law, to develop the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), or, as Castro (2018) puts it, one of the main milestones in the renewal of contemporary anthropology. This perspective takes up the notion of social as everything that is relational (involving humans and nonhumans), and recognizes that every actor is itself a network, and every network is an actor. Therefore, ANT does not use a subjectcollective dichotomy, but goes through associations at different scales, different actors, performances, and interrelationships, in a sociological analysis (Latour et al. 2012). As is the case discussed by Castro, ANT starts from some premises (Latour 2005), such as no prior distinction between human and nonhuman, natural and social; the attribution of agency to all actors (human and nonhuman) involved; the privileging of the explanations and narratives of the actors involved over conceptual metanarratives – a notion that also comes from Michel Callon’s sociology of translation (1984); the quest for an explanation of how networks are stabilized, and not simply the deconstruction of naturalized concepts, as advocated in postmodernist perspectives. In this sense, an actor-network study produces an aggregative narrative, in order to explain and describe how a certain conjuncture was possible through the associations of different actors. When it comes to studying science, actor-network studies are an aggregative narrative, inasmuch as they seek to explain and describe how a certain conjuncture was possible through the associations of different actors until the controversy can be resolved (Venturini 2010). Once a particular endpoint has been achieved, the end of the controversy is not explained by the discovery of a fact; it is the end of the discovery that produced the fact. Using the aforementioned premises, the ANT describes and explains how this outcome was possible. So, the ontological turn in anthropology involves different metaphysical perspectives that deviate from the modernist consensus, which assumes the existence of a

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single transcendental nature, entirely detached from social organizations. Although the authors may go their separate ways, they all assume the privilege of an immanent point of view in their research methods, taking from the studied episode itself the concepts and discourses they will use in their narratives. Moreover, humans and nonhumans play an equally leading role, sharing agency and being responsible for the outcome of the processes studied. Beyond the purely intellectual interest that these perspectives may arouse, the possibility of conceiving other ontologies and creating-discovering other possible ways of being in the world is in itself a political act (Holbraad et al. 2014). The choice for this kind of perspective is not only the result of a theoreticalmethodological alignment, but is also a way to push the contemporary debate towards understanding and conceiving other realities. Growing social inequality and climate change, among other crises that plague contemporaneity, are the result of an extractivist worldview (Santos 2019; Krenak 2019), vision that objectifies the other (be it nature or other people), so the adoption of a perspectivist metaphysics not only gives anthropology what it needs to exercise a steady decolonization of thought, but also offers the possibility of shaping a world that is free from a hegemonic, exploitative rationale.

Cosmopolitics Since narratives that challenge the theoretical framework of modernity present themselves as a form of resistance and political action (Holbraad et al. 2014), their proposals also overlap with recent discussions on climate mutation and the so-called crisis of the Anthropocene (Kohn 2015), a geological period in which human action cannot be dissociated from the very development of the characteristics of terrestrial dynamics (Latour 2020a). On this particular issue, Bruno Latour has used the notion of cosmopolitics to refer to the disputes not only between cultural forces of different groups, but to the process of collective articulation (of humans and nonhumans) between the entities that make up the world and the amenities that they envision (Latour 1999b, 2020b, 2004b). The concept stems from the discussions by Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers (Stengers 2018, 2010, 2011). On the cosmopolitical proposition, Isabelle Stengers (2018) emphasizes that rather than a stance to be defined or defended, it is a way to decelerate reasoning, consensus, and certainty, and to provoke a different kind of sensibility in relation to the problems and situations that affect us. As a handbrake, Stengers’ cosmopolitical proposition can slow down the pace of the modern world. In this sense, given that this proposal does not adhere to the modernist contract, it is not concerned with locking actors into the roles assigned to them by mere theoretical assumptions. Cosmopolitics is not affiliated with the metanarratives of modernity or with problems at the interface between positive sciences and political issues, which is part of studying political ecology (Latour 2004a).

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Stengers (2018) further reinforces that her concept of cosmopolitics has nothing to do with the Kantian cosmopolitism present in his “Perpetual Peace” (Kant 2009). It is not about conceiving a universal world where each person can feel like a citizen, but precisely about recognizing the plurality of nature-society. Despite being equal, these coexisting collectives are not equivalent – in the sense that they cannot be transformed into one another, as if there were a common denominator. Upon this realization, the performance of a researcher (or thinker) is similar to the conceptual character proposed by Deleuze, inspired by Dostoevsky: the idiot. The idiot casts suspicion on certainties, doubts the consensus, and paralyzes debates in favor of something of greater urgency and necessity, which not even the idiot knows what is. This is the actor who is capable of slowing down the process that the common world has committed to, leading to crisis of the Anthropocene. On cosmopolitics, Latour says that the presence of cosmos in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of politics to mean the giveand-take in an exclusive human club. The presence of politics in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of cosmos to mean a finite list of entities that must be taken into account. Cosmos protects against the premature closure of politics, and politics against the premature closure of cosmos. For the Stoics, cosmopolitanism was a proof of tolerance; cosmopolitics, in Stengers’ definition, is a cure for what she calls ‘the malady of tolerance’. (Latour 2004b).

Motivated by discussions about the Anthropocene, Latour adds a different meaning to the cosmopolitics (Blaser 2018), being particularly concerned with the possibility of building a common world that is livable for all (Latour 2020b). In the following excerpt, Latour’s preoccupation with this possibility is apparent: A common world is not something we come to recognize, as though it hadalways been here (and we had not until now noticed it). A common world, if thereis going to be one, is something we will have to build, tooth and nail, together.The ethnocentrism of sociologists is never clearer than when they paper over thethreat of multiple worlds with their weak notion of cosmopolitanism. (Latour 2004b)

In synthesis, the cosmopolitical proposition starts from an alternative metaphysics to the modernist contract, assuming the nonexistence of a transcendent nature. This detachment allows different fields of philosophy to be confused, such as ontology, epistemology, and political philosophy. In this context, humans and nonhumans assume symmetrical roles, having agency, and cooperating in the making of the cosmos and of the society.

How Historical Narratives Are Written in the Field of Cosmopolitics The previous sections were devoted to present an overview and synthesis of what the ontological turn in anthropology, the anthropology of the laboratory and the cosmopolitics are. Although this is a heterogeneous field, which develops into

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different metaphysical proposals and epistemological and political commitments, such a theoretical framework is characterized by some common elements: a) a metaphysical proposal that breaks with the modernist framework; b) refusal of a transcendent nature; c) combination of metaphysical, political, and epistemological elements in the same narrative; d) attribution of agency to nonhumans; e) refraining from modernist metanarratives; e) noncompliance with fatalistic deconstructions that reduces facts to a subjective state or to a sum of human forces. This chapter’s main goal then is to make a historiographical analysis of historical studies in this theoretical field, which consists in investigating how certain epistemological, political, metaphysical conceptions, as well as the cultural conjunctures of a certain time and space, have had an impact on the way historical narratives are produced (Videira 2007). To make this proposal more concrete, we are about to analyze how historical studies or discussions about history, written by authors recognized in the cosmopolitical field, might be defined with respect to themes, narrative goal, research questions, narrative structure, method of historical analysis, role of primary and secondary sources, and role of theoretical concepts. Once these elements are properly acknowledged, we can discuss how embracing an alternative metaphysical theoretical framework to the modernist contract can impact on historical writing. The way to do this will not be by imposing a priori conditions for a narrative to be considered cosmopolitical, but precisely following the very proposal of such a framework, to recognize the immanent characteristics of narratives. Therefore, from narratives produced by three authors, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, we aim to identify the characteristics of the aforementioned elements, trying to show to what extent they dialogue with cosmopolitics. From this set of characteristics, we can abstract possible methodological guidelines for those who intend to build narratives also aligned with this perspective.

Bruno Latour’s Symmetrical Narratives The modernist contract absolutely separates nature and society, leading to the writing of narratives that consider social constructions to be endowed with historicity, while natural entities are considered to be ahistorical (Latour 1993). We describe in a “rational history” that democracy or republic are cultural constructions, whose existence is circumscribed within a certain space-time envelope. For the sake of comparison, a bacterium, according to modernist history, once discovered, is understood as an objective entity that has always existed. Sociological narratives such as those proposed in the context of the strong sociology program (Bloor 1991), which take society as the cause of different propositions, would explain the emergence of the concept of that bacterium due to a social or political conjuncture. In this case, even if the narrative takes a constructivist approach to nature, it stills reifies theoretical concepts and social structures (Latour 1993).

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Faced with this dichotomy, a first question to be proposed is how is it possible that, confronted with the same episode, the articulation of narratives can be so the opposite in terms of the metaphysics involved? Also, which would be the correct or true story? Instead of assuming a side, and defending one of the possible metaphysical orientations, Latour’s proposal is precisely to take the contradiction explicitly as an object of explanation: “This is the first notion I would like students to absorb: let us take this contradiction, this double discourse, as our object, and endeavor not to rush into taking sides. Let us decelerate. We must be patient” (Latour 2016, 16). To exemplify this methodological positioning, Latour (2016) analyses Plutarch’s text on the life of Archimedes. Latour shows that, in Plutarch’s narrative, this same contradiction emerges: Archimedes is narrated as a scientist aloof from the political sphere whilst a king is looking for Archimedes to assist him in winning a war. Turning to Plutarch’s narrative of the episodes that make up Archimedes’ trajectory, Latour seeks to explain how these two contradictory conceptions are possible in the same narrative. Fragments of the primary source are then presented and interpreted. Latour then goes on to explain the studied objects and to propose concepts that are capable of making sense of the existing contradiction. In this specific case, Latour presents the concept of translation, originally proposed by Michel Serres, which indicates the process of encounter and transformation of agency and interest of different actors (which can be human or nonhuman). In the case of the story of Archimedes, it is about the scientist’s encounter with King Hieram. Latour discusses the original interests and action plans of each actor, and interprets how their encounter implies an interruption in the original course of action, which is now translated into a new action whose interests and performances are transformed into a new plan, that is, it is not about a simple sum of sequential cases. With this construct, from the original account, it is possible to interpret how an apolitical scientist is of interest for a king, and how a king (a political representative) is of interest for an apolitical scientist. The concern of symmetrical history is precisely to show in hindsight the traces of connection that generate over different actors that imply the translation of scientific elements into political ones and vice versa (Latour 1999c). Therefore, it is not about defining science as something reduceable to social, as some authors may argue (Mcintyre 2018), but about perceiving the possible connections and the politicalepistemic translations when they exist. To exemplify this stance towards historical episodes, Latour draws on Spencer Weart’s account of the French nuclear project developed by Frédéric Joliot. In investigating this episode, Latour points out that neither a purely scientific story about, say, the development of the neutron chain reaction, nor a purely political story, be it about a mining company that extracted uranium, some Norwegian company that produced deuterium, or the Nazi spies can stand on their own. Why did someone who was worried about winning the Nobel prize in physics need to get involved with a raid in Norway, and why does an administrator, used to sitting in his office planning his company’s profits, now need to think about a neutron chain reaction (Latour 1999c)? Once again, the processes and encounters can be described as

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translations, in which the original performances are interrupted in favor of a new program of action that is unexpected and inexplicable from the original actions. More than that, Latour discusses that to mobilize the neutrons inside the laboratory, on the one hand, Joliot needs to interest and affect other human actors to invest in that research. On the other hand, to be able to affect the humans, the neutrons have to be worked out. The performance of nonhumans affects the agency of humans, and symmetrically, the performance of humans impacts the agency of nonhumans. Thus, from the historical narrative, Latour proposes a scheme to explain the interrelationships involved in the process of scientific practices, based on four routes that form a circulatory system. This system is formed by (1) mobilization of the world (processes that take place in the laboratory); (2) autonomization (the process of generating interest in peers, who also start investigating the theme and producing knowledge that is more and more autonomous in relation to the original context of creation); (3) alliances (the process of generating interests of nonscientific groups, such as government, companies, and the civil community, which support and invest in research); and (4) public opinion, which establishes a favorable or unfavorable environment for the development of research. From a historical study, Latour argues that none of these processes can be separated from the others: they all affect one another – which would prevent the separation between an “externalist” or “internalist” history of science. Latour (1999c) describes how intensification of connections and links leads the scientific community to nucleation – at the intersection between the circuits of the circulatory system. The more intense this circulation is, the better will be the nucleation, in the sense that – from a distance – one can see the distinction between two separate areas, for example, inside and outside science. However, when getting closer to it, there appears the intense vascularization between the inside and the outside area. Historical research thus should not take a priori assumptions between “inside” and “outside” science, nor between what belongs to the political or to the scientific field, nor decide who has agency in it (be it human or nonhuman). The goal of the narrative, for example, history-based research, becomes to investigate which actors are important to which practices; how a situation in the lab impacts actors and vice versa from outside the lab, or ultimately how nature and society change in the process. Thus, nature and society are not the explanatory elements of the narrative, but rather what is to be explained (Latour 1993). Understanding that society is constructed or affected by scientific practices seems easier to accept, since society itself is typically something that is constructed. Latour’s symmetrical proposal, in contrast, requires nature to be something in need of stabilization by the end of the practice, and not something ready-made before the practice. In the story told by Latour about Jolliot’s case, the construction of nature is not emphasized or privileged, which in a way also indicates that the narrative structure does not have the commitment to fit at all times a preestablished recipe. The researcher faced with historical records, primary or secondary, seeks to interpret the episode in the light of a symmetrical framework in order to answer a question. In the case of the Archimedes story, the goal was to explain how an

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apolitical scientist interested a politician and vice versa. In the case of Jolliot, Latour wanted to explain epistemic-political translations and the nucleation of a society around a scientific practice. In order to shed light on the most polemical aspect of non-modernist metaphysics, a quick analysis of Latour’s study on Pasteur’s microbes will be presented. Latour (1999a) delves into Louis Pasteur’s original article Mémoire sur la fermetation appelée lactique to explore how it is possible to move from a world in which fermentation occurred by a purely chemical reaction, as Liebig argued, to a world inhabited by lactic acid bacteria. In other words, Latour aims to analyze how Pasteur’s own text alters the ordinary way of understanding fermentation (Latour 1999a). In interpreting Pasteur’s own text, Latour points out that initially all that Pasteur had access to were performances, a list of unstable attributes, derived from applying laboratory equipment to a given sample. These actions gradually gain stability around an envelope that, in the future, will be the substance behind the performances. Pasteur’s challenge is to make the actant to reveal itself and for this he needs to make new tests, allowing him to add competencies to the actant. To do so, he uses an artificial, human-built laboratory, so that, in the aftermath, he is left to justify that it is the yeast’s attributes, which are independent of human volition. To explain how it is possible to jump from a list of competencies to the existence of a new entity, Latour suggests that it is time to go into a more profound empirical analysis of Pasteur’s text, in which there is an alternation between a rationalistconstructivist view and a realist view. Pasteur assumes that he conducts his experiments using his own preconceptions, expectations, conjectures, and biases. But as the experiments develop, the yeast takes on agency and often goes against human volition. In the end, Pasteur goes on to talk about results and competencies that have gained their own autonomy. Latour then proposes to understand this process using Alfred Whitehead’s (1978) process philosophy. From this view, no predefined list of objects exists in nature; instead, everything that exists can be understood in terms of propositions, whose only predetermined property is to be distinct from other propositions, and to be able to articulate with them. In this sense, the laboratory experiment is understood as an “event” where propositions articulate with other propositions, giving rise to new propositions and transforming old propositions. On the one hand, Pasteur helps the yeast to reveal itself by changing its list of attributes; and, on the other hand, the yeast changes the attributes of Pasteur, who will now be the scientist who discovered “lactic acid.” The initial propositions no longer exist, and new propositions can be created. The universe, according to Latour (1999a), is composed of actants (or propositions) that “travel through” time. After events, such as laboratory experiments, the list of propositions and their properties pass to be altered. This new metaphysical approach that arises from the need to interpret Pasteur’s text and that inherits Whitehead’s procedural proposal has crucial implications for how we understand history: “What transformations will the notion of history undergo when put into these two different setups? What becomes feasible or

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unfeasible when the tension is shifted from one group of concepts to the other?” (Latour 1999d, 146). The main point is to recognize that the attributes of a proposition depend on the network of other propositions, hence the essence of a substance is not something intrinsic and permanent, but contextual in space and time. Thus, the reality of anything must be regarded as a relative property. The implication of this for the history of science is discussed by Latour. So, in the metaphysics of history that I want to substitute for the traditional one, we should be able to talk calmly about relative existence*. It may not be the sort of existence science warriors want for objects in nature*, but it is the sort of existence science studies would like propositions to enjoy. Relative existence means that we follow the entities without stretching, framing, squeezing, and cutting them with the four adverbs never, nowhere, always, everywhere. If we use these adverbs, Pouchet’s spontaneous generation will never have been there anywhere in the world; it was an illusion all along; it is not allowed to have been part of the population of entities making up space and time. Pasteur’s ferments carried by the air, however, had always been there, all along, everywhere, and were bona fide members of the population of entities malting up space and time long before Pasteur (Latour 1999d, 156).

Assuming the notion of a relative existence, which reiterates the denial of a transcendent nature (a cornerstone of non-modernist metaphysics), Latour argues that we can no longer speak of something that has always been an artifact or something that has always been a fact. When it comes to discussing the existence of something, one must do so by contextualizing it in a space-time envelope of validity. For a given location at a given time, something is real. Thus, in a broad sense, a given actant should not be referred to with just a date, but with at least an ordered pair. That is, to speak of fermentation, we need to differentiate between fermentation as in 1856/1856 and in 1856/2022. In the first case, the yeast might not exist yet, and could not be the explaining cause of the fermentation process, which is not the case in 1856/2022, when the yeast comes into existence and is the cause of the fermentation process. In this way, we can say that before Pasteur there were no fermentation microbes. It is only with Pasteur that these microbes come into being. Once they exist, from this new network of propositions we can reinterpret the entire past. Therefore, just as there are multiple natures that coexist in the present (multinaturalism), different realities can be assumed over time, where there is no way to speak of reality as an attribute, independent of a validating envelope. We thus have, in Latour’s narratives, a new historical metaphysics, which assumes the multiplicity of realities in different space-time envelopes, the distribution of agency between human and nonhuman actors, the interdependence between ontology, epistemology, and politics, and the negation of a priori distinction between outside and inside science. From a methodological point of view, the studies aim to clarify some aspect of the functioning of science, and seek from the historical episode (mainly primary sources) to establish a description and possible explanation of science. This empiricist proposal should not be confused with the notion of lack of

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previous theoretical load during the analysis (Venturini 2010). Latour clearly dialogues with philosophies that he is already familiar with. But the insertion of such conceptions takes place a posteriori, in an effort to interpret the scientist’s own discourse. The narrative privileges the way the actor narrates the process (Latour 2005). Since, as Latour points out, it is not a question of arguing that science is reduced to politics, but of highlighting the interrelations between the different fields when they exist. One can assume that the researcher’s job is about making an inventory of the possible outcomes of scientific work, just as it is the task of anthropology to make an inventory of the different ways of existing (Descola 2016).

Isabelle Stengers’ Cosmopolitical Narratives Although cosmopolitics has already been discussed in this chapter as a concept, this section will focus on a collection of seven books organized in two volumes that compose Cosmopolitics, by Isabelle Stengers (2010, 2011). We will look at some passages to interpret how the cosmopolitical vision impacts her way of narrating the history of science. The seven books that make up the collection are: I. The Science Wars, II. The Invention of Mechanics, III. Thermodynamics, IV. Quantum Mechanics: The End of the Dream; V. In the name of the arrow of time: Prigogine’s Challenge; VI. Life and Artifice: The Faces of Emergence; VII. The Curse of Tolerance. The collection has an arguably great ambition: Stengers goes through emblematic episodes in the history of Physics, from the genesis of mechanics, associated with the very foundation of modern science, to the debates in the second half of the twentieth century on the thermodynamics of dissipative systems, or thermodynamics out of equilibrium, a relatively recent area of Physics, which is led by Ilya Prigogine, with whom Isabelle Stengers worked (Prigogie and Stengers 1984). This history, however, is clearly not a history of concepts. Stengers’ work does not focus on how the concepts of physics evolved, or if there is a demarcation line between science and not science. She does not align to an externalist conception neither, for example, as if the history of science were determined by economic and political structures, or if it could be reduced to a conjuncture of forces. Stengers’ starting point is recognizing that modern science conjugates a diversity of conceptions and practices that should not be understood in a uniform way, and she commits to understanding this internal plurality of science in terms of a “Ecology of Practices” (Stengers 2010, vii). This proposal is then phrased by her as follows: The “ecological” perspective invites us not to mistake consensus situation, where the population of our practice finds itself subjected to criteria that transcend their diversity in the name of a shared intent, a superior good, for an ideal peace. Ecology doesn’t provide any examples of such submission. It doesn’t understand consensus but, at most, symbiosis, in which every protagonist is interested in the success of the other for its own reasons. The “symbiotic agreement” is an event, the production of new, immanent modes of existence, and not the recognition of a more powerful interest before which divergent particular interest would have to bow down. (Stengers 2010, 35)

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The notion of an ecological perspective implies the search for a narrative in terms of associations and departures from interests and objectives. One may not resort to a transcendent nature in the narrative, which judges and guarantees the existence of certain entities but not of others. It becomes possible, then, to determine new ways of existence by understanding the interrelationships and interests that shaped such an event. The politics and sociology of this process, as advocated by Latour, takes place in the study of these associations between humans and nonhumans. Therefore, it is not a matter of turning to political institutions and macro-social structures. The understanding of the history of science occurs to the extent that it is possible to identify and describe “who is interested, how can one be interested, at what price, by what means, and under what constraints” (Stengers 2010, 27). The metaphysical position adopted by Stengers’ dialogues directly with Latour’s proposals, as well as with the notions of Whitehead, Deleuze’ and Guattari. When talking about the existence of neutrinos, Stengers (2010) discusses how at the same time this entity is constructed in the laboratory and within theoretical formalism, and, at the top of it, gains autonomy in relation to the network that originates it. For this, she revisits the concept of “factish” by Latour (2004c), which points to this ontological duality present in scientific actants – somewhere between fact and fetish. Just to exemplify how this conception goes at hand with historiographical narrative, the difference in conceptions about Physics and in its relationship with relativity is usually analyzed from the clash of conceptions of Ernest Mach and Max Planck, which demonstrates the tension between a skeptical view, based on the description of empirical data, and the “faith” in an underlying reality whose understanding would represent the true vocation of a physicist. When discussing the invention of mechanics, the clashes and differences of values and practices are represented in the clash between Leibniz and the Cartesians, in the search for the correct expression about what is preserved in the movements of bodies. Stengers (2010) draws from originals by Leibniz, and then goes on to discuss his philosophy – and points out the distinctions in relation to Cartesian thought. In bringing this tension, Stengers’ narrative is not made out of a transcendent nature, but – as previously mentioned – pinpoints the interests, worldviews, values that underlie each position, along with events and progressions using symbiotic relations. In Stengers’ narrative, this story develops around the event of Lagrange’s rational mechanics (in opposition to a metaphysical discussion), in the sense that the description of movements is directed away from philosophical thinking. Stengers (2010) further shows how this event leads to two traditions: that of Hamilton and that of Carnot, in which conceptions of energy will be treated differently. And this in turn leads to the clashes between the conception of Thermodynamics as a fundamental theory or the possibility of nesting it into Mechanics. Once again, by resorting to primary sources, Stengers (2010) discusses Maxwell’s conception and his “mocking tone” when referring to the attempt made by “the Germans” to describe Thermodynamics using only mechanics. In the text analyzed by Stengers, Maxwell refers to Mechanics as the “Queen of Heaven,” and Stengers (2010) explores the power of this character in describing the world and the implications for the development of Mechanics, and, ultimately, Thermodynamics (Stengers 2011).

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Thus, it should be noted that the negation of the transcendence of a nature does not imply an externalist view in historical narratives. Even from a methodological point of view, Stengers mainly relies on scientific writings, interpreting them in the light of her ecological proposal. This perspective makes it possible to describe, as in Latour’s proposal, the actors involved, their interests, their action programs and the changes in these programs. The political dimension appears insofar as we discuss what legitimates certain discourses. Who has the power to speak on behalf of nonhumans and what gives them this power? This is the question that unfolds throughout the narrative and that receives different answers depending on the “ecosystem” studied.

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Climate Changing” Narrative While Latour and Stengers are not historians, but rather engaged in the fields of anthropology and philosophy of science, both eventually produce historical narratives in line with the cosmopolitical proposition. On the other hand, Dipesh Chakrabarty is a historian who has been preoccupied with climate change and the Anthropocene, to the point that it has led him to interrogate the usual modernist metaphysics (Kohn 2015) and its implications for history’s nature as a knowledge form (Chakrabarty 2009). In particular, as in the previous cases, Chakrabarty uses scientific narratives to justify the limitations of the traditional conception of history. In other words, once again, one can see the pursuit for new concepts that are immanent to the current state of affairs, and not an a priori stance in favor of a predetermined theory. This section will analyze texts in which Chakrabarty discusses the impact of these discussions on the theory of history. In The Climate of History: Four theses (Chakrabarty 2009), the author starts from the recognition that the discussion on global warming in an institutionalized way began in the 1980s and the 1990s, when social scientists were also concerned with the implications of globalization. However, these two narratives usually do not overlap, and reproduce a dichotomy between the history of humans and the history of nature, which is in line with the discussions already presented by Latour (Latour 1993). Chakrabarty assumes that social theories, which are of great importance in understanding the crisis of global capitalism, are not sufficient for a complete account of the Anthropocene: As the crisis gathered momentum in the last few years, I realized that all my readings in theories of globalization, Marxist analysis of capital, subaltern studies, and postcolonial criticism over the last twenty-five years, while enormously useful in studying globalization, had not really prepared me for making sense of this planetary conjuncture within which humanity finds itself today (Chakrabarty 2009, 199).

This incompleteness is due to the fact that in today’s world it is not possible to make a clear distinction between what is natural and social, and therefore the

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traditional distinction between a history of the natural world (such as the evolution of the universe, the Solar System, planet Earth, species, etc.) is not separable from social history (of political systems and modes of production). Today, these histories merge into one, and many of the noticeable differences between modern disciplines blend together. In acknowledging this, Chakrabarty proposes four theses, the last three derived from the first, which will be quickly referred to as they are of interest for understanding cosmopolitical narratives: Thesis 1: Anthropogenic Explanations of Climate Change Spell the Collapse of the Age-old Humanist Distinction between Natural History and Human History; (. . .) Thesis 2: The Idea of the Anthropocene, the New Geologica Epoch When Humans Exist as a Geological Force, Severely Qualifies Humanist Histories of Modernity/Globalization (. . .); Thesis 3: The Geological Hypothesis Regarding the Anthropocene Requires Us to Put Global Histories of Capital in Conversation with the Species History of Humans; (. . .) Thesis 4: The CrossHatching of Species History and the History of Capital Is a Process of Probing the Limits of Historical Understanding. (Chakrabarty 2009, 201)

The fundamental thesis presented is that current scientific explanations for climate change cause a collapse in the distinction between natural history and social history. The point of this rupture is not to recognize human beings as beings who interfere with nature, for they have always done so; but to recognize humankind as a force of nature itself. In the inauguration of the so-called Anthropocene period, human collectivity becomes an integrated and modifying force of the Earth’s very ecosystem. It is no longer just a matter of social history, but the importance of understanding humanity as the human species, this collectivity capable of affecting the planet. In this way, without diminishing the value and importance of all social and critical history, the crisis of the Anthropocene also highlights the limitations of understanding recent history only from the angle of power struggles or social classes. We may not perceive ourselves as such, but we are a geological force, and the recent history of political systems and means of production are intertwined with this natural presence on the planet. In another article, Chakrabarty, when talking about global warming, comments on the intersection of different histories that encompass current events, which are even subordinated to different time scales (the time scale of political events is much smaller than the time frame pertaining to humanity as a species, which is smaller than the scale of geological events): The history of population thus belongs to two histories at once: the very short-term history of the industrial way of life – of modern medicine, technology, and fossil fuels (fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation) – that accompanied and enabled the growth in our numbers and the much, much longer-term evolutionary or deep history of our species, the history through which we have evolved to be the dominant species of the planet, spreading all over it and now threatening the existence of many other life-forms (Chakrabarty 2014, 14).

Chakrabarty (2014) still discusses how the Anthropocene questions simultaneously mobilize scientific, political, ethical, and social justice issues in a single trajectory, and stresses that one cannot reduce the Anthropocene dilemma to purely

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political questions. Thus, it is not only about the history of capitalism and its impact on the Earth, but about the joint action of human and nonhuman elements involved. The Earth and its different mechanisms are active participants in relation to experiencing natural phenomena. Thus, it is evident in Chakrabarty’s discussion about nature of history, again, the blurring of boundaries between natural and social, and the attribution of agency to nonhumans, along with the understanding of human action beyond the scope of its social power (which is also natural). Chakrabarty also draws from scientific reporting and arguments by other theorists to reflect on the limitations and possibilities of history in the Anthropocene period, without claiming in advance a theory on the relationship between nature and society. Unlike Latour and Stengers who discuss a history of sciences in a general ambit, Chakrabarty’s discussion on the nature of history, in the works discussed, centers on the issue of global warming. Chakrabarty’s fundamental thesis is that we cannot ignore planet Earth as an agent of this history, just as humankind cannot be recognized only by its social construction, but as a force of nature. This same relation that Chakrabarty describes in the case of the Anthropocene can be naturally identified in other cultures that do not agree with the modernist terms, as anthropologists (Descola 2016) have exhaustively analyzed, and that is also present in Laboratory’s Life, as Latour and Stengers showed. Given that this is a discussion on the history of global warming, still in course, Chakrabarty’s proposal gains political contours similar to what is found in anthropology’s ontological turn. In proposing a history that overcomes the naturalsocial dichotomy, the narrative itself becomes an element that tensions our conceptions about the past and allows us to glimpse other possible futures. The historical narrative itself, as an element of culture, can also impact and tension agencies and thus impacts the construction of the world that is understood as natural.

Final Remarks The ontological turn in anthropology is a recent trend in anthropological thought. It arises from a maturing of the research field itself, by learning from the conceptions made by the collectives it has studied, and by recognizing that contemporary times, characterized by the term Anthropocene, blur the boundaries between what is natural and what is social. At the same time, the lab’s anthropology studies also motivate the proposition of a metaphysics that challenges the usual divisions of philosophy by merging notions of ontology, epistemology, and politics. Although thoroughly discussed, the term cosmopolitics remains an emblematic concept in this context. Beyond intellectual interest or theoretical positioning, such multinaturalist studies have their role reinforced from the cosmopolitical notion itself – its validity is not only epistemic but also ontic-political. In times of climate mutation, understanding the world beyond modernist dichotomies is a necessary path to reorganize the ways of experiencing and sharing the world in order to achieve a better version of it (Latour 2020b).

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This new framework has important implications not only for how science is portrayed in present time, but also for how the history of science is narrated. To determine the characteristics of such narratives, we have broadly examined the historical studies proposed by Latour, Stengers, and Chakrabarty, in an attempt to highlight some specific characteristics and their relation to the worldview presented. To conclude, we can briefly list some common features of such narratives, which can serve as methodological guidance for historians interested in building narratives in line with the cosmopolitical proposition: (i) nature is not presented as a transcendent judge, that is, there is no history of concepts that develops in the face of an objective Nature. (ii) Social constructions (in the usual sense) are not the only sources of explanation of the history of science. (iii) Humans and nonhumans participate in the unfolding of events. (iv) The epistemological dimension is also political. (v) The goal is to develop an inventory of forms of existence, knowledge, and politics. (vi) Interpretation of primary sources is one of the main research methods, emphasizing the voices of the protagonists themselves. (vii) Theories and theoretical concepts can be brought along in the interpretation from the needs of the narrative. (viii) The narrative reconciles contradictory views and explains the stabilization of nature and society. Certainly, these indications do not exhaust the subject, but they can minimally synthesize those characteristics identified in the authors’ narratives analyzed, which are in line with the multinaturalist and cosmopolitical perspectives presented. The importance of drawing up inventories of forms of existence, knowledge and distribution of power from the history of science, without having to resort to a transcendent nature or society, has the potential to broaden our understanding of scientific practices and their potential to impact on our collectivity. As emphasized by the authors analyzed, taking this approach is in itself a political action, since it allows understanding and creating new forms of collective organization.

Cross-References ▶ Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History: Toward a Rapprochement Between Disciplines That Never Ruptured ▶ Postcolonial and Decolonial Historiography of Science ▶ Thomas Kuhn’s Legacy for the Historiography of Science Acknowledgments The author would like to thank the Brazilian National Council of Research (CNPq) for their support.

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Part IV Historiography of Science and Related Fields

Science, Religion, and the Creation of Historiographical Categories

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Jaume Navarro and Kostas Tampakis

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The History of the Origins of Science and the Origins of the History of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . Colonizing and Decolonizing Science and Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Science, Religion, and Nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Science, Religion, and the Modern Nation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Science as Nation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter first explores the constitutive role that science and religion historiographies played for the establishment of the history of science as a discipline, in general, and the parallel and codepended introduction of the first major theories on the relations of science and religion. The second part discusses more recent proposals on the historiography of science and religion, from the “complexity thesis” attributed, to John H. Brooke, to Peter Harrison’s work on Protestantism, secularism, and the historicity of the concepts themselves. Finally, the third part argues that the historiography of science and religion should continue to play a constitutive part in history of science, by proposing and integrating novel historical lines of inquiry. To that end, a historiography that would tackle science, religion, and the state is tentatively described.

J. Navarro (*) University of the Basque Country and Ikerbasque, San Sebastian, Spain e-mail: [email protected] K. Tampakis Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens, Greece © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_28

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Keywords

Science and religion · Conflict thesis · Complexity thesis · Nation building · Science identities · Invented traditions

Introduction How did “science and religion” become a subject? And when did historians start talking about the relationship between science and religion? Looking at the shelves of many British or US bookstores, one is led to think that this is a topic of interest to many people. The same may be said browsing the timetable of the major history of science international conferences. Philosophers, sociologists, theologians, and religious activists (including promoters of the so-called New Atheism) often write to unravel the ways in which science and religion interact with each other, both historically and in the present. The situation changes in other geographical areas. Sections on “science and religion” are seldom found, and the (comparatively fewer) books on this topic appear scattered on the shelves devoted to history and philosophy, often to the popularization of science and even, from time to time, in sections on esoterism or the occult. Why this cultural divide? In this chapter, we shall explore the way the subject “science and religion” was created, with a special emphasis on how science and religion – with and without quotation marks – played a foundational role in the establishment of history of science qua academic discipline. Shying away from the tradition that assumes that “science” and “religion” are and were two clearly defined categories interacting with each other, our starting point is to follow after Peter Harrison’s (2015) thesis, who argued that neither science nor religion had well-marked identities by the time their historical relationships were first explored. Moreover, Harrison argued that the first histories on the matter were part of the processes that constructed our modern notions of science and of religion. In other words, only when the modern sciences, or a generic notion of “science,” demanded to be distinguished from other human and social activities, did the need to build histories of the relationship between science and religion emerge. And all this happened mostly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prior to the consolidation of a professional discipline for the history of science. Before the nineteenth century, it would have been difficult for historians to talk about science and religion, since there was hardly any analytical boundary between natural philosophy and natural theology. There were, indeed, discussions between the philosophical and theological proposals about Nature among European scholars. But, as many historians have shown, most projects on natural philosophy, from Descartes and Bacon to Newton, had very deep theological roots. In England, the Boyle lectures of the eighteenth century, or even the Bridgewater treatises of the early nineteenth century, are testimonies to the philosophico-theological arguments

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from which a tradition of modern natural theology emerged and expanded throughout the British colonies. In the European continent, things were different. The collapse of the ancien régime gave way to reformers who, like Auguste Comte, wanted to help build the institutions, the morals, and the rituals of the modern nation-state. Education, the military, communications, and health were four of its fundamental pillars. And traditional institutions, mainly of ecclesiastical origins, were a hindrance to such a project. A progressivist history à la Comte, by which the positive (i.e., scientific) reason dethroned mythological and metaphysical primitive stages, was a useful contribution to legitimize the all-embracing institutions of the modern state. Interestingly, these historiographical constructs shaped the histories of science and religion in continental Europe and were particularly instrumental in the creation of the modern states, especially in French-influenced Latin America. These two historiographical lines evolved differently. The latter was mostly interested in social and institutional relationships between scientific and religious institutions, while the former can be loosely classified within the tradition of the history of ideas: ideas about Nature and about the Divine. Both historiographical lines of inquiry soon gave way to general theories about science and religion, which we will have the opportunity to mention later on. The first decades of the twentieth century saw the creation and consolidation of history of science as an academic discipline tout court. One of the earlier discussions in the field was about the time and place of the birth of modern science. The triumphant category of the so-called scientific revolution had deep implications in shaping a history of the relationship between science and religion: conflict, harmony, or even the famous “complexity thesis” (Brooke 1991) took for granted that there were two things whose interactions needed explanation. Yet, seldom was it clear whether those two categories referred to institutions, ideas, ways of life or worldviews, and the extent to which they were essential or historical categories themselves. As a matter of fact, when in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, history of science embraced global and decolonizing historiographies, non-Christian religious traditions were almost uncritically incorporated in the new science-andreligion histories, thus opening a Pandora’s box of what constitutes science and what religion that is yet to be resolved. This chapter consists of three parts. The first explores the constitutive part that science and religion historiographies played for the establishment of the history of science as a discipline, in general, and the parallel and codepended introduction of the first major theories on the relations of science and religion. The second part discusses more recent proposals on the historiography of science and religion, from the “complexity thesis” attributed to John H. Brooke (1991) to Harrison’s work on Protestantism (1998), secularism (2019), and the historicity of the concepts themselves (2015). Finally, the third part argues that the historiography of science and religion should continue to play a constitutive part in history of science, by proposing and integrating novel historical lines of inquiry. To that end, a historiography that would tackle science, religion, and the state is tentatively described.

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The History of the Origins of Science and the Origins of the History of Science When did science begin? Contemporary historians of science often find the question irrelevant or even misconstrued. But early generations of professional historians of science often saw it as a central theme of their emerging discipline, and one that was intrinsically related to the old demarcation problem between science and non-science. The question of origins, of births, be it of people, of nations, or any other group or activity, has a huge attractive power, since it relates to the identity of the specific subject under scrutiny. That is why people usually celebrate their birthdays, modern nations their foundational moments, and also why science or specific fields within tend to search for their precursors and their founding fathers (seldom mothers). The most successful birth of modern science was the historiographical category of the so-called Scientific Revolution, the most influential precursor of which was Auguste Comte’s (1798–1857) well-known law of the three stages (Schmaus 1982). With it, Comte was using history (and this is the important point) as a tool to distinguish between positive science from previous, more primitive, cognitive approaches to Nature. In the wake of the downfall of the ancien régime, his new science of society was called to substitute tradition, authority, and superstition in the task of rationally describing and organizing the modern nation-states. According to the historiography Comte built, the positive spirit was called to overcome religious and metaphysical ways of thinking and erase any reference to God, to the divine, or to the supernatural in modern societies. Yet, as some of his contemporaries already criticized, Comte preserved the ritual traditions of French Catholicism, promoting the construction of positivist temples and expounding his philosophy with a Positivist Catechism, with him as high priest (Nussbaum 2011). In a way, Comte was creating a new religion, with its heroes, practices, and a sense of community, with specific rituals and demanding morals: a post-Theistic Religion of Humanity (Wernick 2001). This initiated a tradition in which, rather than a tension between science and religion, one could interpret it as the clash between two religious expressions, analogous to the tensions between monotheist and polytheist religions, or the conflicts within specific confessions. Or to put it even more bluntly, one could argue, and we shall see this happening in many places under French influence, especially in the new Latin American republics, that the relationship between science and religion might be better understood as an interreligious, intercultural, or interinstitutional debate. The argument that science and religion are by necessity opponents was advanced more forcefully by the scientist and part-time historian John William Draper (1811–1882) and the educator and cofounder of Cornell University, Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918). Draper published his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science in 1874, while White published his A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom in 1896. These books together were seen as making explicit the so-called conflict thesis, which argued that science and religion were intrinsically in conflict as manifested through its history. Recent scholarship

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has shown that the creation and spread of the conflict thesis should be situated in their specific political, geographical, and theological contexts: first, by paying attention to the agendas Draper and White, who wrote their oft-quoted books on the essential, permanent, and global conflict between science and religion in the context of institutional disputes and intra-theological controversies within Protestant Christianity (Ungureanu 2019); and secondly, the translation of the book into other languages shows the political interests of some local elites to promote the conflict thesis. For example, the Spanish translation was published as a way to promote the liberal cause, though many of the actors in the campaign were very critical with the content of the book (Navarro 2019). In other places, like imperial Russia, Draper and White’s arguments were perceived as mainly anti-Catholic, and as such, they were read around the world (Hall and Bayuk 2016). Today, very few professional historians of science subscribe to the conflict thesis.1 Heir of this positivist tradition was one of the founding fathers of the history of science qua institutionalized academic discipline, the Belgian George Sarton (1884–1956). Much has been written about him and about his role in shaping the field with the creation of Isis (Lightman et al. 2009). His programmatic articles argued for the need to develop the history of science as part of a New Humanism: if the positive sciences were at the center of modern societies, he claimed the history of science should be as important as the history of art, of philosophy, or of religions. As a matter of fact, Sarton was part of the modernist Belgian circle that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, defended internationalism and pacifism from socialist and rationalist standpoints. The promotion of the history of science was, for him, a tool in the construction of a universal, transnational creed in which science would act as a major link between all nations. With his editorial choices in Isis, Sarton could also shape what would become the received view of the relationships between science and religion, with a positivist and progressivist view of science, and in which science and religion were two separate “departments of life.” And although acknowledging the positive role of some priests as “transmitters of knowledge from one generation to the following,” especially “from the end of the second school of Alexandria to the ninth century,” Sarton defended that “the intersections between science and religion have often had an aggressive character . . . most of the time a real warfare.” Praising as “excellent” and “splendid” Andrew Dickson White’s The Warfare Between Science and Theology, Sarton distinguished between religion and theology, the former being a personal feeling and the latter a mixture of dogmas, rites, and formalisms (Sarton 1916: 335–340). Only with the latter would science hold a real warfare, mostly triggered by the intransigence and fanaticism of theologians. Thus, the so-called conflict thesis, with all its indeterminacies about what exactly was in conflict, became part and parcel of the first wave of professional historians of science. Sarton and his Isis also became eventually an instrument for the dissemination of another highly successful historiographical trope: the Scientific Revolution. Coined

1

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by Alexander Koyré (1892–1964) in 1939, the scientific revolution became for decades synonymous with the birth of modern science (Koyré 1939). This is not the place to explain the vicissitudes of this historiographical category and the role played in in its dissemination by people such as Cambridge-based Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) and Rupert Hall (1920–2009) or the Harvard physicistturned-historian Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–1996) (see Cunningham and Williams 1993). The important thing for the purposes of this essay is that the idea of the Scientific Revolution as the birth of modern science was shaped by religious considerations. It is often forgotten that Koyré started his career as a historian and philosopher of religion, which he taught from 1932 onward as the Chair of History of Religious Thought in Modern Europe at the École Pratique des Hautes études. His later idealistic history of science, in which the Scientific Revolution features prominently, owes much to his initial studies. One has only to look at his famous Études Galiléennes (Koyré 1939) and his From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Koyré 1957) to see how carefully Koyré traces physical concepts like infinity to their religious origin. In response to these positivist or revolutionary frameworks, there emerged a number of historiographical suggestions to make Christianity, or some particular branch of it, responsible for the birth of science. In chronological order, we will mention the French physicist Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) and the thesis of Robert K. Merton (1910–2003). Being one of the first scholars to try to systematically challenge the idea of the Middle Ages as a Dark Age, Duhem placed the origins of modern science in 1277, as the result of theological controversies in the University of Paris. The condemnation of 217 Aristotelian and Averroist theses by the local bishop promoted, according to Duhem, an interest in the empirical study of Nature and planted the seeds for some key notions of space and movement that would eventually lead to Galileo and Newton’s mechanics. Duhem was a committed Catholic and argued that in fact it was the Catholic Church that enabled the rise of modern science. Thus, his historiography was welcomed in many Christian settings and equally rejected in anti-Catholic and secularist milieus, despite the fact that he equally argued that physics would be useless in defending or denying Christianity (Martin 1991). This polarization remained in place until very recently, when the history of science, following the track of general history, has largely rejected the characterization of the Middle Ages as “Dark.” Following Ian Barbour’s (1997) characterization of the four ways that science could relate to religion – conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration – Duhem’s historical project today would rather be seen as an example of a dialogue between medieval theology and natural philosophy and astronomy. More successful in the short term was Merton’s suggestion that modern science was, to a large extent, the result of a puritanical culture of duty, efficiency, and responsibility to bear God’s gifts fruitful. A sociologist, Merton argued that science had intrinsic moral norms that were the mirror image of the moral norms of the English Puritans of the seventeenth century. By so doing, the relationship Merton was establishing between science and religion, basically between science and puritanism, was not at the conceptual but at the behavioral level: “Puritanism, and ascetic

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Protestantism generally, emerges as an emotionally consistent system of beliefs, sentiments and action which played no small part in arousing a sustained interest in science.” These Puritan values were a “complex of a scarcely disguised utilitarianism; of intramundane interests; methodical, unremitting action; thoroughgoing empiricism; of the right and even the duty of libre examen; of anti-traditionalism – all this was congenial to the same values in science” (Merton 1938: 494–495). Merton’s thesis has been characterized and criticized as voluntarist. There is no intellectual causality between modern science and puritanism but simply a correspondence of moral economies (Shapin 1988). Yet, the fact that some values present among Puritans were, in Merton’s view, essential values of modern science led him to believe that puritanism was a necessary element in the development and success of science. In other words, without puritanism, science would not have taken off where and how it did. Similarly, Boris Hessen’s (1893–1936) Marxist interpretation of the birth of science was also qualified as voluntarist. Like Koyré, Kuhn, or Merton, Hessen shared the idea of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the centrality of England and Newton in the birth of modern science. But following a Marxist strategy, however, Hessen argued that Newton was the product of material needs and opportunities of his time and place. It was a voluntarist thesis in the sense that material needs can hardly be the only reason for the emergence of science (if so, all places with similar material needs would have given analogous births). Much has been written about the impact Hesse’s paper had in 1931, when it was first expounded during the Second International Conference of the History of Science in London (Chilvers 2003). The thing that interests us here is, again, his views on the relationship between science and religion. Not surprisingly, as a Marxist, science was regarded as a purely materialistic and secular endeavor attributing to some of the founding fathers of modern science views that look more like things that Marx himself would have defended. For instance, “Bacon was the father of materialism. His materialism arose out of a struggle with medieval scholasticism. He wanted to release humanity from the old traditional prejudices and to create a method for controlling the forces of nature. His teachings contain the germs of the many-sided development of this doctrine” (Hessen 1931: 64). Similarly, many of the traditional actors of the scientific revolution were presented either as materialists or as promoters of materialism, in spite of their religious adherences in political and ideological matters: “English materialism as preached by Hobbes proclaimed itself to be a philosophy fit for scientists and educated people, in contrast to religion, which was good enough for the uneducated masses, including the bourgeoisie” (p. 66). It is worth noting that Merton himself had read Hessen’s work and had been greatly impressed. In fact, Merton often considered that his work had been misrepresented and that there was a second part to his argument that concerned technology, which had been ignored (Olwell 1996). Another Marxist sociologist-cum-historian was the Austrian Edgar Zilsel (1891–1944). His intellectual foundations being in the positivist thinking of the Vienna Circle, Zilsel proposed a different interpretation of the origins of modern science, which is still known as the Zilsel thesis. For him, it was the rise of capitalism

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that led to a different kind of rationality than the one traditionally practiced by the educated medieval classes. That rationality, in conjunction with the intermingling of craftsmen with scholars and philosophers that early capitalism brought about, led to the rise of modern science (Zilsel 1942). Zilsel’s thesis was initially far less influential than Hessen’s but has recently been positively reappraised (Raven et al. 2000). What is important for our discussion is that Zilsel explicitly contrasts the rationality of the neophyte scientific enterprise with the traditional scholastic and religious scholarship. The “spirit science of science is worldly. . . Obviously therefore it could not develop among clergymen and knights. . .” (p. 545). Zilsel, like Hessen but also the rabidly anti-communist Koyré, sees modern science as rising in opposition to the established religious thought. There have been many other births of modern science, including attempts at showing that science has always and everywhere existed or stressing the importance of specific non-Western cultures and technologies in its birth. Perhaps the most important project at decentering the picture by previous generations of historians was Joseph Needham’s (1900–1995) study of Chinese naturalist and technological traditions. Yet, as we intend to show, most narratives and topics of science and religion were created by Western historians talking about Western science in the West (actually, even in only a fragment of the West) and later exported to other latitudes or cultures.

Colonizing and Decolonizing Science and Religion By the last half of the twentieth century, the historiography on science and religion had been colonized by professional historians, who produced their own historiographical narratives and arguments. While variants of the conflict thesis were becoming more and more prominent in the public sphere, historians of science and religion produced more nuanced proposals. Reijer Kooyhaas (1906–1994) was a pioneer of the field. His Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Kooyhaas 1972) was the first modern systematic attempt to show how both Greco-Roman and Christian religiosities were instrumental in the emergence of modern science. We should also here mention the seminal work of David C. Lindberg (1935–2015) with his studies on medieval and early modern science (Lindberg 1976, 1992). An even more influential work was the already mentioned Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, in which Brooke (1991) proposed, and showed through multiple examples, that no single narrative could encompass the whole historical range of science and religion interactions. Instead, historiography should focus on the complexity of each individual case. Historian Ronald Numbers and others christened this approach as the “complexity thesis,” which still remains part of the received view (Lightman 2019). Some years later, Harisson (1998, 2007) revisited the relationship between the different Protestant traditions of reading and interpreting the Bible and the attitudes toward Nature, its knowledge, and its dominance, giving very powerful arguments for their interactions to date. Finally,

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as we mentioned at the beginning of this essay, in his The Territories of Science and Religions, Harrison (2015) called into focus the historicity of the terms “science” and “religion.” The Western medieval religio, for example, was mostly a personal virtue, a component of individual morality, while scientia was associated with deriving truths from first principles. Harisson proposes that it is futile to try and establish transhistorical relationships between such shifting targets. So far, these were mostly studies of one very particular geographical and confessional area: Protestant Europe, with an emphasis on Britain. The time was ripe for opening up the field beyond these borders. However, intellectual colonization of a discipline, even the most benign and well-intentioned, by necessity invites tacit assumptions and what Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) would call “symbolic violence.” The 2011 collective volume Science and Religion Around the World edited by Brooke and Numbers, two of the most influential historians of science and religion, was a praiseworthy attempt to broaden the geographical and confessional scope of science and religion studies. Chapters on early and modern Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were complemented by contributions on Chinese religions, Indic religions, African religions, Buddhism, and even Unbelief. Extending the so-called complexity thesis to “other religions” was an interesting endeavor, but one that proved very difficult. Indeed, the editors apologized in the introduction for not including “all religions” or “religious traditions.” But, does that make sense? Is it possible to demarcate the category “religion” so as to beg forgiveness to those religions not included in the survey? And, would it make sense to establish a dichotomy between science and all those religions in the way early historians of Western science did? The epilogue “Which science? Whose religion?”, written by David L. Livingstone, contained the best answer to this conundrum: “‘What is the relationship between science and religion?’ is a question in need of questioning,” he wrote, adding that many of the issues dealt in the previous chapters “misconstrue the issue” and were a way to “import Western categories and inflict them in non-Western cultures” (Livingstone 2011: 279). Livingstone was here pointing at the irony that the so-called decolonization of science-and-religion historical studies and their syllabi might be a new way of intellectual colonization. Seeing cultural practices as forms of religion or as forms of science would be a way, not of diversifying science and religion but universalizing a local and historically contingent field of study. To be sure, as a number of religious studies scholars have argued, “religion” may be easily understood as a Western, mostly Christian, construction superimposed to other cultures and traditions during the so-called Age of Empire. One of the clearest examples of this argument may be Brent Nongbri’s (2013) Before Religion. A History of a Modern Concept, in which the author shows how the modern notion of religion is one offspring of the intraChristian debates and wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Central to his argument is John Locke’s transformation of religion into a private matter, detached from politics and the state, as an attempt to avoid conflicts among different Christian confessions in Britain. There are many general studies about the invention of other religions (Asad 1993; Fitgerald 2000; Masuzawa 2005) and specific analysis in

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China (Nedostup 2009), Japan (Josepshon 2012), and India or for Buddhism (Josephson 2006), Hinduism (Gottschalk 2013) and Islam (Yalçınkaya 2022). A typical example of the way science-and-religion historians and sociologists often colonize the world with Anglo-American perspectives is with the so-called Darwin reception studies. Indeed, the emergence of Darwin and Darwinism in the late nineteenth century triggered debates in Victorian Britain that can easily be studied as an instance of science and religion. Yet, it is often assumed that these debates were also the high watermark of science and religion controversies around the globe, within and without the limits of the British Empire. Even in those latitudes where evolution and Darwinism became a hot topic, it was seldom through a direct reading of Darwin’s works in scientific or naturalist milieus. The mediation of German materialist philosophers such as the Germans Ludwig Büchner (1822–1899), Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), Jacob Moleschott (1822–1893), and Carl Vogt (1817–1895) and the new liberal tradition of Scriptures reading in the German Protestant world suggest that evolution cannot always be assumed to constitute an example of science and religion but of philosophical and theological discussions. A similar case can be made for the supposed disenchantment of the world and the extension of secularization throughout the world as the result of the spread of modern science (Asprem 2017). An example is what historian John Stenhouse (2020) has called “Missionary Science,” as a way to show the different, at times contradictory, narratives of science in relation to religion and secularity in the centers of the European empires and in their colonies. While the Catholic Church was increasingly banned from any public presence in France after the proclamation of the Third Republic, especially in education, French missionaries played an essential role in spreading la civilisation in the colonies, with a mixture of Catholic doctrine and modern science and technologies, especially modern medicine, helping spread literacy, public health policies, and loyalty to the metropolis. Thus, while clerics were removed from public life in France under the argument that they promoted superstition, their role in the colonies was applauded precisely because they kept the local populations away from their ancestral, anti-modern superstitions (Daughton 2006). The history of spiritualism is yet another area that challenges the spread of secularism as a natural consequence of the development of science. Again, the stories of Anglo-American and Continental spiritualisms diverge, but they have in common the promotion of a new form of religiosity that challenged the established (Christian) churches in the West. Anticlerical religiosity was paramount, for example, among French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin-American spiritualists in the late nineteenth century, influenced by the works of the French Allan Kardec (pseudonym of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (1804–1869)) who promoted a kind of new religiosity that both rejected institutional Catholicism and hopeless materialism, especially among the working classes in the new industrial metropolis. “To God, through Love and through Science,” was the lemma of an international spiritualist conference organized in Barcelona during the city’s 1888 World Fair. Yet, contrary to what was common in Britain, where the Society for Psychical Research was

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promoted by acting scientists (Noakes 2019; Oppenheim 1985), in Barcelona, like in many other places influenced by Kardec, “science” was more a catchword to be used as ideological tool than the profession of the promoters of spiritualism. Finally, the existing historiography on science and religion invites us to understand colonialism not only by what it was said but also by what was not. It is tempting, and to a very large extent correct, to assume that colonialism is something that happens away from Europe. Even scholars of postcolonialism have the tendency to assume Europe, as the hyperreal or the imperial colonial seat of power, as something well defined (Bhabha 1990, 1994; Prakash 2002). In fact, it is not. As historians of Europe and political theorists have shown, Europe is a constructed concept in itself, where the old divide between North and South was gradually transformed to West and East (Delanty 1995). What we call Europe in science and religion is more aptly the West. This is why even a cursory examination of the various science-and-religion-edited volumes will show an almost complete lack of scholarship on Orthodox Christianity, the religion of more 260 million people, the vast majority of which live in Europe. And yet, science and religion historiography has remained silent in what is, by any reasonable criteria, a very European, very Christian, history, the kind favored by “European historians.” Non-Christian but very western historical phenomena, spiritualism being an example, have been discussed historically. The relations of Orthodox Christianity and science have, until very recently, been neglected (Nikolaidis 2011; Nikolaidis et al. 2016).

Science, Religion, and Nationalism The historiography of science and religion was, in a certain sense, born before the history of science and around the same time that the history of religion appeared. It has been one of the main arguments of this chapter that the field has had a defining historiographical bend from its inception. In this final part, we propose that historians of science and religion should acknowledge the historiographical fecundity of their field and make a programmatic effort to expand it. In what follows, we will propose one such a novel direction, by considering how science and religion histories can interact with scholarship on nationalism, the nation, and national identities.

Science, Religion, and the Modern Nation Consider the Brazilian flag: a green field with a yellow rhombus and, at the center, a blue sphere representing the starry sky from the day of the country’s independence and, spanning the sky, a band with the motto “Ordem e Progresso” in Portuguese. Auguste Comte’s positivistic aphorism “love as a principle and order as the basis; progress as the goal,” was not only part of the ideological roots of the new country but even made it into the major national symbol. It is perhaps the clearest example of the ideologies behind the creation of many modern nation-states throughout the

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nineteenth century, at least in Latin-America and Continental Europe. Independence, modernity, and science were bywords to define the identity of the new nation-states, as were the breaking with the ancien règime, with tradition, and, often (but, as we shall see, not always), with the established churches. Certainly, modern nations were built under the premises that the state was meant to coordinate, promote, organize, and even monopolize the development of technology and the sciences. The military, civil engineering, education, and public health were the key to a modern nation in the post-Enlightenment model. As Robert Fox and many others have argued, science and the state were intimately connected and mutually interdependent (Fox 2012, 2016; Gascoigne 2019). But equally important was the creation of historical myths to help shape the new relationships between power, knowledge, and national identity. And in this climate, certain narratives about the relationship between science and religion emerged, as the following examples from Germany, Italy, Argentina, Greece, and the region of Catalonia show. Much has been written about the intense battle between the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck and the Vatican immediately after the unification of Germany, in the 1870s. Bismarck’s goal was to build a centralized, uniform empire, and he regarded institutions run by the Catholic Church as a threat. Like Henry VIII had done centuries earlier in England, his dream was to create a national church as part of a state that organized the lives and morals of its citizens. But the religious pluralism in the German territories since the Peace of Westphalia prevented such an overarching project. Instead, the Catholic Church was the main target of Bismarck’s attacks, under the accusation that the Vatican was both a foreign state to which German citizens had also to be loyal and that Catholicism was contrary to modernity and to science. As Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (2003) argued, however, the irony of the Culture Wars in Germany and in most of Europe is that they created a movement of Catholic ultramontanism that, in some of their practices (the use of the press, for instance) were as modern as their accusers. And it also triggered a wider involvement of Catholic individuals and institutions in the modern sciences, so as to prove that they were not anti-science as Bismarck and others would claim. Some historians have paid attention to the real practices and attitudes by clergymen and lay Catholics in the German lands regarding modern and scientific knowledge, in spite of a focus on the bishops’ official statements. To be sure, the Catholic Church kept the Index of Forbidden books well into the mid-twentieth century, and many were the bishops who issued prohibitions on particular books and ideas. Yet, the important thing to look at is how many of those prohibitions actually related to specific scientific doctrines as opposed to general philosophical matters and, more importantly, the extent to which such prescriptions were heeded by the average Catholic. Jeffrey Zalar’s (2019) analysis of the books available and read at the libraries of the Borromäusverein, the major popular library service in German Catholic parishes, shows the chasm between the edicts issued by Church officials and the real life and readership of many Catholics. Another unification, that of Italy, can be a probe to understand the construction of historical narratives by local historians in which science, religion, and national identity were embedded. As Neil Tarrant (2014, 2019, 2022) has analyzed in

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depth, a number of Neapolitan historians like Stanislao Gatti (1820–1870) or the brothers Bertrando (1817–1883) and Silvio Spaventa (1822–1893), highly influenced by Hegel’s philosophy of history, wrote an essentialist history of the new nation. Italy, so the narrative went, had always existed, though only now, from the 1860s onward, it could achieve a political structure. The highlights in which the spirit of Italy would manifest itself were the Roman Empire, the cultural and scientific genius of the Renaissance, and the political prowess of the unification movement. In other times, so the narrative continued, the national genius would have been clouded by non-Italian elements, the most important of which was the Catholic Church. The erection of the statue of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) in Campo di Fiore by the local and national authorities was a most representative visual depiction of the new history. Bruno, the martyr of science and of Italy, standing facing the Vatican in his somber, yet accusing, pose became a symbol of the new, scientific, and non-Catholic Italy. Pictures of the inauguration, on the ninth of June 1889, show a para-religious precession led by flags and banners from most masonic lodges in the country (Dickie 2020). The latter begs the question of an understudied element in the historiography on science and religion, i.e., the role played by freemasonry in the creation of these meta-narratives. Freemasonry was also central in the development of some Latin-American countries like Argentina. Contrary to Germany or Italy, or even to other former Spanish colonies like Mexico or Peru, Argentina was hardly a political entity before its independence. A national identity was yet to be built and local heroes, founders, and liberators to be negotiated. Among the figures that stood out as potential fathers of the nation, the premature death of the naturalist, paleontologist, and zoologist Florentino Ameghino (1853–1911) in 1911 came in handy. Large crowds assembled for a civil funeral heard a number of eulogies, the most significant of which was the one given by the doctor and socialist intellectual José Ingenieros (1877–1925). “A modern saint,” he said, because “modern saints do not perform miracles but search for truth” and stay away from fanaticism (De Asúa 2019: 11). Ameghino was depicted as a saint of modern Argentina because he could be seen as an icon of modern science in a modern country and also because he had supposedly found paleontological remains of the first American and, thus, Argentinian man (Tonni et al. 2001; Bonomo 2002). In the context of the centenary of Argentina’s independence, Ameghino and his followers’ interpretation of an Argentinian origin of American men, different from Eurasian or African men, was uncritically accepted for a time in the early twentieth century. The narrative was clear: in the same way American humanity had its biological origins in the Argentinian Pampa, the cultural and material development of the whole continent would also emerge from the new Argentinean nation (Tonni and Zampatti 2011). And in order to transform the religiosity of the country into a secular cult of nation and science, attempts were made to transform Luján, the major site of Catholic pilgrimages, and also the birthplace of Ameghino, into a hotspot of science and national identity. The latter project failed, not only because the paleontological interpretation was finally dismissed but also because a new, large Catholic

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basilica was erected. Yet, the narrative of science as a para-religious activity performed by “science saints” remained in some sectors of the population. Not always were the established churches regarded as enemies of the new national identities. In fact, in some cases, theologians and scientists both used prevalent nationalistic tropes to establish their academic and scientific credentials. An example is Greece. The first of the new states to emerge in the Age of Revolutions, Greece was officially recognized as an independent state in 1832 (Gallant 2015). The first Greek university was the University of Athens, created in 1837. With its foundation, the first Greek natural scientists and also the first Greek, and one could say, the first Orthodox Christian, university-trained theologians appeared (Tampakis 2019). Both neophyte academic communities needed to legitimize themselves in the eyes of the public but also in the eyes of a suspicious Greek Orthodox Church. To do so, they borrowed arguments and rhetorical strategies from the prevalent nationalistic ideology of the era. For Greeks, that meant invoking the importance of the Greek language, establishing a lineage to ancient Greece and, of course, borrowing notions of sacredness and exceptionalism from Orthodox Christianity (Tampakis 2014, 2015). In the Greek case, nationalism and national identity acted as pillars for the establishment of scientific and theological academic communities. Finally, the case of the scientification of Catalan as the language of a new national identity but without a political structure behind it points at unexplored historiographical possibilities. The “science” in science-and-religion case studies tends to focus on problems of cosmology or the origins of life and of man, i.e., on physics and biology. Traditionally, sciences like linguistics tend not to be on the radar among science-andreligion scholars. As Ceba and March argued, Catalan was first scientifically explored, thanks to the work of the Majorcan priest Antoni M. Alcover (1862–1932) in the late nineteenth century. His project, which culminated in the first ever full dictionary of the language and the development of grammatical rules, was, from his point of view, one of religious “veneration for God, homeland and language” (Ceba and March 2019). Indeed, this was the motto with which he summoned all educated people in the territories where Catalan was spoken, with a particular call to local priests, since parishes could act as the nodes of the network to explore all the dialectal versions of the language. It should be noted that Pope Leo XIII had favored local nationalisms as a reaction to the internationalism of modern industrial societies that were uprooting people from their traditions and their religious practices. In this context, Alcover managed to establish a narrative in which the preservation of the Catalan language and national traits was both a religious duty and a scientific one and also one in continuity with tradition. Indeed, he portrayed Ramon Llull (1232–1316), the late medieval Majorcan philosopher who had, among other things, searched for the perfect language that would help the conversion of the infidels, as a precursor of Francis Bacon and the scientific method. Alcover’s linguistic project was, thus, legitimized through tradition, through Papal authority, through the use of the modern science of linguistics, and through the appeal to the heartbeat of a people that was now, like many other European nations, finally awakening.

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Science as Nation Fireworks in most US cities every fourth of July; crowds gathering annually for “El Grito” in El Zócalo, the central square in Mexico City, on September 15th; the hoisting of the flag in the Red Fort by the president of India each 15th of August, etc. Many modern nation-states celebrate their independence days as their birthdays, with the iconographies and liturgies that remind, more often than not, the rituals of older nations, cultures, and religions. These are ways to create a sense of community, of collective destiny, and of a transcendent identity. They are the source of what Eric Hobsbawm called “Invented Traditions” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). It would be interesting to explore the ways in which the histories of science, and their treatment of religion, play a similar role in helping create the identity of “science” or of “modern science.” As we saw earlier in the paper, the histories of the beginnings of modern science shaped the definition or demarcation of science itself. That is why the history of science is not simply the compilation of events within science but, by the very choice of the relevant episodes, a way to define what constitutes science and what does not. Histories centered in the conceptual changes or the development of theories stressed the connection between science and the tradition of natural philosophy, thus continuing the old hierarchy by which thinking was superior to doing. Science would, with this prejudice in mind, be part of the superior activity of thinking. On the contrary, narratives stressing the experimental side, as if observation of Nature was a new, unprecedented, activity, established the uniqueness of the new sciences in contrast with a supposed blindness of previous times. The same would happen with the dichotomy between pure and applied, between individual and collective, between authoritarianism and freedom of thought, and between tradition and novelty. The malleability of the notion of science means that histories of science can stress one aspect or the contrary depending on the particular values of specific times and places. As a number of historians have shown, the nineteenth century was the age of the creation of a new professional, cultural, and political actor: the scientist. A mixture of philosopher and engineer, of entrepreneur, and civil servant, the new scientist became a central element in the modern state, increasingly acquiring institutional quotas of power previously occupied by politicians, by “intellectuals,” and, in most European countries, by clergymen. This introduced a new kind of organized actor, the “scientist,” in the disputes for the intellectual prestige of nation-states, in ways analogous to the battles for the favor of monarchs between guilds, aristocratic families, or religious institutions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cahan 2003). This “professional dimension” of the science and religion conflict in the United Kingdom was first studied by Frank Turner (1974, 1978) and further analyzed by, among others, Ruth Barton (1998). Their analysis showed the rhetorical strategies by activists of the new activity – the so-called X-Club – to be recognized as a profession of prestige included the construction of enemies easily portrayed as anti-science for their reluctance to give up their historical institutional privileges in the traditional

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universities. In a way, anticlerical rhetoric became part of the struggles to create new science departments in old academic institutions, where the so-called Humanities, theology included, had the majority of chairs. This kind of dualistic narrative, portraying religion as the opponent to progress of science, can often be found in the stories of some scientific controversies. Just to mention a few, we often find the Galileo affair (Finnochiaro 2005), the supposed dispute between Darwin and bishop Wilberforce (Jensen 1988), the clash between Freud’s psychoanalysis and the school of experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt (Larssen & Mülberger), and the dating of the age of the earth (Rudwick 2014) as episodes of conflict between science and religion. Yet, more often than not, these and many other episodes try to hide the obvious fact that controversy is part and parcel of science. An empiricist or positivist tradition in the philosophy of science tried, at times, to create a linear narrative in which opponents to any new theory or empirical result could easily be caricatured as reactionary or anti-science. Certainly, much contemporary historiography of science shies away from such simplistic narratives; but at a time when the role of the scientist in modern societies was still at stake, these heroic stories came in handy. Like in the construction of any other identity, national, professional, or religious, the construction of heroes and of enemies of science was a useful element to legitimize the role and prestige of the scientist and to create a sense of community among the new scientists. One of the best explored episodes is the fabrication of the myth of Newton qua scientist (Fara 2002). The story about how Newton’s archives were preserved and classified under the premise that he was the icon of the scientist and, therefore, devoid of any religious tendencies is perhaps the best-known example of the way archivists and historians shape the creation and consolidation of historical myths. In his Priest of Nature, Rob Iliffe (2017) has given us the fullest portrait of Newton to date, a portrait that rejects the dichotomies between Newton the scientist, Newton the religious man, Newton the theologian, and Newton the alchemist and, instead, depicts a consistent image of a Newton for whom all his activities were part of the same philosophical project. Myths of conflicts, myths of founders, and many other myths. In the collective work Galileo goes to Jail and other Myths on Science and Religion, edited by Numbers (2009), the contributors lamented that no matter how much historians prove the inaccuracy, or utter falsehood, of many common tropes on science and religion, these remain fixed as part of many popular cultures. That is why, as we have tried to argue in this section, historians may want to study the stories not so much about how false these myths are, but the social, cultural, political, and even religious roles these narratives played and, indeed, still play.

Conclusion The number of historical studies on science and religion is vast and has been growing steadily in the last 30 years. It was not the goal of this chapter to try and present the full diversity and scope of the field. Its focus was rather historiographic. It aimed to

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show how closely intertwined the development of history of science as a discipline has been with the historiography of science and religion and to present some of the main methodological theses that have shaped that interaction. Furthermore, the chapter also argues that the historiography of science and religion should push forward its methodological flexibility, by bringing together and incorporating other current historiographical developments like the historiography of nationalism and nation-building.

Cross-References ▶ Historiography of Science and Gender ▶ Historiography of Science and the Relationship Between History and the History of Science ▶ Postcolonial and Decolonial Historiography of Science

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Noakes R (2019) Physics and psychics: the occult and the sciences in modern Britain. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Nongbri B (2013) Before religion. The history of a modern concept. Yale University Press, New Haven Numbers R (2009) Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Nussbaum M (2011) Reinventing the civil religion: Comte, Mill, Tagore. Vic Stud 54(1):7–34 Olwell R (1996) ‘Condemned to footnotes’: Marxist scholarship in the history of science. Sci Soc 60:7–26 Oppenheim J (1985) The other world: spiritualism and psychical research in England, 1850–1914. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Prakash G (2002) Another reason. Science and the imagination of modern India. Princeton University Press, Princeton Raven D, Krohn W, Cohen RS (eds) (2000) Edgar Zilsel: the social origins of modern science. Kluwer Academic Publishers Reijer Hooykaas (1972) Religion and the Rise of Modern Science. (Eddinburgh, Scottish Academic Press) Rudwick M (2014) Earth’s deep history. How it was discovered and why it matters. Chicago University Press, Chicago Sarton G (1916) The history of science. Monist 26(3):321–365 Schmaus W (1982) A reappraisal of Comte’s three-state law. Hist Theory 21(2):248–266 Shapin S (1988) Understanding the Merton thesis. Isis 79(4):594–605 Stenhouse J (2020) Missionary science. In: Slotten HR (ed) The Cambridge history of science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 90–107 Tampakis K (2014) Onwards facing backwards: the rhetoric of science in nineteenth-century Greece. Br J Hist Sci 47(2):217–237 Tampakis K (2015) The once and future language: communication, terminology and the practice of science in nineteenth and early twentieth century Greece. Hist Sci 53(4):438–455 Tampakis K (2019) High science and natural sciences: Greek theologians and the science and religion interactions (1832-1910). Zygon 54(4):1067–1086 Tarrant N (2014) Censoring science in sixteenth-century Italy: recent (and not-so-recent) research. Hist Sci 52(1):1–27 Tarrant N (2019) Science, religion and Italy’s seventeenth-century decline: from Francesco de Sanctis to Benedetto Croce. Zygon 54(4):1125–1144 Tarrant N (2022) Defining nature’s limits: the Roman inquisition and the boundaries of science. Chicago University Press, Chicago Tonni EP, Zampati LH (2011) El ‘Hombre Fósil’ de Miramar: Comentarios sobre la correspondencia de Carlos Ameghino a Lorenzo Parodi. Rev Asoc Geol Argent 68(3):436–444 Tonni E, Pasquali R, Bond M (2001) Ciencia y fraude: el hombre de Miramar. Ciencia Hoy 11(62): 58–62 Turner F (1974) Between science and religion. The reaction to scientific naturalism in late Victorian England. Yale University Press, New Haven Turner F (1978) The Victorian conflict between science and religion: a professional dimension. Isis 69:356–376 Ungureanu J (2019) Science, religion, and the Protestant tradition: retracing the origins of conflict. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA Wernick A (2001) Auguste Comte and the religion of humanity: the post-theistic program of French social theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Yalçınkaya MA (2022) Globalizing ‘science and religion’: examples from the late ottoman empire. Br J Hist Sci 55(2):1–14 Zalar J (2019) Reading and rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770–1914. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Zilsel E (1942) The sociological roots of science. Am J Sociol 47:544–562

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The “Wrong Questions” and the Diffusionist Answer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reactions to the Diffusionist Model and Innovative Replies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theoretical Propositions to Escape from the Diffusionist Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenges for Further Developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Studies addressing the so-called “diffusion” of modern European science utilized a Eurocentric viewpoint and considered non-European countries essentially as receivers and repeaters, conveying a notion of general scientific backwardness. But since at least the 1980s, studies have focused on scientific activities in different countries and former colonies with a fresh look aimed at understanding and including these regions in the broader map of science. This was accomplished by a critical review of the historiography of sciences produced in and about those countries, identifying their epistemological and methodological foundations and ideological motivations. This shift made it possible for historians of science to stop asking “wrong” questions, like “what did not happen, why not, and what went wrong” but rather “what did happen,” thus illustrating how science operated. The implications of this new attitude involved redefining what counts as science. Understanding science in colonial/postcolonial contexts consequently became a question of constructing a detailed ecology of science, studying and conceiving science in its specific relation to the (colonial) environment. No longer do scholars search for idealized reproductions of mainstream science; instead, the S. F. d. M. Figueirôa (*) School of Education, University of Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_29

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goal is to search for and understand the marks of the “production loci.” This has allowed a new historiography of sciences to emerge that includes countries and personalities that previously were marginalized or simply ignored. This new historiography also accounts for flows in the opposite direction, illuminating the colonial and metropolitan processes of knowledge exchange. This chapter recovers the history of this process over approximately the past 40 years. Keywords

Colonial science · Postcolonial science · Imperialism · Scientific periphery · Diffusionist models · Mundialization of science · Circulation of science

Introduction How can the sciences in formerly colonial countries be discussed? What are the meaning, overall reach, and limits of such a question? For quite some time, crafting an answer by reviewing the existing bibliography was a disheartening task, since those texts overwhelmingly conveyed the idea of generalized scientific backwardness. Studies concerned with the “diffusion” of modern European science utilized a Eurocentric point of view and considered non-European countries as essentially receivers and repeaters. These studies ignored regional or global networks of exchange and knowledge production that existed prior to the European ones (whether they were colonizers or not) or regarded them as exceptions to a general rule. This viewpoint persists even today: unfortunately, general textbooks on the history of science have not yet incorporated elements that would make their narratives more comprehensive and non-Eurocentric. A recent and most welcome exception is Horizons: A Global History of Science, intended to be an important new narrative of the history of science. This book by James Poskett (University of Warwick, England) structures the last five centuries of scientific endeavor as a globe-spanning project. Roughly 15 years ago, another major initiative was the Encyclopedia of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, edited by Helaine Selin (2008), which included 1000 entries (in the second edition) that covered a broad range in scientific as well as geographic scopes. First, it is important to make explicit the understanding of the three terms that entitle the chapter, although it is not easy to establish pristine demarcations. By “colonial science” it is meant the science produced in colonial or ancient colonial territories, mostly limited and designed by the colonial statute. “Postcolonial science” refers to the science produced in countries after their liberation from colonial rule. Then the efforts to demonstrate that other ways of knowing and doing science should not be less valued or not viewed as legitimate science are clear: “the core element in the postcolonial condition remains the dilemma as to how to fashion a science that is both local and universal” (Arnold 2013: 370). And “decolonial science” intends to capture a wider conception of science production and practices, aimed at countering its colonial nature, and that includes, on equal epistemic levels, ideas and people from diverse parts of the world in different moments of history; it

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explicitly intends to change, once and for all, the narrow framework of the dominant Western lenses. This chapter is intended to historicize the substantial historiographical changes that have occurred, especially since the 1980s, which are presented and discussed here. The historiographical impact of these changes unfolds into the present, leading to profound revisions in the very conception of science, its construction as knowledge, its different manifestations in different time-spaces, and its impacts on imperial and colonial identities. Similar efforts have been made in other so-called “minority” studies such as gender studies and women’s histories, for example, and also encompass repairing injustices, understood according to Sombrio and Lopes (2017, based on Fraser 2006): social/economic injustices, as well as those based on social and cultural standards of representation, recognition, interpretation, and communication. Clearly, the sciences in formerly colonial spaces continue to demand complete understanding and recognition in order to build a more diverse (and, consequently, fuller, more comprehensive, and richer) and less Manichean history. To confront negations of science and misleading xenophobic narratives, a history of science that engages with these different histories is sorely needed. Despite the fact that some statues of ancient (Metropolitan) scientists have been removed from their previous sites – as, for instance, the one of Henry de la Beche (1796–1855) out of the Geological Society of London – decolonizing the history of science, medicine, and technology has more to do with constructing new narratives. Moreover, it is necessary to evade the chauvinistic trap made explicit in the question: “are we to think solely in terms of competing nationalist, or civilizationist, narratives claiming precedence in scientific reasoning for their respective societies?” (Raj 2013: 340). Finally, it is important to remember that experiences in former colonies are likely to differ widely. This review of the historiography is not only relevant to those who are starting working in the field but may be useful also to specialists, since recently published research works include partly or entirely erroneous statements. For instance, one states that “only recently have historians been exploring the role of science and technology in the shaping of national identity. A volume of Osiris dedicated to the topic, published in 2009, constituted one of the first systematized attempts to draw attention to the potential of analyses focusing on the relationship between these two domains by presenting case studies from a variety of national backgrounds” (Gamito-Marques 2018: 225). There is no doubt that our own history clearly demands systematization, and this chapter adds to other works that have performed relevant synthesis and reviews such as Reingold and Rothenberg (1987), MacLeod (2000), Raj (2010, 2013), Elshakry (2010), and, in the case of technology, Arnold (2005), which will all be cited here.

The “Wrong Questions” and the Diffusionist Answer Since the 1980s, studies have focused on taking a fresher look at scientific activities in various formerly colonial countries to understand and incorporate these regions into the broader map of science. This was accomplished through a critical review of the historiography of sciences produced in and about these countries, identifying

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their epistemological and methodological foundations and ideological motivations. This shift made it possible for historians of science to stop asking “wrong” questions, like “what did not happen, why not, and what went wrong” and instead ask “what did happen,” thus clarifying how science operated. A very illustrative example is the question posed by science historian Joseph Needham (1900–1995) in his extensive and remarkable work on the sciences in China. Convinced of the universality of science as a human activity, he asked why modern science developed in Europe and not in China. The “wrong questions” have been asked, not only about China but also about Latin America, India, and Africa, for instance. In the precise words of Marcos Cueto: “a significant number of Latin American historians, especially historians of science, have been asking the wrong questions. (. . .) Only lately has it been recognised that it is almost impossible, if not useless, to find out why something did not happen. (. . .) A more rewarding approach for elucidating how science operates in Latin America is to concentrate on the few cases where science has worked, even if that science failed after some years” (Cueto 1997: 233). This problematic and even authoritarian question, to the extent that it subjects one culture to the canons of another, entrenched the notion that “science” is exclusively the product of Europe and that the so-called Scientific Revolution was the moment of its birth. This concept soon became the primary focus in the historiography of science: “the theoretical transformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century astronomy and mechanics came to count as the pivotal developments that created not just modern science, but modernity itself. Achievements in medieval physics (. . .) were now reduced to ‘preparations.’ Developments in eighteenth and nineteenthcentury chemistry and biology became ‘postponed’ elaborations. (. . .) This chronological restriction was accompanied by a geographical constraint. The dismissal of the Middle Ages entailed a neglect of the many Islamic scholars of this period. It also resulted in the exclusion of the most important scientific developments in China, which were taken to have occurred before 1600” (Somsen 2008: 372). However, even an intra-European homogeneity of “Western” science cannot be assumed without equivocation. An article in the journal Centaurus discusses the differences and imbalances in exchanges between European countries (which we usually place at the “center”), showing that when the focus of the discussion changes to circulation within Europe, and reference spaces often absent from other scholarly accounts are included, the history is much more complex and uneven than usually assumed (Raposo et al. 2014). The notion that modern science was born in Europe with the so-called Scientific Revolution has underpinned the history of science for decades: while locating the place and time of its emergence, it has made scientific enterprise into something “universal” (or “a codeword for ‘Western’” (Somsen 2008: 363)), “neutral,” and “democratic.” The excellent synthesis by Lynn Nyhart (2016: 7) is crystal clear: “an older predominant history of science might be captured by the image of a tree of scientific ideas rooted in the base of Western culture (perhaps extending downward earlier to ancient Egypt and Babylonia); the task of the historian of science was to trace the tree’s growth and branching. Today a more fitting image would be of the history of science as a densely tangled bank of people and material things teeming

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with social, cultural, economic, and religious life, that covers the globe. The historian’s task now is to tease out how certain forms of knowledge and practice within this mass of activity came to be understood as ‘science;’ what has sustained science socially, culturally, and materially; and who has benefitted and who has suffered in its formation. What happened in the past did not change: what we expect professional historians of science to know and care about has.” Thus, by privileging significant figures, successful theories, and innovative scientific institutions, these older studies considered the processes of scientific and technical exchanges between countries, which were often marked by asymmetries, to be a minor problem. When they were considered, they were used as examples of the conflict between modernization (equivalent to the advance of science) and obstacles of tradition and customs (equivalent to backwardness): “the cases concerning peripheral situations and underdeveloped scientific communities only merited some consideration for the great history of science because of their picturesque, more or less anecdotal and banal aspect” (Lafuente et al. 1993: 16; own translation). A noticeable change in approach, although still within the framework of the progress/backwardness dichotomy, came in the 1960s amid the context of the Cold War, when science and technology achieved prominent status and modernization theories attempted to economically leverage the so-called peripheral countries through scientific and technological development, incorporating them into certain geopolitical blocs. A significant landmark was a 1967 article by George Basalla entitled “The spread of modern science,” published in the journal Science. According to Raj (2013: 339), “it echoes Walt Whitman Rostow’s anti-Communist five-stage model for economic development based on the American ideal and has thus, not surprisingly, attracted much favor but undoubtedly more critical response. Its publication in Science assured the article a wide readership among the American political elite, and it crucially contributed to shaping U.S. foreign policy in science during the Cold War years.” Basalla proposed a three-phase model to analyze and explain how “Western” science and technology came through outside Europe. In the first phase, a nonscientific society (referring to the absence of modern Western science) is the source for European science. During this phase, Europeans visit the new land and survey and collect flora, fauna, minerals, rocks, and fossils; study physical aspects; and take the results to Europe. The second phase is the colonial science phase, a dependent science based upon the external models provided by a nation with established scientific culture. During the third phase, an independent scientific tradition develops; here the scientists’ relationships are predominantly within their own country. Basalla proposed certain steps to move from one phase to the next: these included overcoming resistance to science (alleged obstacles based upon philosophical and/or religious beliefs), creating native scientific societies, introducing the teaching of science at all levels of the educational system, government financial and material support to science, and so forth. Not only was this a sort of recipe to improve “modernization” in countries worldwide, from the “centers” to the “peripheries,” the main problem was the linear nature of the model, assuming that completing one phase would automatically lead to the next. Even though the author stated the role of the specific social locus several times, his approach was

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essentially Eurocentric. Furthermore, the problem of disciplinary cohesiveness and contingency may be most acute within the entire series of studies habitually grouped as “non-Western” science (or occasionally “extra-European” or “non-European” science) (Elshakry 2010). Basalla also separated science from the sphere of culture and denied the possibility that any scientific activity could have occurred prior to colonization, hiding the complex processes of exchange and appropriation of knowledge under the concept of “diffusion.” The rapport between Western science and the other parts of the world is not just a matter of “diffusion” or “repositioning” of scientific contents, institutions, and practices but is also a learning and social process shaped by cultural, geographical, and ethnic issues, as well as a political process operated within the distinctive power structures of imperial rules.

Reactions to the Diffusionist Model and Innovative Replies Basalla’s article was very influential and received significant criticism at the same time, paradoxically generating a new field of study (Lafuente et al. 1993; Figueirôa 1998). The implications of a new attitude first involved redefining what counts (or counted) as science. The contribution from the field of the Social Studies of Science was paramount, allowing science to be perceived as an intrinsically social activity of acting and interacting human beings. In particular, Bruno Latour’s critique to modernity was a source of inspiration for postcolonial scholars. In this way, it was a product of histories and processes situated in wider societies, making scientific propositions that were not stable in terms of meaning but instead reinterpreted as they moved from one social context to another. Therefore, understanding science in colonial/postcolonial contexts became a question of creating a detailed ecology of science, in other words studying and conceiving science specifically in relation to the (colonial) environment. The goal was no longer to search for idealized reproductions of mainstream science but instead to search for and understand the marks of the “production loci,” whatever they were. These studies found that still-basic questions like “what counts as fact?” are in fact place-based. Consequently, the broader “travel” of knowledge itself also needed to be explained, because of its materiality and localization in specific sites. This led a new historiography of sciences to emerge that allowed for the inclusion of countries, knowledge, and individualities that previously had been marginalized or simply ignored. It accounted for a genuine local production that, despite empirical evidence in archives, libraries, and museums, could not find its place in the traditional historiography and sometimes required true tours de force to be explained and justified (Arboleda 1987). This new historiography also accounted for flows in the opposite direction, illuminating “colonial” and “metropolitan” processes of scientific knowledge exchange. At the same time on the global level, multiculturalistic and intercultural perspectives in cultural studies emerged in the 1980s. Multiculturalism has been understood as a theoretical, practical, and political field that seeks answers to cultural diversity and challenges prejudice; it can be considered a polysemic concept encompassing several models that express and discuss the issue of cultural plurality.

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Multiculturalism ranges from more conservative perspectives that only acknowledge the existence of diversity and affirm the existing cultural hegemony without problematizing reality to more critical perspectives that question the discourses that construct identity and difference, bringing the relationship between culture and power to the forefront (McLaren 1997). One significant development in this perspective is Santos’s political-epistemological proposal (2004), which he calls the “sociology of absences and emergences;” it involves understanding how particular subjects, histories, political participation, knowledge, and achievements have been rendered invisible and even entirely absent in epistemology and politics within the contexts of power relations, colonialism, capitalism, racism, and so many other forms of domination. An interfering factor can also be added: the turn in the field of imperialism studies, or imperial history, which built its own tradition from the late nineteenth century. But along with the “end of empire” and progressive decolonization movements in the 1960s came an increasing interest in science and technology as instruments of postcolonial development (MacLeod 2000). This new perspective questioned the underlying imperialism: “imperialism was more than a set of economic, political and military phenomena. It was a complex ideology which had widespread cultural, intellectual and technical expressions in the era of European world supremacy” (MacKenzie 1990: vii). In this way, the new turn attempted to develop an innovative sociocultural approach that encompassed the close dependency of imperial power and scientific research throughout history, thus enlarging the field of imperial studies and establishing contexts for the history of science. The fundamental problem was no longer science in imperial history but science as imperial history (MacLeod 1982). A landmark of this development is the Studies in Imperialism series edited by John MacKenzie and published by the Manchester University Press. This series included several titles devoted to the history of science, such as The empire of nature: hunting, conservation, and British imperialism and Imperialism and the natural world (by John MacKenzie) and Imperial medicine and indigenous societies (by David Arnold). Some of the works in this line of inquiry, however, cast doubt on the political and moral tenets of modern science, and many denounced science and technology as highly problematic and degrading. According to Kapil Raj: “inspired by Michel Foucault’s and Edward Said’s writings, and sometimes by those of Daniel Headrick, these scholars see modern science as a hegemonic ‘master narrative’ of Western power, a discursive formation through which the rest of the world was simultaneously subjugated and relegated to the role of Europe’s binarily opposed Other. The spread of Western science is, in this view, achieved by means of an often violent imposition of ‘rationality’ on cultures originally endowed with ‘another reason.’ Thus, far from replicating those in Europe, the resulting practices in the non-Western colonial world are a mere travesty of Western metropolitan science, a hybrid or pale copy valid only locally, in contrast to the universality of the European original” (Raj 2013: 340–341). The three “movements” or tendencies mentioned above led to a process of crossfertilization, which may be considered to be at the heart of the qualitative and quantitative spread of colonial and decolonial history of science studies. During the 1980s, the history of science within imperial and colonial contexts had also

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become a new “venue,” expressing the convergence of interests from scholars in economic history, world/global history, the history of medicine, diseases and public health, and environmental changes throughout history (MacLeod 2000). Some notable developments resulting from this convergence for institutions and their renewed practices include the Latin American Society for the History of Sciences and Technology (SLHCT, Sociedad Latinoamericana de Historia de las Ciencias y la Tecnología) and the Sciences and Empires Commission. The founding of the SLHCT is associated with the Bucharest Declaration, a platform of commitments signed by a group of ten Latin Americans presenting their work at the XVI International Congress on the History of Science in 1981. This group of researchers tasked themselves with bringing together professionals as well as amateurs dedicated to the history of science and technology in this region. But the group went beyond this original goal, pursuing radical change in how the subject is approached after the official founding of the SLHCT in 1982, abandoning the “wrong questions” mentioned above and seeking its own innovative path that renewed the traditions of the “golden age” of Latin American history of science in the 1930s and 1940s, most notably with Aldo Mieli (1879–1950), José Babini (1897–1984), Julio Rey Pastor (1888–1962), Desiderio Papp (1895–1993), and Fernando de Azevedo (1894–1974). Notably, the SLHCT introduced original and contextualizing investigative strategies addressing transversal themes like “science and nationalism,” “colonial science and republican science,” “hybridization and amalgamation of autochthonous and European knowledge,” “Creole science and technology,” “local scientific controversies,” and “formation of scientific and technological cultures in so-called peripheral countries” (Saldaña 2001). Underpinning this research was a critique of preexisting theoretical schemes in an attempt to escape the trap of conceiving the region and its productions as eternally “peripheral” and above all, not subordinating the cultural, intellectual, and technical-scientific contexts to economic and political ones (Saldaña 1986, 1987; Motoyama 1988). Since its creation, the SLHCT has been active in publication; a highlight of this rich historiographic production is Quipu. The name of this journal refers to an ancient Incan mathematical computing system, symbolizing the ideas to be presented as well as recognizing Latin America’s scientific and technological past. In 1990, a large international conference entitled “Science & Empires” was held in Paris to present different perspectives and discuss the theme of situating the European experience of science from the viewpoints of both “metropolitan” and “colonial” histories. This meeting brought together historians of science from every continent in a fruitful dialog that had long-lasting consequences, registered in the book Science and Empires (Petitjean et al. 1990). As reported by Roy MacLeod in a seminal review: “what emerged was a growing awareness that the historical reality of European colonialism (. . .) had to be more closely defined. Colonies once administratively categorized as, for example, colonies of conquest, plantation, or settlement, were revisited as places within which the practice of science had a special meaning. Colonial science acquired a three-dimensional character and presence, whether the ultimate reference was Britain, France, Germany, or Spain, or for that matter, the United States” (MacLeod 2000: 4).

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The dialog was possible because significant scholarship had already been developing in different geographical and cultural areas: intellectual production was vigorous not only in Latin America (notably featuring Juan José Saldaña, Ubiratan D’Ambrosio, Emilio Quevedo, Luis Carlos Arboleda, Maria Amélia Dantes, Hebe Vessuri, Eduardo Estrella, Shozo Motoyama, and Marcos Cueto, to name just a few) but in India and Australia, for instance, as well as in France and Spain, not to mention the United States, with its geographically specialized historians (like the Latin-Americanists, Brazilianists, etc.). Another entire chapter would be required just to list the works produced in (and about) India, Australia, the Arabic and Islamic world, the Ottoman Empire, and the Spanish, French, or Portuguese Empires, for instance. But despite the risk of omitting worthy authors, a few names deserve to be mentioned, such as Deepak Kumar, Kapil Raj, Roy MacLeod, Ian Inkster, David Wade Chambers, Nathan Reingold, Thomas Glick, Nancy Stepan, Michael Osborne, Lewis Pyenson, Roshdi Rashed, Antonio Lafuente, José Sala, Alberto Elena, Patrick Petitjean, Catherine Jami, Karine Chemla, Michael Worboys, and Paolo Palladino. The “Science & Empires” conference led to the establishment of the Science & Empire academic network that in 1997 became a commission belonging to the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology’s Division of the History of Science, which until recently is very active (https://sciemp. weebly.com/). Another landmark was an international congress held in Madrid a year later in June of 1991 entitled “Ciencia, Descubrimiento y Mundo Colonial” [Science, Discovery, and Colonial World], within the framework of the critical reappraisal of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. The book Mundialización de la ciencia y cultura nacional (Lafuente et al. 1993) published most of the works presented and is also mandatory reading. The final decade of the twentieth century saw additional and significant critiques. In 1996, a new SAGE international journal emerged, Science, Technology and Society, edited by Veni V. Krishna. This interdisciplinary journal welcomes analyses based on varying viewpoints from sociology, history, economics, philosophy, science policy, political science, and international relations. As a result, articles dealing with science and technology in former imperial and colonial spaces appeared here from the very first issue, for example, “The Social Construction of Leprosy in Colombia, 1884–1939” (by Diana Obregón) and “Agronomía afranceada: The French contribution to Mexican agronomy, 1880–1940” (by Joseph Cotter and Michael Osborne). A sort of “state of the art” and analytical review appeared in Volume 15 (2000) of the journal Osiris, edited by Roy MacLeod and including 16 articles on the topic of “Nature and Empire.” MacLeod’s introduction to the volume is mandatory reading for anyone dedicated to the colonial and postcolonial history of science and technology. Two decades later, this same journal revisited the subject to some extent, presenting fresh approaches that mix medicine and legal regulations in the 2021 volume Therapeutic Properties: Global Medical Cultures, Knowledge, and Law (Osiris Volume 36, edited by W. Patrick McCray and Suman Seth). Over the past 20 years, the history of postcolonial and decolonial science and technology has been the subject of several reflections and reviews. Encouraged by

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the postmodern turn that contests established authority and the usual historiography, the new histories displayed the various interactions that occurred in contingent communication and exchange practices, allowing for new syntheses and significant theoretical and methodological advances with greater sophistication and maturity. At the same time, as David Arnold (2013: 361) points out, “Postcolonial studies have been preoccupied with matters of voice. The question of who speaks, whether for the subaltern, the colonized, or the postcolonial subject, is a recurring analytical trope.” In 2005 (Volume 96 n.1), the Focus section of the journal Isis investigated “Colonial Science,” edited by Londa Schiebinger. The four articles addressed the British, Iberian, and French empires, with a “cross-cutting” article on the considerable role of the Jesuits. Again in 2010, another Focus section dealt with “Global Histories of Science,” edited by Sujit Sivasundaram (Isis Volume 101 n.1), privileging historiographical and method issues. Finally, in 2013, the Focus section focused on science in India (Isis 104 n.2). Entitled “Science, History and Modern India,” the section was edited by Jahnavi Phalkey and featured four articles by authors long familiar with the topic. In addition to the Focus dossiers, individual articles have addressed this issue with aplomb, such as a fascinating recent article on Sierra Leone in sub-Saharan Africa (a region less covered in the already vast literature) entitled “John Augustus Abayomi Cole and the Search for an African Science, 1885–1898,” written by Colin Bos (2022). Specifically with regard to Africa, the MIT scholar Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga must be mentioned, the author of books including The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production (2018) and Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (2014). Recent texts continue to keep this subject up to date, as in the 2021 Routledge Handbook of Science and Empire, edited by Andrew Goss. It includes 27 essays on the intersection between science and imperialism, with particular attention to networks of science, scientific practices within empires, and science and decolonization, as well as scientific and imperial disciplines. Additionally, in the United Kingdom, debates have taken place in prestigious journals such as the British Journal for the History of Science, which in 2010 published an issue containing selected papers presented at the international conference “Circulation and Locality in Early Modern Science,” held in 2007 in Los Angeles. Edited by Kapil Raj, the articles in this volume addressed “the many ways in which scientific knowledge, instruments, texts, and practitioners moved around the globe in the early modern period” (Raj 2010: 513), delving deeper into methodological issues. And these issues, as the next section shows, were always present and changing throughout time.

Theoretical Propositions to Escape from the Diffusionist Model After the critiques of Basalla’s model, the challenge was to overcome its narrow limits from a general and methodological viewpoint. An attempt was made as early as 1982 by Roy MacLeod in his well-known essay “On visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis:’ reflections on the architecture of imperial science.” MacLeod started from the following questions: How did the quest for natural knowledge become a

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part of the administration, as part of the policy, and also government-aided economic development? How did arguments supposedly derived from scientific worldviews come to support models of economic and political development and arguments for the introduction of techniques that at best were economically palliative but still often socially and economically divisive? What happens when imperial relations become so entangled that the metropolis depends upon the periphery for economic and intellectual resources? According to MacLeod, “metropolitan science” represents not only the science of European centers (London, Paris, or Berlin) but instead a way of doing science grounded on learned societies, small groups of practitioners and amateurs, conventions of discourse, and specific theoretical main concerns set in Western Europe. Meanwhile, “colonial science” by definition was carried out at a remove from Europe; in the colonies, colonial science might imply simply science as performed in the colonies. In his words, “from this usage would grow the concept of ‘imperial’ science, embodying intellectual and institutional rivalries that reflected political divisions. Imperial science again took on a different coloration, when viewed from England, or the periphery” (MacLeod 1982: 2). The model he proposed thus assumed that the history of controversy and conflict should be embedded. Furthermore, such a proposition could hardly shoehorn the diversified experiences of imperial developments in different parts of different European empires into a single simple structure. MacLeod himself characterized it as “an impressionistic taxonomy describing some characteristics of the major phases of British imperial science between ca. 1780 and 1939; and to outline in passing some of the structural relationships which, whether necessary or contingent, appear to have strengthened the connection between political, economic, and technical developments” (MacLeod 1982: 7). He proposed five major passages in British imperial science, namely, “Metropolitan,” “Colonial,” “Federative,” “Efficient Imperial,” and “Empire/Commonwealth.” Specific aspects of scientific practice were assigned to each one, covering the institutional ethos, the social and political characteristics, and the economic/technological functions. Of course, it was focused on the British Empire, but MacLeod saw the possibility of drawing more generalized conclusions. The first was that the concept of “science and empire” must be concerned with political and technical issues. Also, the idea of “imperial science” must be assumed to be dynamic, for “there is no static, or linear extrapolation of ideas; there are multiple autochthonous developments which have reverberating effects” (MacLeod 1982: 14). For this reason, the image of a fixed metropolis “radiating light from a single point source” is inadequate; instead, it is better to speak of a “moving metropolis,” a function of empire to select and cultivate intellectual and economic frontiers. Another wide-ranging proposal appeared in 1990, by Xavier Polanco. Concerned with the mechanisms of “mundialization” (in the sense of dislocation) and the globalization of European science as well as the construction of local scientific traditions, Polanco proposed a concept and a model intended to address the notion of “world science,” which he borrowed from Fernand Braudel and his “world economy.” To Polanco, the advantage of the notion of world-science is that it offers an alternative intellectual horizon to the linear conception of development in steps that must be completed successively. World-science comprises places and sciences

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(for instance, Arab, Mayan, Chinese, Aztec, and European science) connected within a kind of network structure, and in this way, a world-science would not exist without its own place. By definition, each place has its boundaries, but in this model, these boundaries are mobile zones that advance or retreat as a result of science and technology in the process of “mundialization,” in other words, “the dissemination of forms of organizing scientific practice, intellectual or moral values, and technical rules that will impose the sole way of performing ‘good’ science everywhere from now on” (Polanco 1990: 20; own translation). Specifically with regard to the mundialization of European science, Polanco adds that this dissemination occurred through the spread of scientific disciplines, the reproduction of institutions (academies, observatories, laboratories, scientific colleges, and so on), journeys and expeditions, and the circulation of scientists, books, journals, instruments, and observation and measurement techniques. Moreover, the space of world-science is hierarchical, with a center and concentrically arranged semi-peripheries and peripheries where the distance to the center determines the nature of activities in each zone. At the same time, he stressed that the scientific center could not be unique nor immutable, nor the exclusive driver: “one scientific primacy is replaced by another, and scientific domination is more or less complete according to ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ centering. (. . .) It is possible that the impulse does not always come from the center; there is a possibility that specific scientific establishments situated in the semiperipheral or peripheral zones of the network in a given field of research could be the true agents for propelling and carrying out research activity” (Polanco 1990: 13–14; own translation). The growth and continuation of increasingly detailed research with extended temporal and geographic scopes in intense dialog with science studies and the contemporary history of science continued to stress the limits of analytical categories and models. An important perspective, emphasized and developed by Raj (2013), among others, proposed adopting the concept of “circulation” – of knowledge, theoretical concepts and models, experts, and institutions – since (as we have known for a long time) science does not circulate because it is universal but rather becomes universal because it circulates. There are several advantages to this analytical change: it forces the incorporation of locality, situating science and technology insofar as circulation occurs between at least two points; it breaks with the hierarchies established a priori, which are so dear to the center-periphery binomial; it permits the addition of theoretical, institutional, and contextual aspects, since nothing circulates in the abstract, in isolation, or in a vacuum (the view from nowhere); it even allows us to shed light on what does not circulate and understand the reasons that authorize and select circulation. Raj proposes that we “focus on the (long- or short-range) movement of scientific skills, practices, material, and ideas and their encounter with the skills, practices, material, and ideas of other specialized communities in natural history, medicine, cartography, linguistics, ethnology, and so forth – fields that actually counted as mainstream science until well into the nineteenth century” (Raj 2013: 342–343). Circulation should be taken not as a synonym for “transmission,” “dissemination,” or “communication” of ideas, rather as the “processes of encounter, power and resistance, negotiation, and reconfiguration that occur in cross-cultural interaction” (Raj 2013: 344). This methodological

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perspective allows (or even demands) the writing of a polycentric and polyphonic history. Undoubtedly, it is permeated with asymmetries and inequalities because the refusal of chauvinism prevents the construction of naive narratives: “being colonized and having agency are not antithetical. It is in the asymmetry in negotiation processes that the power relationship resides” (Raj 2013: 344). What are the implications of the notions of polyphony and polycentrism for the history discussed here? One significant change in the human sciences over the last half-century is the multiplication of voices that are identified and “speak” from documents, mainly but not exclusively textual. Understanding what is said in different times and spaces requires movements of translation, which are in themselves complex because the problem of translation is not only linguistic but also cultural: “the greater is the distance between the two cultures, between the assumptions of the original author and the new readers, the more difficult is the translator’s task” (Burke 2010: 484). So in our theoretical and empirical context, the idea of “cultural translations” turns out to be particularly valuable, stressing the complexities of the encounters, exchanges, and hybridizations of knowledge. At the same time that different voices “speak,” they “speak” from different places, from multiple (poly)centers, which adds another layer of methodological challenges. Two concepts that make it possible to analytically and methodologically address this challenge are the “contact zone,” a term first defined by Mary Louise Pratt (Pratt 1992) as “sites of encounter and exchange,” and also “trading zones,” formulated by Peter Galison in his study of what he calls the “subcultures” of twentieth-century physics (especially experimenters and theorists), defined as spaces in which two dissimilar groups can find common ground, exchanging items of information while disagreeing about the broader significance of what is exchanged (Galison, 1997). Furthermore, “modernity,” and modern science as part of it, “is also characterized by the ‘intensification of intercultural contact zones. . . Heightened hybridizations, jarring juxtapositions, and increasingly porous borders both characterize modernity and help bring it into being’” (Ganeri 2013: 349). From this point on, from uniquely complex characters of contact zones around the globe, it would be possible to account for “the bedrock of both modern sciences’ apparently universal validity and its historical link to material progress” (Roberts 2009: 11). It is also important to incorporate into the analysis that the “contact” and “trading” zones may not only be characterized as “Western” and “non-Western” but instead embedded in different empires, including areas that border each other, whose interests and affinities adjust or diverge over time and according to the flavor of disputes. As emphasized by Sivasundaram (2010: 154–155), “to move beyond Eurocentrism necessitates an understanding of how European empires came into collision with other imperial formations such as the Qing, the Mughals, or the Ottomans. (. . .) Europeans did not have a monopoly over the combination of science and empire, for they fought to take over information networks and scientific patronage systems that were already in place.” One essential aspect of the “cultural translation” that takes place in what we could call “contact and trading zones” (mixing both concepts) is the interpretation of the sources, mainly because they are diverse and, given the highly varied contexts investigated, can be unusual and even surprising. This point has often caused the

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apparent lack of sources to be identified with a lack of scientific/technological activities or restricted research to the usual and almost always “biased” sources from North Atlantic archives. A promising proposition for interpreting sources in the history of science was advanced by Sujit Sivasundaram (2010), who advocated a strategy of “cross-contextualization” that involves reading across genres and cultures, as well as relying on other disciplines like historical anthropology, for instance, which proved vital for his specific research on South Asia. He began with the question, “How should the historian overcome the fact that, as far as production and preservation are concerned, the sources connected with the history of science in Europe far outweigh those from other parts of the world?” (Sivasundaram 2010: 147). Briefly, Sivasundaram’s methodological strategy first involves looking beyond textual and written sources, radically incorporating non-textual, material testimonies of non-Western societies. Second, Western sources are to be read within the non-Western cultural framework, and vice versa. In his words, “in reading the Quarterly Review article from within Pacific material culture, and the palm-leaf manuscript from within British botanical sources, I have advocated two different directions of contextualization. (. . .). These two directions of contextualization—reading a European source within Pacific materials and a Kandyan source within European materials—are fruitful because they shift our sense of balance. While it is common to complain about the scarcity of sources stemming from a non-European perspective, this methodology allows us to see what happens when a European source is surrounded by other voices and when an unfamiliar non-European source is prioritized inside the colonial archive” (Sivasundaram 2010: 152 and 154). At the same time, archives and libraries are also not neutral, as we have long known, since they embed criteria and values in their classification structure, selection, custody, and disposal policies. As in oral history, where we choose what and how to tell, we also choose what and how to keep, and the documentary arrangements reveal, unveil, or hide the information we seek. In the history of science and technology, it can emerge or disappear, whether in the former colonial metropolises, non-Western regions, or former colonial territories. In this regard, a timely reflection was made by Maria Portuondo with regard to Spain that reflects the complexity of repositories: “this essay tells the story of archives within archives, derived from several archives, many of them created when the idea of a monarchial archive was new. Nested archives open to us like Russian matryoshka dolls (. . .) changing our expectations of what the archive contains and all the while hinting that other archives may lie within” (Portuondo 2016: 95). Along with archives and libraries, museum collections and herbaria should also be critically interrogated (Lopes and Podgorny 2000; Weber 2021). Their objects and plants, stored as material components of the circulation of scientific knowledge, tell a story in themselves, and through their labels, notebooks, entry and acquisition records, or places in collections and display case reveal details of multiple stories and characters, some still remaining invisible. For these reasons, the issue of sources and collections was, is, and will continue to be a vital and ongoing challenge in shaping investigations, from research questions to the answers that will be obtained.

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Challenges for Further Developments Although advances have clearly been made, there are still challenges associated with this new level of understanding of the history of science and technology in former colonial and postcolonial spaces, some of which are long standing. One challenge (perhaps the main and most persistent) refers to the connection – or insertion – of the history of science and technology in global history. In fact, today it is almost common sense that the achievements of modern science, along with its practices, institutions, and ideas of nature, had an impact on the global context and were simultaneously shaped by it. This task necessarily involves the history of the circulation of science and technology within empires. MacLeod had already made this point in 2000; in 2009, Lissa Roberts again insisted that “historians of science and historians interested in broader developments, encounters, and interactions situated around the globe need to find each other and engage in a mutually beneficial conversation” which should focus on “the specifically local character of individual encounters and the increasingly global networks that both afforded and attributed meaning to the conditions and outcomes of these local exchanges” (Roberts 2009: 10). This call was repeated in 2015 in the Focus section of Isis (Volume 106, no. 4) entitled “Connecting and Globalizing History of Science, History of Technology, and Economic History.” The special editor Karel Davis starts from the need for these three disciplines to communicate more with each other than they are accustomed and become more globally oriented. He is convinced that “there is still a large potential for further exchange and involvement to explore and exploit,” and the task will be possible through “a number of concepts that may serve as tools to bring these three disciplines more closely together and ease their evolution in a less Eurocentric direction,” namely, interaction and formalization, production, trading zones, and machines and self-organization (Davids 2015: 835). The repeated insistence on this subject probably reflects that despite the constant efforts, the “meeting point” has not yet been reached. Even so, relevant work has been and is still being produced, addressing different and relatively separate empires and areas. The essays by Cristiana Bastos on the Portuguese empire and its former colonial areas are noteworthy; this scholar successfully integrates the history of sciences and medicine, the history of technology, and Portuguese and economic history by looking into the microcosm of the “plantation production system” widely adopted by Portugal and other metropolises. Insisting on material-based “hard connections,” she links the universe of ideas and representations to the tilled ground of the plantations, showing how everything is articulated and even reinforces and perpetuates structural racism (see, among others, Bastos 2018). Another essential and relatively recent contribution came from Kapil Raj, whose book Science moderne, Science globale: circulation et construction des savoirs entre Asie du Sud et Europe, 1650–1900, published in 2021 by Brepols, summarizes his critical reflections of many years. Raj disrupts the belief that modern science was created only in the West to be then disseminated or imposed elsewhere. Six case studies in botany, cartography, land surveying, linguistics, scientific training, and colonial administration show the crucial importance of intercultural encounters to the emergence of the sciences that surround us today, allowing a fresh

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look at the coproduction of the global and the local. Finally, this book presents a heuristic model for scholars of other contact areas, periods, and fields of knowledge, as well as cross-national and global studies. On the global history side, the history of science and technology was addressed in a comprehensive and heavily documented interdisciplinary project coordinated by historian Patrick Manning at the University of Pittsburgh, involving the World History Center, the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and the Center for the Philosophy of Science. These efforts produced a wide-ranging three-volume set devoted to scientific and technical developments between 1750 and 1850, developments in the life sciences between 1945 and 1980, and global patterns of scientific exchange between 1000 and 1800. The key problem, presented by Manning in the introduction to the third volume, is that “the field of world history (. . .) has not yet found a way to place scientific debate as a central factor in explaining ‘the construction of the global world’” (Manning and Owen 2018: 10). Although the history of technology is not the main focus of this chapter, it should be highlighted here as a topic that still requires attention since it is a minority theme in the general scope of postcolonial and decolonial historiography even though it has also expanded since the 1990s. It is worth remembering, with David Edgerton (2006), the deep imbrication between local and foreign knowledge in technological activity because it historically implicated local adaptation and use of preexistent knowledge, apparatus, artifacts, and procedures. For this reason, along with the seeming processes of global standardization and homogenization, there is a plentiful history of locally based modification to be recovered. Along these lines, Arnold (2005: 87) points out that the history of technology “thus becomes less an investigation of origins and inventions (a history that has long privileged Europe) than an enquiry into uses, meanings, effects.” In summary, much progress has been made in the more detailed studies, but we still need to move forward to build up a solid global history of science and technology that links the fine-grained observations of everyday life with large-scale processes (Raj 2013). A “big picture,” which is still missing, is (perhaps urgently) needed. As this chapter has demonstrated, several outstanding national and regional studies on the history of science in Asia, the Pacific “Circle,” Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa have been produced over at least the past four decades. These case studies would undoubtedly make it possible to compose a detailed and geographically wideranging historical chart. But in order for this to happen, the “dialog between the deaf” must cease, and each group must conduct more intensive readings of other groups’ literature that also include some “old” sources to avoid repetition or rediscovering gunpowder, so to speak. We know that the dominance of English as the scientific “lingua franca” leads to privileging production from the Anglo-American world; the time has come to decolonize the history of science and technology itself.

Conclusions This chapter recovered the history of science in colonial/postcolonial contexts over approximately the past 40 years. It surveyed the process of changing the Eurocentric viewpoint, which considered non-European countries essentially as receivers and

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repeaters, into a new historiography of sciences that includes countries and personalities previously marginalized or simply ignored. The historiographical impact of these changes unfolds into the present, leading to profound revisions in the very conception of science, its construction as knowledge, its different manifestations in different time-spaces, and its impacts on imperial and colonial identities. The text presented historical, institutional, and methodological developments over the decades that successfully escaped the trap of asking the “wrong questions” about what did not happen. Instead, facing what did happen, a plethora of studies established the decisive importance of intercultural encounters to the emergence of the sciences and technologies that surround us today, allowing a fresh look at the coproduction of the global and the local. This new methodological perspective allows (or even demands) the writing of a polycentric and polyphonic history, indeed permeated with asymmetries and inequalities because the refusal of chauvinism prevents the construction of naive narratives. As this chapter has demonstrated, several outstanding national and regional studies on the history of science in Asia, the Pacific “Circle,” Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa have already been produced. These case studies would undoubtedly make it possible to compose a detailed and geographically wide-ranging historical chart. Although much progress has been made in the more detailed studies, we still need to move forward to build up a solid global, postcolonial, and decolonial history of science and technology.

Cross-References ▶ Historiography of Science and Gender ▶ Historiography of Science and the Relationship Between History and the History of Science ▶ Science, Religion, and the Creation of Historiographical Categories

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Elshakry M (2010) When science became Western: historiographical reflections. Isis 101:98–109 Figueirôa SF d M (1998) Mundialização da ciência e respostas locais: sobre a institucionalização das ciências naturais no Brasil (de fins do século XVIII à transição ao século XX). Asclepio 50: 95–111 Galison P (1997) Image and logic: a material culture of microphysics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Gamito-Marques D (2018) Defending metropolitan identity through colonial politics: the role of Portuguese naturalists (1870–91). Hist Sci 56:224–253 Ganeri J (2013) Well-ordered science and Indian epistemic cultures: toward a polycentered history of science. Isis 104:348–359 Goss A (ed) (2021) The Routledge handbook of science and empire. Routledge, Abingdon/New York Lafuente A, Elena A, Ortega ML (eds) (1993) Mundialización de la ciencia y cultura nacional. Doce Calles, Madrid Lopes MM, Podgorny I (2000) The shaping of Latin American museums of natural history. Osiris 15:108–118 MacKenzie J (ed) (1990) Imperialism and the natural world. Manchester University Press, Manchester MacLeod R (1982) On visiting the ‘Moving metropolis’: reflections on the architecture of imperial science. Hist Rec Aust Sci 5:1–16 MacLeod R (2000) Nature and Empire: science and the colonial enterprise (Thematic issue). Osiris 15 Manning P, Owen A (2018) Knowledge in translation: global patterns of scientific exchange, 1000–1800 CE. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh McLaren P (1997) Revolutionary multiculturalism: pedagogies of dissent for the New Millennium. Westview Press, Boulder Motoyama S (1988) História da ciência no Brasil. Apontamentos para uma análise crítica. Quipu 5: 167–189 Nyhart L (2016) Historiography of the history of science. In: Lightman B (ed) A companion to the history of science. Wiley, Chichester, pp 7–22 Osborne M (2005) Science and the French Empire. Isis 96:80–87 Petitjean P (ed) (1996) Les sciences coloniales: les sciences hors d’occident au XXeme siècle. Orstom, Paris Petitjean P, Jami C, Moulin A-M (eds) (1990) Science and empires: historical studies about scientific development and European expansion. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht Polanco X (1990) Une science-monde: la mondialisation de la science européenne et la création de traditions scientifiques locales. In: Polanco X (ed) Naissance et développement de la sciencemonde (production et reproduction des communautés scientifiques en Europe et en Amérique Latine). La Découverte: Conseil de l’Europe: UNESCO, Paris, pp 10–52 Portuondo M (2016) Finding “Science” in the Archives of the Spanish Monarchy. Isis 107:95–105 Pratt ML (1992) Imperial eyes: studies in travel writing and transculturation. Routledge, London QUIPU – Revista Latinoamericana de Historia de las Ciencias y la Tecnología. 1984–2014. Articles can be recovered from: http://www.revistaquipu.com/Sub1/. Accessed 10 Aug 2022 Raj K (2010) Introduction: circulation and locality in early modern science. BJHS 43:513–517 Raj K (2013) Beyond postcolonialism . . . and postpositivism: circulation and the global history of science. Isis 104:337–347 Raposo PMP, Simões A, Patiniotis M, Bertomeu-Sánchez JR (2014) Moving localities and creative circulation: travels as knowledge production in 18th-century Europe. Centaurus 56:167–188 Reingold N, Rothenberg M (eds) (1987) Scientific colonialism. A cross-cultural comparison. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC Roberts L (2009) Situating science in global history: local exchanges and networks of circulation. Itinerario 33:9–30 Saldaña JJ (ed) (1986) El perfil de la ciencia en América. Soc. Latinoam. de Hist. Ciencias y de la Tecnol, México

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Historiography of Science and Gender

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Andrea Reichenberger

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Women’s History to Gender Studies: Looking Back to the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gender Equality and Historiography of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Women as Researches and Subject of Research: Lessons from History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenges and Perspectives in the Digital Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to cover a critical and broad assessment of one of the great challenges in contemporary historiography of science, i.e., gender equality and diversity. The chapter is divided into four parts. The first part gives a brief and by no means complete outline of women’s and gender studies from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. The second part focuses on the interdependence of science, ethics and its interwoven history with women’s and gender studies. It is argued that gender equality and diversity are fundamental for both history and historiography of science. The third part takes a closer look at a twofold approach of feminist historiography intending to make women visible as researches and objects of research. The fourth and final chapter is devoted to some challenges and perspectives for a gender-sensitive and inclusive historiography of science in the digital age.

A. Reichenberger (*) Fakultät IV/Department Mathematik, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_30

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Keywords

Gender equality · Diversity · Feminism · Pluralism · Values · Human rights · Ethics in science

Introduction The scope of this chapter is to contribute to the handbook’s overarching objective to cover a critical and broad assessment of the historiography of science produced from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, by focusing on gender equality and diversity. At first glance, the focus might seem unusual, if not inappropriate. In fact, however, the topic is highly explosive and important in view of the major challenges we are facing today, from closing the gender gap over migration and displacement to climate change and the current transformation from a digital network society to a data society, just to mention a few examples. There is an increasing responsibility for science to produce societally relevant and impactful research searching for solutions of these global and local challenges. Science has an obligation and responsibility to take sides for truth and objectivity. This applies in the same way to other values and norms for conduct in science and research, such as trust, accountability, mutual respect, fairness and justice. Ethical norms in research, such as guidelines for authorship, copyright and patenting policies, data sharing policies, and confidentiality rules in peer review are designed to protect intellectual property interests while encouraging collaboration. Research ethics apply to any science so to the history and historiography of science, too. The history of science covers the development of science from its earliest roots to the present. The historiography of science might be characterized as a meta-science studying the history and methodology of the history of science, including its disciplinary aspects and practices (methods, theories, schools, etc.) and the study of its own historical development. Historiographical debates regarding the proper method for the study of the history of science are sometimes difficult to demarcate from historical controversies regarding the course of science. Early controversies of the latter kind are considered by some to be the inception of the subdiscipline. In any case, in its most general sense, the term historiography refers to the study of historians’ methods and practices, objects, and problems with which history of science is concerned, offering a comprehensive and critical review through description and evaluation of significant viewpoints. Historiography in this sense involves the study and analysis of historical methods of research, inquiry, inference, and presentation used by more-or-less contemporary historians. Historiography becomes itself historical when we recognize that frameworks of assumptions about historical knowledge and reasoning change over time. On this assumption, the history of historical thinking and writing is itself an important subject. How did historians of various periods in human history conduct their study and presentation of history? Incorporating key challenges in today’s general history as scientific discipline, this chapter aims to bridge the gap between history of science and

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historiography of science concerning gender equality and diversity as main topics. Historiography of science is practiced and reflected from the epistemological criteria and choices that guided the writing of the history of science in its different. Therefore, it is fundamental of carrying out epistemological reflections to assess the cornerstones, possibilities, scope, and limits of different historiographical conceptions, authors, and traditions that have established the writing of the history of science. Feminist historiography of science together with women’s history and gender studies have offered important and critical contributions to that assignment.

From Women’s History to Gender Studies: Looking Back to the Future In the following, a brief and by no means complete outline of women’s and gender studies in the history of science is given. In a snapshot on the current state of research, it is shown that not only women’s history and gender studies have become more and more intertwined but also developed to the complex field of intersectionality for tackling diversity and inclusion. This raises a number of challenges for a gender-sensitive and women-friendly historiography of science, which will be addressed in conclusion and which lead over to the next section. Today, there is a general consensus that women’s history and gender studies broadened and deepened history of science and revisited historiography of science. Due to the academic and professionalized field of women’s history, we nowadays know much more about the image and role, work, and perceptions of female scientists in history and present than we did a few decades ago (e.g., Whaley 2003). Women’s studies constituted in close relation to and under the influence of the feminist movement and women’s rights movement (Haque 2019). The latter has its roots in the French Revolution and reached its first peak at the turn of the twentieth century and the “glorious 1920s” with the enforcement of women’s suffrage, the recognition of the legal equality of the sexes, and the social opening of universities. From the 1860s, as a result of first-wave feminism, girls gained access to higher education and more and more universities opened their doors for women in Europe, the United States, and worldwide. For example, in 1875, the University of Zurich formally opened to women, closely followed by universities in Brazil, Chile, Australia, Korea, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Austria–Hungary (Fuchs and Thomson 2005; Rosser 2008). It took until 1890 for it to spread to France, and 1909 to Germany, long after universities on other continents had granted access to women and many women’s colleges were founded inside and outside the United States (including Barnard, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Wellesley). Hand in hand with the so-called second wave of the women’s movement, women’s history and then, since the 1980s, gender history were able to establish themselves as separate fields of historical research (Offen and Yan 2020). Feminist scholars adopted the term gender as way of distinguishing “socially constructed” aspects of male–female differences (gender) from “biologically determined” aspects

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(sex). The study of women in science was already in this sense about much more than women. This holds also true because already in the 1980s, authors documenting the absence of women in a given scientific field were not only interested in this out of a preoccupation with unfair employment practice as such. Rather, they were concerned about its epistemic consequences. A possible way in which women’s history can lead to a reassessment of epistemic consequences in general is by analyzing the concept of gender. Joan Scott, just to mention one example, has taken a leading role in this effort. Gender, according to Scott and many others, is a socially constructed category for both men and women, whereas sex is a biological category denoting the presence or absence of certain chromosomes (Scott 1986). Even physical differences between the sexes can be exaggerated (all fetuses start out female), but differences in gender are bound to be of greatest interest to historians. Of particular interest to women’s historians are what might be called “gender systems,” which can be engines of oppression for both men and women. In this sense, gender served as a tool for analyzing how structures of power and social orders created by “the heteronormative matrix” have coined the production and application of scientific knowledges and technologies (Ingraham 1994; Lennon and Whitford 1994). In the more reflexive phase that followed, the dichotomy between femininity and masculinity itself became the subject of critique. For example, Anne Fausto-Sterling (1992) rejected the discourse of biological versus social determinism, advocating a deeper analysis of how interactions between the biological being and the social environment influence individuals and societies. Treating gender not as a category with a stable level of meaning but as a perspective on social relations and systems of interpretation that is to be related to other axes of inequality opened the way for a multi-perspective approach which incorporated ethnicity, nationality, religious affiliation, skin color, age, or level of education. The technical term “intersectionality” has prevailed for this approach. A history of science understood in this way also teaches us that the history of women does not necessarily have to be understood as a history of feminism, of the drive for emancipation, and as a women’s rights movement. In this context, the history of feminism does not show itself as a straightforward history of increasing achievements in equal rights but as a history of ups and downs, characterized by successes and failures and by regional and temporal progress and regress. In her influential monograph, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Schiebinger 1989), Londa Schiebinger examined how, by the late eighteenth century, a self-reinforcing system had emerged that rendered invisible the inequalities women suffered (Schiebinger 1999). In reexamining the origins of modern science, Schiebinger unearthed a forgotten heritage of women scientists and probes the cultural and historical forces that continue to shape the course of scientific scholarship and knowledge. Feminist philosophers, like Sandra Harding (1986, 1991, 2015), Donna Haraway (1988), or Helen Longino (1990, 1992, 1993), have paid particular attention to the

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ways narrative genres constrain scientific knowledge and explanations. Starting from the question of how metaphors constitute meaning, Martina Reuter (2006) and other scholars have critically analyzed the feminist debate on the “maleness of reason,” reinterpreting at the same time the philosophical canon. The gendered scientific distribution of labor in the fabrication and dissemination of scientific knowledge became more and more evident – also in its epistemic consequences – in the study of the so-called gendered spaces of science. Such studies concern a wide variety of issues concerned with the way science is and was done, evaluated, and applied and in addition, or in connection therewith, with historical episodes or traditions. Within this context, a distinguished set of international scholars has examined the nature of collaboration between life partners, including collective biographies, with particular attention to the ways in which personal and professional dynamics can foster or inhibit scientific practice outside conventional places like the academy (John-Steiner 2006; Lykknes et al. 2012). Today, there are an increasing number of initiatives, under the headline “new narratives,” that pursue the goal to change historiographical practices in philosophy and science and to enable to become more inclusive and diverse by changing the ways we do history and philosophy of science (Canning and Postlewait 2010; Matthews 2014; Pozzo 2021). Achieving this goal requires collective action and a genuine cultural and scientific paradigm shift in order to encourage plurality and diversity in place of one-sided canonizations, aiming to shift emphasis away from the discoveries of a few scientific geniuses and to foreground instead the many contributors to scientific work at the intersection of transnational studies of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Among the ongoing debates about different ways of articulating pluralism, feminist approaches (e.g., Harding 1987; Hartsock 1998) have been of lasting influence on pluralist frameworks in philosophy and history of science by contributing to a wide range of research programs that explore the knowledge of marginalized stakeholders and challenge dominant scientific perspectives as being grounded in the standpoints of dominant actors in scientific practice (Amoretti and Vassallo 2016; Kourany 2010). Against this background, Donna Haraway’s (1988) description of “situated knowledges” and “embodied objectivity” argues for “epistemologies of location” where claims of knowledge can only be considered partial. The argument here is that a return to such original notions of pluralism helps validate the diversity of experiences and knowledges that grow out of the variety of ways we are all situated in any number of experiences, including environmental degradation. Haraway’s approach highlights the importance of human intermediation between context and action by insisting that human action required people to formulate reasons to motivate their action or inaction. The situated-knowledge model accounts for the idiosyncrasies of individual and local practice while enabling contingent generalizations across cases. Feminist historiography of science was not the first, but it was one of the leading movements in the postwar period that criticized, in the context of decolonization and

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internationalism in the mid-twentieth century, classical historiography of science as hegemonic and Eurocentric, pointing to the simplistic character of modernization theory, Western narratives of progress, and to the persistence and even rejuvenation of ostensibly “premodern” features of society – notably fundamentalism (Verburgt 2020). The difficulty of defining Eurocentrism is not so much due to vagueness and ambiguity (this is true for many terms) but to the political and ideological charge of the debates associated with it. In practice, the term usually conceals the appeal that historiography should not marginalize and ignore non-Western traditions and to contrast Western epistemologies with, for example, indigenous ways of knowing. Black feminist movements, for example, emerged from struggles against enslavement and overexploitation and explored the extent to which gender and sexuality entail specific lines of exploitation, concerning the question of global justice. Latin American critics in particular have provided analyses of Eurocentrism that link its epistemological dimension that is Eurocentric knowledge to economic aspects such as the organization of global capitalism and economic exploitation (see Aníbal Quijano 2000, 2002). Today, there is a large consensus that the rise of the Western world has been crucially influenced by other cultures in constructing modern science; that Copernicus strongly depended on the work of Islamic astronomers; that modern science is not the outcome of the abstract and pure minds of solitary geniuses; that the expansion of science during the Enlightenment was parallel and strongly interdependent with the imperialist expansion of European powers; that scientific progress in the nineteenth century went hand in hand with the growth of capitalist industries (and continued expansion of European empires); that the same happens in the twentieth century with respect to Cold War geopolitics; and that a lot of science has been done either out of the European centers of research or on the basis of work done by “indigenous” people. In the case of comparative global history, it is somewhat clear, in that one can historiographically change tack and ask different questions, such as many of those present have done in their own work. One can also avoid the tendency to ask what flaws or vices in other parts of the world prevented their “rise” and rather focus on what the historical boundaries and specificities are of the European moment in world history. But the alternative to Western history of science raised the question what the alternative to a Eurocentric approach might be. Here, different perspectives contributed to the bigger picture of world history that is now emerging beyond the disciplinary hyper-specialization that still often limits knowledge at modern national boundaries. The current plea for making science more diverse, open, less discriminatory, and more inclusive in its practice ties up with the feminist program exploring the deep interrelationship of science and technology with social and political spheres and promoting a better and more informed understanding of contemporary challenges and problems regarding gender equality, diversity, intersectionality, and globalization beyond a Eurocentric framework that enables resistance to racism and other contemporary forms of social brokenness. These primarily ethical challenges are deeply rooted in the foundation of scientific thought.

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In her monograph Feminism and Science, Evelyn Fox Keller argued that abandoning the ideal of objectivity as such would not only do a disservice to women in science but more importantly result in “cultural relativism, in which any emancipatory function of modern science is negated, and the arbitration of truth recedes into the political domain.” Keller is convinced “that those elements of feminist criticism that seem to conflict most with at least conventional conceptions of science may, in fact, carry a liberating potential for science. It could therefore benefit scientists to attend closely to feminist criticism.” How future historiography and history of science will fare in these wider horizons embedded in global concerns, such as the clear-cutting of rainforests and global warming, remains to be seen. The Eurocentrism debate is not going away, since the fundamental historiographical paradox remains. The moment of European dominance in world history is, seen from a long-term perspective, not a matter of inherent European superiority or the inferiority of other civilizations. Nor is it obviously a unique and permanent feature of history. Most importantly for present historiography, it gave us, through and within its colonial–imperialist context, our conceptual apparatus and academic institutions: the same ones that allow us to dispute its causes and to combat its nefarious political and intellectual effects and the same that allow us to demand human rights, to argue against violence, for access to justice, and the pursuit of gender equality. Of the period of European, or if one will “Western” hegemony, one can therefore say that we cannot live with it, and yet we cannot understand without it. This holds, not at least, for understanding and promoting gender equality and diversity. Under the new label “epistemic injustice,” current approaches go further and deeper than the debates on pluralism and situated knowledges. Epistemic injustice includes exclusion and silencing, systematic distortion or misrepresentation of one’s meanings or contributions, undervaluing of one’s status or standing in communicative practices, unfair distinctions in authority, and unwarranted distrust. Originally, the term was coined by Miranda Fricker (2007). Other scholars expanded what the term includes such as “epistemic oppression” (Dotson 2014) or “epistemic trust injustice” (Grasswick 2018); related concepts include epistemic oppression and epistemic violence. Looking back, of course, promoting gender equality, diversity, nondiscrimination, and racial justice always have been intrinsically linked to human rights and their realization. This gives rise to a multitude of challenges not only for the practice of research but also for the practices of doing history of science, i.e., for historiography of science. In some cases, scientific misconduct is easy to expose and, to that extent, not a controversial topic: for example, making up or falsifying data, manipulating data analyses, or misrepresenting results in research reports. It is a form of academic fraud. Research misconduct is not a simple mistake or a point of disagreement but a serious ethical failure. Much more difficult to resolve are norm and value conflicts and dilemmas that arise in decision-making actions. Giving particular thought to the ways in which historical perspectives have been shaped by the era and culture in which we were born and raised, by education, and by the expectations of the

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communities is being much more difficult to observe than to expose obvious misconduct by scientists.

Gender Equality and Historiography of Science In this section, it is argued that gender equality and diversity are relevant and at the same time great challenges for both the history and historiography of science aiming to investigate the interrelationship between science’s epistemic aspects and ethical and sociopolitical features. Diversity does not simply refer to differences and similarities between people or groups. In sociopolitical and social contexts, the term stands for an appreciative and respectful approach to diversity (lat. “diversitas”). A human being is by definition unique in its identity and should be valued and respected in that regard. At the same time, a human being is by definition a social being, and its meaning and purpose cannot be found within itself. There is a healthy and necessary tension between the individual goals and the collective goals: We are unique individuals in deep necessity of communion with others, and our communities need to protect individual freedoms to survive. To be more concrete, people differ based on various individual mental and physical conditions, age, social status, economic situation, education and professional experience, religion/worldview, etc. But no matter what they look like, what country they come from, what preferences they have, or what they believe in, all people have the right to be treated equally. Diversity-promoting measures are aimed at reducing disadvantages and discrimination and, thus, positively speaking, at equal opportunities, equality, participation, and inclusion. This implies that gender equality and gender mainstreaming combined with targeted actions and intersectionality are important factors for treating all people with the greatest respect. Gender equality is a fundamental right, an internationally agreed upon sustainable development goal, and an essential feature of stable and transparent democracies. Gender equality requires not only equal enjoyment by women and men of socially valued goods, opportunities, resources, and rewards but also equal access to science and knowledge as a collective good, so that both women and men can fully participate as equal partners in a productive way. At this point, a prejudice should be addressed that persists to this day but is in fact unfounded, i.e., the prejudice that feminist history and philosophy of science were and are political, if not ideological, and therefore undermine the principles and ideals of science (Longino 1993). This brings us to a much-discussed phenomenon: science cannot itself justify the norms and values on which it is based. On the contrary, values and rights, such as the right of science to freedom of research, are the condition of the possibility of science and, one might add, of democratic societies. Rights go hand in hand with responsibilities. Advocating free and responsible practice of science includes the responsibility to promote equitable opportunities for

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access to science and its benefits, opposing at the same time discrimination based on such factors as ethnic origin, religion, citizenship, language, political or other opinion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and age. Gender equality is intrinsically linked to sustainable development and is vital not only to the development and progress of science but also to the realization of human rights and the accomplishment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Essed Fernandes and Blomstrom 2012). The problem is that equality is often easier to achieve in theory than in practice. The fact that women are poorly represented in the “History of Ideas” written by Western scholars are excluded from historical narratives despite many efforts to overcome the hagiographies of ingenious white male thinkers (Grasswick 2011; Jordanova 1993) mirrors this phenomenon. The debate over equality as an ideal objective versus factual inequalities (caused by past discrimination) is rooted in two fundamental conflicting principles of justice, i.e., equality and liberty. This relationship is closely linked to the problem on how to reconcile unity and diversity, i.e., a unity without uniformity and diversity without fragmentation. In any situation wherein equality will be the end goal, the state will have to interfere in the natural process to try and reduce inequalities. However, in doing so, it must put forth certain limitations in order to ensure the proper distribution of resources. Thus, any goal of establishing social equality shall only be fulfilled by distributive justice if the liberties are curtailed of people, and their choices are limited. We must therefore draw the conclusion that equality is incompatible with liberty, since achieving equality implies political, or social control, whereas liberty leads to inequalities, which are created by differences in circumstances and abilities. Egalitarian and uniform treatment via laws, norms, regulations, and prohibitions can create or perpetuate inequalities when applied to individuals in unequal circumstances. The question is, therefore, how can we resolve these problems? Although rooted in simple demands, which embrace the principle of equality and reject unacceptable forms of discrimination, legal measures and antidiscrimination get inextricably mixed up with the economic, cultural, and social trends of contemporary societies. The difficulty of implementing equality through collective bargaining and the ongoing debate on affirmative action and/or discrimination attests to this complexity. Acting against different types of discrimination requires knowledge about them, and this, in turn, leads to the matter of how to gauge them. The crux: Measurement presupposes standardization. For example, the International Telegraph Union (now International Telecommunication Union) was created in 1865 to set international standards in order to connect national telegraph networks. Should we do the same concerning social standardizations? In a world designed by men, ISO (International Organization for Standardization) has taken a big step toward gender equality for more women’s voices in standardization. Diversity and inclusion, one can read, are key elements for the development of standards. They help create a world where everyone is represented regardless of race or gender. It may be doubted whether justice and fairness to each individual are achieved by this

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ambitious goal, as important as this goal is. In any case, a big challenge lies in avoiding that standardization leads to egalitarianism. Given the recurring call for implementing aspects of equality and diversity in all our spheres of life, whether in human–machine interaction, UN policy, or UNESCO’s programs, it should not be forgotten that concepts like dignity, freedom, equality, and solidarity are ideals, not facts. They are presented in the preamble of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union as common, indivisible, and universal values serving as a motivation for common action and communication in local and global respect. In social engineering and research ethics it is commonplace to distinguish values and norms (Haslett 1987, 22–25; Tranøy 1986). Values constitute the foundation or groundwork for norms. Norms provide guides or standards with which to navigate through what ought to be done within specific situations, i.e., norms are generally regarded as concrete action-guiding rules that are socially enforced. They are codes of right action obligating members of a group and serving as guide or control over what is considered appropriate behavior. In sum, a value refers to an overall ideal, whereas a norm specifies a value. Values can be operationalized in specifying norms; norms refer to and are justified by underlying values. Both values and norms should not to be confused with “real” facts and “hard” facts, respectively. Nevertheless, values can be realized. To be more precise, by formulating norms, we express what has to be done in order to realize values. That’s a crucial point in order to understand that the so-called is–ought problem, which is closely related to the fact–value distinction in epistemology, is an oversimplified distinction. One might object: Value judgments are invariably biased; facts are supposed to be unbiased. Unfortunately, this claim is based on the assumption that “facts” refer to an objective truth about the world, i.e., objective reality. Indeed, factual judgment might biased in subtle ways. After all, we may be wrong. That what we thought was supposedly factual knowledge is in fact not fact. The situation becomes more complicated if we consider that value judgments, specifically, moral ones, go beyond offering one’s own subjective opinion. At least, human rights, for example, do not seem to be simply a matter of opinion. On the other hand, values do not seem to be falsifiable in the same way as facts, too. We are faced with the problem of justification. Considering the reality of research policy today, it is striking how far it removed from the ideals of Humboldt and Weber’s value neutrality and disinterestedness. Today’s research policy rests on a comprehensive ethical obligation toward the production and application of knowledge that is beneficial to society, i.e., priority must be given to applied research that is beneficial to society. At least in the Western world, this credo is rooted in the idea of the European Union as a project of peace that arose after the catastrophes of the World War II. This results in a major challenge: Freedom and self-determination of science are limited by governmental research policy. It also makes science dependent on the rich and powerful industrialized countries and research-funding opportunities, counteracting the research agenda of open-minded, diverse-friendly, pluralistic science beyond Eurocentric interest and motives.

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Feminist historians of science have explored the historically gendered participation in the practice of science. They have also investigated biases concerning women as subject of research. In both approaches, feminist science studies have to be credited with exposing a crucial lack of gender equality: the marginalization or exclusion of women and how their contributions have disappeared when they have participated; further, they have demonstrated how sciences unscientifically studied women as research subjects. In this sense, feminist history of science was and is a powerful tool for a critical reflection on the future of historiography of science through a critical retrospective on its past, by building a bridge between feminism, gender, and the question of ethical values in science.

Women as Researches and Subject of Research: Lessons from History In her now famous 1993 article on the Matilda effect in science, the American historian of science, and Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science, Margaret Rossiter pointed out the systematic undervaluation of women’s scientific contributions in the history of science (Rossiter 1993). This pattern is meanwhile particularly pronounced and well researched. The minimizing and even denial of the role of women is known as the “Matilda effect,” in honor of Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1889), an activist, free thinker, author, and pioneer in American sociology. Like Matilda Joslyn Gage, before her, Rossiter criticized the classical history of science as a male-dominated culture of memory (Rossiter 1993). For Rossiter and others, recounting the “herstories” of often invisible women scientists came with analyzing and theorizing the social structures that excluded them from participating in science systems and kept them at their margins but also the “mechanisms” that prevented them from being fully recognized. It is important to note that scholars searching for women in science also found many women who never received the title “scientists” by their contemporaries, even though they can in retro perspective be described as such. Moreover, it also revealed the importance of the work of women who contributed to scientific projects as “ghostwriters,” secretaries, lab technicians, native informants, etc. Today, we know that there were a significant number of women scientists and philosophers who made history, such as Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), the daughter of Lord Byron, who wrote the first “computer program” for an analytical machine (Hollings et al. 2018). Most of them gained access to knowledge, either by taking advantage of the scientific education of their brothers, fathers, or husbands or by teaching themselves by reading and participating in academic discussions (Kohlstedt and Longino 1997). During the first three decades of the twentieth century, an increasing number of female pioneers gained renown, such as the French–Polish woman Marie Curie (1867–1934) and the Austrian Lise Meitner (1878–1968) in chemistry and the Irishwoman Alicia Boole-Stout (1860–1940), the Russian Sofya Kovalevskaya (1850–1891), and the German Emmy Noether (1882–1935) in mathematics. In 1912, Norway appointed its first female university professor in Oslo, the biologist

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Kristine Elisabeth Heuch Bonnevie (1872–1948). One could continue the list for many pages. Most of these women were very well aware of the fact that they were exceptions rather than typical models. And quite a few of women scientists and philosophers were feminist activists themselves. A most notable example is the Polish student Stefania Wolicka who was the first European woman to receive a doctorate in philosophy; she did this in 1875 at the University of Zurich, with a work on Greek female figures (Wolicka 1875). Another example: In 1871, Julie-Victoire Daubié (1824–1874), a feminist activist and primary school teacher, was the first woman to receive a Bachelor’s degree in literature from the Sorbonne. Such female scientists nevertheless remain symbolic still today. They fought their way into science with much resilience and had to stand up to a lot of resistance, prejudices, and disparagements. Quite a few of the women who wrote history of science (in double entendre) were or became feminists themselves (though not all). For example, the mathematician, logician, philosopher, and psychologist Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847–1930) was not only one of the leading experts of the algebra of logic, which was a quite new research field of that time. She was among those women philosophers and scientists who fought for the visibility of women in science, revealing at the same time deeprooted stereotypes in the philosophical foundation and concepts of science. She attacked the dualistic juxtaposition of intuition and reason in order to unmask stereotypical, scientifically unfounded ways of argumentation, at the same time pleading for a critical rethinking of the notions of the subject as well as the object of knowledge. This sociopolitical and scientific background must be kept in mind in order to understand the aim and content of Christine Ladd-Franklin’s article about “Intuition and Reason” (Ladd-Franklin 1893), which appeared in the journal The Monist in 1893. In this paper, Christine Ladd-Franklin describes her battle for the recognition and respect women deserve as men’s intellectual equals. In order to gain that respect, they first had to convince the dominant patriarchal forces that women were capable and worthy of being educated and, once this was done, that their thoughts warranted attention, discussion, and debate. In this respect, she achieved her goal, as William James wrote to her in a letter of March 3, 1892: “I shall be delighted to read your Intuition and Reason in the MS., and to do what I can to recommend it” (James 1992–2004, 83). However, Ladd-Franklin’s analysis went even deeper. Ladd-Franklin asks “whether we act more frequently from intuition or reason” (Ladd-Franklin 1893, 211). This question, Ladd-Franklin claims, has caused much more of a stir in the history of philosophy since Immanuel Kant than the question “whether we execute a greater number of analytic or of synthetic judgments” (LaddFranklin 1893, 211). Why? Because of the stubbornly persisting but wholly unfounded opinion that reason and intuition are marks, respectively, of the manner of working of men’s and of women’s minds and that the faculty of reason is the more noble guide to conduct. In fact, “the question whether intuition or reason is the nobler faculty is an exceedingly meaningless question” (Ladd-Franklin 1893, 215). It is time, Ladd-Franklin asserts, “that the belief in the different quality of men’s and of women’s minds should follow the whole antiquated machinery of ‘faculties’ into

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the limbo of old and worn-out fashions of thought and of speech” (Ladd-Franklin 1893, 211). To Ladd-Franklin, the mind was neither male nor female: It was genderneutral. The differences being addressed regarding intuition and reason are about different modes and types of knowledge, not different kinds of mind, which are socially and culturally conditioned, often internalized by men and women and derive from the discrepant distribution of men and women into social roles both in the home and at work. A further strategy that Ladd-Franklin pursued in order to encourage the presence and acceptance of female scientists was to increase the visibility of women in the history of science. For example, Ladd-Franklin dedicated a long and well-researched article to the French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Marie-Sophie Germain. Ladd-Franklin’s study “Sophie Germain. An Unknown Mathematician” was published in the highly successful Century Magazine in 1894 (Ladd-Franklin 1894). Nearly one hundred years later, it was reprinted in the Association for Women in Mathematics Newsletter in 1981. The introductory words speak volumes: “Christine Ladd Franklin might also be called an unjustly unknown mathematician.” This sentence gives us a vivid picture of the underestimated recognition for the roles of women in science even today. Christine, lauded as the “Sophie Germain of America” in The World’s Congress of Representative Women (Sewall 1894, 201) during her lifetime, does not rank with the famous logicians who are credited with the algebraization of logic today. The World’s Congress of Representative Women was a weeklong convention for the voicing of women’s concerns, held within the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair) in May 1893. At 81 meetings, organized by women from each of the United States, 150,000 people came to the World’s Congress Auxiliary Building and listened to speeches given by almost 500 women from 27 countries. Ladd-Franklin portrayed Sophie Germain not only as a brilliant mathematician and physicist, with important contributions to number theory, differential geometry, and elasticity theory, well-known from her correspondence with famous mathematicians such as Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss, but as a philosophical intellectual of her time, as a moral model and example to follow (Ladd-Franklin 1894, 948). This just did not mean a misplaced glorification. On the contrary, Christine LaddFranklin was extremely critical when dealing with texts, whether by men or women. Both Germain and Ladd-Franklin addressed the question of what science is and should be in a very profound way (Germain 1879). In doing so, Ladd-Franklin honored Germain’s philosophical considerations on the unity of all intellectual disciplines of the morals, literature, arts, and sciences and particularly highlighted Germain’s impact on Auguste Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive (Comte 1830– 1842) and her critique of Immanuel Kant fitting as it did nicely into the growth of positivism. Ladd-Franklin herself plead for a new approach to philosophy of science to ensure trustworthy science based on adequate rigor, reliability, and a commitment to truth, balancing fallibilism and anti-skepticism. Feminist historians and philosophers have endeavored to establish new understandings of the ways in which science in its historical origins was and is practiced.

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From the beginning, they intended not only to make women in science visible as researchers and agents of change and to integrate their contributions into the history of science. They aimed at the same time to deconstruct images and concepts, which science has historically produced and which history of science was reproducing, i.e., such images that, when critically examined, were not at all scientifically well founded but were based on disputable stereotypes and social norms and values (Rosser 2008). Feminist science studies have worked out how one-sidedness and biases in scientific knowledge production are marked by sex-stereotyped beliefs and by the fact that researchers are situated in heteronormative social spheres and how apparently objective theories legitimate and perpetuate discriminating social conditions (Harding 1986). An example of a well-founded criticism of unjustified and unscientific treatment of women as objects of science is the following one: In the midst of vehement disputes over the admission of women to universities and in the midst of the reform movement of girls’ higher education, women’s competence and intelligence were questioned by alleged scientific research. Studies from phrenology and brain research, for example, attempted to prove the mental inferiority of women based on the anatomy of their brains (Descombes 2001). Another example: Gender division of labor was explained as the result of an evolutionary advance. The discourse figure of an “energetic economy of gender difference” shows that even physical theories, such as thermodynamics, were invoked to legitimize hierarchical gender differences (Heinsohn 2000). Just to bring to mind a famous paradigm for the debate in Germany, Paul Julius Möbius, a neurologist and psychiatrist, claimed “that women are as a rule without disposition for mathematics. Usually, women are not only incapable of grasping mathematical relations, but they also feel a kind of disgust for everything numerical. [. . .] In a certain sense, one can say that the mathematical is the opposite of the feminine” (Möbius 1900, 84). Many feminist philosophers and scientists intervened and raised objections. In Germany, Hedwig Dohm, Johanna Elberskirchen, and Oda Olberg criticized the fact that supposedly objective results of scientific studies were being misused as a projection screen for well-known gender stereotypes (Dohm 1902; Elberskirchen 1903; Olberg 1902). They did not speak against scientific research per se but unmasked the rhetoric of “scientification,” accusing it to be itself ideologically and politically interspersed. It goes almost without saying that the social structures often shaped not only the lives of women in science but were more far-reaching factors coining the organization and with it the results of scientific practices. Many women (including some in the early history of the Annales) worked as unpaid research assistants and cowriters, and it is doubtless that they were deprived of credit for being historians and scientists in their own right. There were exceptions, of course, Hélène Metzger (1889–1944) and Anneliese Maier (1905–1971), for example, one of the pioneers of a professionalized historiography of science in the early twentieth century. Metzger was a member of the History of Science Section of the Centre International de Synthèse (CIS) in Paris and a founding member of the International Academy of the History of Science. She was secretary of the Groupe Francais d’Historiens des Sciences and had close contacts with historians of science such as Pierre Brunet, Alexandre Koyré, George Sarton, Federigo Enriques, Aldo Mieli, Robert Lenoble, and Paul

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Mouy. However, Helene Metzger, a driving force for the professionalization of the history and historiography of science in France, became also the victim of multiple discrimination in a particularly tragic way because of her Jewish origin (Chimisso 2019). Anneliese Maier, who became particularly known for her work on natural philosophy in the middle ages, received her doctorate at the University of Berlin under Eduard Spranger and Wolfgang Köhler with a thesis on Kant’s categories of quality (Meier 1930). In her book Mechanisierung des Weltbildes im 17. Jahrhundert (Maier 1938), she analyzed in detail the thoughts of the fourteenthcentury natural philosophers and scholastic science (Maier 1938) Eduard J. Dijksterhuis’ De Mechanisiering van het Wereldbild (Dijksterhuis 1950) further developed the concept which was introduced by Maier. Both Maier and Dijksterhuis interpreted the mechanization of the world picture as a process of mathematization of science. Anneliese Maier was for political reasons unable to complete her habilitation during the National Socialist period and never received a full professorship. After hundred years later, after the second-wave feminism, the establishment of gender history and feminist science and technology studies, we are still far from gender equality and practiced diversity in the wide field of a professionalized historiography of science. Female authors are often ignored in course readings and teaching practices. Famous theorems, insights, and discoveries are attributed to men’s names. And certain stereotypes about gender roles are reproduced again and again. Debates about equality and diversity in academia are not new. However, recent developments have triggered new reflections and a sense of urgency stemming from the perceived inertia and lack of concrete change in academia and beyond. Changing historiographical practices in history of science in order to become more inclusive and diverse (Canning and Postlewait 2010; Matthews 2014) is still one of the very important challenges, not least in our digital age.

Challenges and Perspectives in the Digital Age Historians today benefit from much reintegrated and comprehensive archival and library systems than existed in previous centuries. Computers and the Internet have vastly enhanced the speed and amount of data with which printed sources can be searched. But the Internet and Big Data Societies have also brought as much misinformation as information, if not more. With the mass digitization of libraries and archives under way since the 1990s, historical text analysis has become essential in studying history and philosophy of science. This method involves the identification of linguistic patters, where the frequency of keywords is used in order to investigate changes in what words meant, how words were used, and how these changes may have responded to changes in the environment. Announced in 2011, the Google Books Ngram Viewer, an online search engine that charts the frequencies of any set of search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in printed sources published between 1500 and 2019, was presented as a revolutionary new way of looking at culture. Ngram, also called an N-gram, is a statistical analysis of text or speech content to find n (a number) of

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Fig. 1 Google Books Ngram Viewer, frequency analysis concerning “Christine Ladd-Franklin” in comparison to “Charles Sanders Peirce,” using a yearly count of n-grams found in printed sources published between 1800 and 2019

some sort of item in the text. In the case of the Google Books Ngram Viewer, the text to be analyzed comes from the vast number of books in the public domain that Google scanned to populate its Google Books search engine (Koplenig 2015). Frequency-based tools and methods are, however, reliable only to a limited degree. The Google Books corpus, like many corpora, is restricted in its representativity. Gauging the representativity of corpora requires careful contextualization through structured metadata (i.e., who wrote what, when, and in which context). An excellent example to demonstrate the pitfalls of Google Books Ngram Viewer is, for example, entering the keywords “Christine Ladd-Franklin” and “Charles Sanders Peirce” (Fig. 1). The female American psychologist, logician, and mathematician Christine LaddFranklin is probably most known for her theory of color vision, and work with vision in general, together with Hermann von Helmholtz, among others. During her studies at Johns Hopkins, she published several papers in the American Journal of Mathematics, but it was while she was there that the work of Charles S. Peirce peeked her interest in symbolic logic. In fact, she completed a dissertation on the subject of algebra of logic that was published in 1883 (Ladd 1893; Ladd-Franklin 1883). Despite fulfilling the requirements for a Ph.D., she was not granted it until 1926. Christine Ladd-Franklin’s remarkable achievements – against the odds of her social position, opposition from universities, and individual psychologists – have been well remembered by historians of women scientists and writers. Too often, however, her deserved place in history of philosophy and science textbooks is forgotten. This applies not least to their joint work with Charles Sanders Peirce with whom she published a joint entry on the logic term “Universe of Discourse” in Mark Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (Peirce and Ladd-Franklin 1902). In contrast to Christine Ladd-Franklin, her colleague Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) is today considered one of the most famous logicians of the nineteenth

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century and known as a father of pragmatism in philosophy. Peirce is credited with a number of striking discoveries in formal logic and foundational mathematics, nearly all of which came to be appreciated only long after he died, e.g., existential graphs, a diagrammatic notation for the predicate calculus. However, as Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, among others, has shown, “the unpublished Peirce–Ladd-Franklin correspondence provides equally important insights into the development of theories of logic and meaning, science and reasoning, and language and intelligence. Taking Ladd-Franklin’s contributions into account puts the received historiography on modern logic, semiotics, pragmatism, and linguistic philosophy in a new light” (Pietarinen 2013, 139). If one compares the frequency distribution to the names “Christine LaddFranklin” and “Charles Sanders Peirce,” one notices the frequency with which Peirce’s name appears is significantly higher over the maximal period 1800–2019 than the frequency with which Ladd-Franklin’s name occurs. Furthermore, a sharp increase in the frequency distribution of the name Peirce can be observed from about 10 years after Peirce’s death. This is not the case for the name of LaddFranklin. Instead, the frequency is much higher for Ladd-Franklin at the time of her creative period. A possible conclusion that one might draw from this analysis is obvious: The fact that Ladd-Franklin’s work was reviewed and discussed during her lifetime but forgotten and ignored after her death, in sharp contrast to the work of Peirce, confirms Margaret W. Rossiter’s observation of a patriarchal history and philosophy of science, known as Matilda effect. Here, too, it is important to bear in mind that no facts can be derived from statistics alone. The interpreter of any statistics should have the appropriate background knowledge and take the risk of potential biases into account. And, of course, it is important to bear in mind that a regularity must not be inferred from a single example. Instead, only a significantly high range of cases allows a generalization. In addition, the following factors should be considered: the use of different language corpora, cross-checks on different corpora from the same language, word inflections, synonyms, and a standardization procedure that accounts for both the influx of data and unequal weights of word frequencies. Applying and particularly combining these procedures increase the reliability of results and prevent authors from deriving wrong assumptions (Younes and Reips 2019). On this basis, social network analysis techniques offer many new insights into women’s role within diverse collaboration patterns in the academic community. Sharing women’s history through digital history holds particularly compelling methodological and epistemological characteristics for a feminist approach, challenging at the same time the hegemonic power relations by problematizing dominant discourses within and outside of academia. The overreaching goal of such approaches is not just to recover the history of women scientists and philosophers but to develop new perspectives on our past, by involving better contextualization through structured metadata. Unfortunately, a gender-sensitive digital history is more a programmatic goal than reality. Once again, in the field of digital history, the Matilda effect becomes

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particularly evident. Online databases, digital mapping tools, or Google statistics are by no means neutral. Visualization often veils rather than explains data and reinforces power structures and canonizations instead of critically questioning them. The evaluation of the sources with digital methods has shown the bias in the methods themselves and raised the question of how digital methods can be made useful for a gender-sensitive history (Paju et al. 2020; Leon 2018). Bias can emerge from many factors, including but not limited to unintended or unanticipated use or decisions relating to the way data are available, collected, selected, interpreted, and evaluated. Bias in the history and philosophy of science may be minimized by expanding inclusion and to produce more reliable information about those female philosophers and scientists who have not been recognized on the WWW or in books. The importance of digital editions of women’s works has long been recognized as a means to foster a more diverse and inclusive history and philosophy of science, not to forget to mention the intended increase representation of women on the Wikipedia platform. The challenge for a digital gendersensitive approach goes further than sharing previously untold stories of women from around the world. The challenge lies in making women visible in two respects: women as subjects, i.e., as active agents of scientific progress and research, and as objects of science, i.e., as objectified images, which science has historically produced. Sad as it is, there is a certain irony to the story. For this research program is by no means new but ties in with that of the early feminist history of science (Richardson 2010). Gender equality is not achieved in the historiography of science until there is a balanced proportion of historical work on the scientific legacy of both women and men, not only quantitatively but qualitatively. This requires more than feminist history and historiography of science that women’s history and gender studies are capable of achieving. It requires the involvement of experts from the history of science from all subjects and disciplines worldwide. This chapter, like so many papers and books before it, could only make a plea for this, knowing full well that its focus on the Anglophone world and the limitations of its own knowledge meant that it could not even live up to its own claim.

Conclusion The overarching objective of this chapter was the overarching goal of the chapter was to make clear why gender and diversity have always played an important role in the history of science and in critical reflections on the way we do history of science. In a retrospective of women’s and gender studies, it was argued that the debates on equality and diversity have their origins in the women’s movement or women’s rights movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was also outlined why this movements did not lead to a paradigm shift in the historiography of science produced from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. The patriarchal structures in the historiography of science at that time, which were deeply rooted in social and political frameworks, were too powerful, the emerging field of

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women’s studies too weak to achieve a cultural change globally and locally. Even today, women’s studies, enriched by gender and diversity studies, face numerous challenges that are deeply interwoven with the question of how history and historiography of science should be practiced and taught. In order to be able to address most of these challenges, it is important to understand that these questions are ultimately questions of the ethics of science and research. Most notably, this is one of the lessons from the history of science. Almost thirty years ago, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt stated: “Equity and fairness are fundamental for most historians who explore the participation of women in science” (Kohlstedt 1995, 39).

Cross-References ▶ Historical Epistemology: A German Connection ▶ Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History: Toward a Rapprochement Between Disciplines That Never Ruptured ▶ Historiography of Science and the Relationship Between History and the History of Science ▶ Postcolonial and Decolonial Historiography of Science ▶ Science, Religion, and the Creation of Historiographical Categories ▶ The Emergence of a Sophisticated Historiography of Science in Continental Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflections on the Possibilities for a Historical Historiography of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historiography of Science in the Light of Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historiography as a Concept of History: Toward a “Historiographical Operation” of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Theoretical Reflection to Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter establishes a theoretical reflection on the scientific field of the historiography of science as a fundamental element for a critical understanding of the development and dynamics of science and its history. To reflect theoretically on the historiography of science means to think beyond the specific historiographical currents of science, involving aspects of research and debates in the history of science that have developed over more than a century. We propose a reflection based on the use of historiographical tools that enables us to think about the “writing of history” of science, problematized by the complexity of historical (or scientific-historical) sources. Thus, the focus is on the past and the possible fissures provoked by recent questions and discontents to write, rewrite, deconstruct, or re-signify this past. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, as a concept of history, historiography does not conceive “writing” as a simple historiographical report of the historical “fact,” which the historiography of science does not do in practical terms. However, it still seems to lack theoretical

A. M. R. S. Vieira (*) Federal University of Minas Gerais – UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_31

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reflections on how (not on what) the history of science is written. The double assignment of the historiography of science, on the one hand, enables the analysis of the different ways of writing the history of science (and of the authors themselves) and, on the other, questions the theoretical and methodological scope of the different models created from the narratives of the history of science. However, more than that, without losing sight of history and its historiographical perspective, this theoretical reflection can unfold in a third assignment in which the theoretical analytics of the historiography of science would work as locus, space of tension, and propitious convergence that, through the “historiographical operation of science,” could propose, from interrelations and intercrosses, the interdisciplinary and complex critical analysis involving the history of science field. Keywords

Historiography of science · Historiography · History of science · History · Theory

Introduction The exercise of thinking about the status of the historiography of science tends to lead us to the historiographical practice and the craft of the historian, who, according to Hobsbawm (1995), has the role of “remembering what others forget,” visiting and revisiting the past, and preserving the memory considering the respective historical time. However, historians do not accomplish this process as simple memorialists or compilers but through a “writing of history,” in this case, the history of science, submitted to historiographical technique and critical analysis. The relevance of the humanities for science, in particular the role of history beyond its limited use in historical contextualization, promotes openings for questioning science itself and broadens our view of it as a human activity that impacts nature and subverts the artificial separation between human and natural history. In effect, such an approach makes it possible to obtain new insights into the Nature of Science, its historical-epistemological perspective, its dynamics, and its complexity through the critical and problematized analysis of the different historiographical paths. Historiography means the “writing of history,” but it is not restricted to the scientific and historical report alone; it also has the purpose of critical analysis of scientific production, whether it be of science, the history of science, or the historiography of science. Historiography is expected to take place in a problematized way based on its complexity. Such an analysis focuses on the near or distant past from the perspective of recent questions and concerns in an endeavor to write, rewrite, deconstruct, or re-signify that past. From this angle, what is usually called the “historiography of science” is represented by the “writing of the history of science,” sometimes referred to as the

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“writing of science” (which, in this latter case, would be the history of science) in which the demarcation limits are tenuous and get mixed up. It has undoubtedly been produced since the birth of the discipline history of science in the nineteenth century. Notably, in 1833, albeit unsuccessfully, the founder of positivism Auguste Comte called for the creation of the chair of “a general history of science” at the Collège de France. However, an issue present since its inception and capable of impacting historiography is the existence of a history of science marked by a kind of “absence of history,” operating outside history tout court and eclipsing central concepts of the theory of history, such as narrative and historical time. Initially, however, it is relevant to ask: what is this alliance between writing and the history of science that culminates in the historiography of science? A brief analysis confirms the existence of this robust alliance, considering the extensive and diversified historiographical production of science and the fruitful métier of historians of science coming from the most varied fields of knowledge. However, it is an alliance that sometimes seems fragile in view of the paucity of theoretical and conceptual reflections on the historiography of science and “writing,” disregarding the relationship between history and history of science and the place of history in the history of science (Vieira 2021). Therefore, the strengthening of this alliance involves reflections on theoretical concepts concerning the historiography of science; historiographical currents of science; possibilities for the constitution of the scientific field; theory, methodology, limits, and potentialities; theoretical and methodological uses or nonuse of historiography (of history in its broad sense) by the historiography of science; the analysis of “writing of the history of science” without the use of the theoretical concepts of history; the narrative of the history of science; non-sayings in the history of science; and the impacts of the historiography of science on the epistemology and the demarcation criteria of science and vice versa, among other possible and necessary reflections for the advancement of the historiography of science as a scientific field. The history of science and its historiography present very positive founding characteristics represented by the academic diversity of the historians of science, most of whom have a predominant background in physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics. Other historians of science, in smaller numbers, have backgrounds in history, philosophy, sociology, education, and interdisciplinarity fields. In his day, Thomas Kuhn defended that interdisciplinarity in his emblematic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. However, this essential academic diversity should not be authoritative for transposing theories and methodologies from the hard sciences to the history of science. Even if we consider sociology or philosophy, this transposition cannot occur. It is the history we must consider if the object of analysis is the past of the “writing of history of science,” the “scientific enterprise,” the “writing of science itself,” or even if it is the past of the sciences as history as analyzed by the physicist and historian of science Kostas Gavroglu (2007). Therefore, in addition to the objects and analysis of the sources, it is important to investigate whether the questions asked by the researcher are compatible with the

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historical scientific field of investigation.1 This means that they should be answered in the light of the theories and methodologies of the area of history, in this case the scientific field of historiography. Due to its interdisciplinary characteristic, the scientific field of historiography functions as a moving space constituted by struggles and tensions (Bourdieu 2004) and as a space for research and deepening concepts, theories, and methodologies, demarcating the historiography of science, which is a task that imposes itself. Therefore, the question that arises in the face of the relevant role of historiography around the understanding of science is to unveil, from theoretical reflections involving the relationship between history and history of science, possibilities for creating a genuinely historical historiography of science. Unlike the publications about the theoretical discussions on the historiography of science that is still in its consolidation process, there are many consolidated reflections and theoretical discussions about historiography stricto sensu or tout court (derived from history) in the scientific field of history. Despite the conceptual polysemy and its ambiguities,2 in general, historiography means the historian’s

In complex discussions, it is sometimes essential to highlight the obvious. Kuhn knew this. “I have, for example, repeatedly taught graduate seminars in which prospective historians and philosophers read and discussed the same classic works of science and philosophy. [. . .] Undoubtedly the two had looked at the same signs, but they had been trained (programmed, if you will) to process them differently. The professions are different, and they quite properly put different first things first. For the philosophers in my seminars the priority tasks were, first, to isolate the central elements of a philosophical position and, then, to criticize and develop them [. . .] historians, on the other hand, were concerned with the viable and the general only in the forms that had, in fact, guided the men they studied. Their first concern was to discover what each one had thought, how he had come to think it, and what the consequences had been for him, his contemporaries, and his successors” (Kuhn 1968/1977, 6–8). In the emblematic threeday-long interview Kuhn adds, “[. . .] when I read that lecture on the relationship between the history and philosophy of science, a philosopher came up to me afterwards and said, ‘But we have such good scholarship! We have such good scholars in the history of philosophy!’.” Kuhn agreed in part and replied: “Yes, but they are not doing history” (Kuhn 2000, 316). 2 “The term appeared in France in the Bescherelle of 1845 under the influence of the Polish historians Lelewel, Wronsky and Plebanski. It designates then ‘the art of writing history.’ From 1869 onward, the term was used in the sense of ‘historical literature,’ as used by the German school. Those who study historical literature fall into the field of the history of historiography, like the German Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung and the Italian Storia della storiografia. The term ‘historiography,’ used in the field of research, appears in the supplements of the Littré of 1877. Historiography is defined there as the ‘literary history of the books of history,’ a definition retaken in the Supplements to the Dictionary of the French language in 1886. [. . .] In the 8th edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy, ‘historiography’ means ‘collection of works by historiographers’” (Zeller 2021). “Le terme apparaît en France dans le Bescherelle de 1845 sous l’influence des historiens polonais Lelewel, Wronsky et Plebanski. Il désigne alors ‘l’art d’écrire l’histoire’. À partir de 1869 le terme se diffuse dans le sens de ‘littérature historique,’ employé par l’école allemande. Ceux qui étudient la littérature historique s’inscrivent dans le domaine de l’histoire de l’historiographie, à l’image de la Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung allemande et de la Storia della storiografia italienne. Le terme d’ ‘historiographie,’ utilisé dans le sens de domaine de recherche, apparaît dans les suppléments du Littré de 1877. L’historiographie y est définie comme l’ ‘histoire littéraire des livres d’histoire,’ définition reprise dans les Suppléments au Dictionnaire de la langue française en 1886. [. . .] Dans la 8e édition du Dictionnaire de l’Académie française,‘historiographie’ a le sens de Recueil d’ouvrages d’ historiographes” (Zeller 2021). 1

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narrative (rerum gestarum) of the set of facts and events of the past (res gestae) (Aróstegui 2006, 28). It also means the examination of the different discourses on the historical method and the different modes of writing history (Bourdé and Martin 1983). However, above all, it means “history writing’ (Walch 1990, 13). For Le Goff (1990), since the early twentieth century, historiography has been developing as a “branch of historical science that studies the evolution of historical science itself” (Le Goff 1990, 7). Historiography has the task of situating “the discourses and practices of historians in their societies,” taking care to “relate their writings to contexts, scholarly struggles, political issues, social worlds.”3 In France, the founders of the Methodical School, Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, members of the beginning of the process of making history scientific (later combated by the Annales movement), referred to the “historiographer” as one who has the activity of writing the history of his time or of previous times. Still, concerning French historiography, the English historian Peter Burke (1990) argues that the Annales movement represented the French revolution of historiography, in which the most significant contribution of its founders, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, was the diversification of historiography. According to Burke, of “the intellectual production in the field of historiography in the twentieth century, an important part of the most innovative, noteworthy, and significant has originated in France” (Burke 1990, 12). Concerning historiography stricto sensu, which is entirely developed as a scientific field, the use of the concepts of history, historicity, historiography, and history of historiography, as well as what occurs in the historiography of science, although distinct, is often confused and interpenetrated, without, however, losing their identity. We see an example in Michel de Certeau (1975/2011a), who uses the word history in the sense of historiography4 to express the historiographical practice, the “making of history” and the “writing of history.” In general, historiography means rerum gestarum, the “writing of history” in its past, involving subjects, institutions, narratives, discourses, and economic and social power relations. In other terms, the object is history itself or what has been written about it. Historiography is the field of historical research that investigates the history of history itself (some classify it as “history of historiography”). From the theoretical point of view, reflections on the writing of history and the historical object have led the researcher to revisit the history with a critical attitude concerning the sources that support, it basing himself on new sources in conjunction

The author explains that “the discourses and practices of historians in their societies” [. . .] “relate their writings to contexts, to academic struggles, to political issues, to social worlds” (Offenstadt 2011). “les discours et les pratiques des historiens dans leurs sociétés” [. . .] “rattacher leurs écrits à des contextes, à des luttes académiques, à des enjeux politiques, à des mondes sociaux” (Offenstadt 2011). 4 In note 2 of Chap. II, “The Historiographical Operation” of the book. The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau clarifies: “Once and for all, I want to specify that I use the word history in the sense of historiography. That is, I understand by history a practice (a discipline), its result (a discourse), and its relationship.” Cf. “Making history. . .” (de Certeau 1975/2011a, 109). 3

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with the existing ones. In addition, however, historiographical theoretical reflection is constitutive of the historiographical practice itself, not only to understand how history was written or is written but to critically question why it was written in this way or that, moving from a “narrative history” to a “problem history.”5 In effect, the critical analysis of practices, discourses, objects, methods, tools, and sources takes place relationally with the authors, scientists, society, institutions, places, uses, and discourses, in a given temporality. Just as history should not be thought of without knowledge of its own history, so the history of science invites researchers to revisit and question the history of science (and also science) itself. In other words, it is an invitation to revisit its objects, concepts, theories, and methodologies, interrogating the sources and inserting the history of its own discipline into a historical and interdisciplinary perspective, thereby ensuring one of the main characteristics of historiography. The relevant role of the historiography of science is not limited to the analysis of the historical narratives of science but embraces the writing and narrative itself, proving to be effective in questioning the models, worldviews, epistemological conceptions, goals, potentialities, and limits imbricated in the various social, economic, institutional, and epistemological dimensions of science. Therefore, the historiography of science will be more effective the closer it is to historiography tout court.

Reflections on the Possibilities for a Historical Historiography of Science Historiography can potentially analyze and report the object and transform or re-signify it. Thomas Kuhn, in his masterpiece, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2009), gives prominence to “a role for history” as being able to “produce a decisive transformation in the image of science” (Kuhn 1962/1970, 1) at the time, with the historian having the task of producing the change through historiography. According to Kuhn, “concerned with scientific development, the historian then appears to have two main tasks” (Kuhn 1962/1970, 2): to situate, chronologically, the “discoveries” or “inventions” of “each contemporary scientific fact, law and theory” and “he must describe and explain the congeries of error, myth and superstition” (Kuhn 1962/1970, 2) accumulated by the history of science, promoting the primordial revisionism and re-signification of the history of science through historiography.

The “problem-history” occupies the central core of the new historiography proposed by the Annales movement, which inspired historians such as Peter Burke and many others outside France. Burke clarifies that this “new kind of history,” in addition to problem-history, promoted two other historiographical revolutions: the broadening of the object to “the history of all human activities” and not just political history and interdisciplinarity, that is, “collaboration with other disciplines, such as geography, sociology, psychology, economics, linguistics, social anthropology, and so many others” (Burke 1990, 12). 5

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Kuhn points out as an appropriate path for the operationalization of the necessary change in the image of science, investment in a “new historiography” to replace the “older historiographic tradition” (Kuhn 1962/1970, 3) that represented the fight against positivism and logical empiricism, which reverberated so strongly. According to Kuhn, the new French historiography of science described by the “writings of Alexandre Koyré”6 and its core composed of Émile Meyerson, Hélène Metzger, and Anneliese Maier,7 influenced by Gaston Bachelard, demonstrated that “science does not seem altogether the same enterprise as the one discussed by writers in the older historiographic tradition” (Kuhn 1962/1970, 3). Implicitly, “these historical studies suggest the possibility of a new image of science (. . .) making explicit some of the new historiography’s implications” (Kuhn 1962/1970, 3). Undoubtedly, Thomas Kuhn’s thought was and continues to be a fundamental turning point for thinking about the role of history in science and a starting point for reflecting on the possible theoretical and methodological paths for the historiography of science. Beyond The Structure of the Scientific Revolution, in the 1970s, Kuhn went further in his reflections on history and historiography. He brought to light structural aspects such as the fact that the history of science belongs to a field distinct from history, with journals, academic societies, organized disciplines, and congresses around each of them. The North American thinker argues that the history of science is not a very different activity from “other kinds of history,” although, in his view, there is a “historian’s neglect of science and its history” (Kuhn 1971/ 1977, 147). Kuhn recognizes this debate’s relevance to the field’s advancement by analyzing the issue in the article “The Relations between History and History of Science,” published in 1971, and later in the book The Essential Tension of 1977. Kuhn maintains that although the history of science has its specificities, such as, for example, devoting its activity to “a special group – the scientists” (Kuhn 1977, 151), “the history of science is not in principle a narrower specialty than, say, political, diplomatic, social, or intellectual history. Nor are its methods distinct from the ones employed in those fields” (Kuhn 1977, 151). As we can see, this is not a new debate;8 it is still very current. The discussion about the relationship between history and the history of science is more than a American philosopher Gary Gutting points out that Koyré’s “influence on him [Kuhn] was historiographical rather than philosophical” (Gutting 2002, 53). 7 Although the historians mentioned by Kuhn are historians of science, they all belonged to the same Parisian intellectual circle formed around the Revue de Synthèse (1900), whose main objective was interdisciplinarity in search of the integration of history, with the participation of the founding historians of the Annales movement, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, with several areas, including the natural sciences. The philosopher and historian Henri Berr (1863–1954), a protagonist in this intellectual exchange, also founded the Centre International de Synthèse, in which researchers from different fields also participated in the Semaines de Synthèse (Maia 2013; Vieira 2014). 8 In an article published in 1920, the American historian of science Harry E. Barnes pointed out the lack of dialogue, interest, and mutual cooperation between historians and the history of science. (Barnes 1920, p. 122). On the other hand, the American chemist and historian of science Allen G. Debus, from the analysis of several classics of historians of science, defended the idea of the “History of Science as a branch of the field of History” (Debus 1991, 3). 6

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century old, but it is still eclipsed by debates about the role of history (most often confused with the history of science) for science. Nevertheless, it is a fruitful discussion that, if better explored, could generate good results. Inspired by French historiography, Kuhn pointed the ways, but more than half a century since the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has not been enough to advance discussions to consolidate theoretical issues about the historiography of science based on historiography stricto sensu. This approximation process aims to consolidate the scientific field of the historiography of science as a space for theoretical and methodological issues. Indeed, it should be noted that much of the historiography of science produced in the second half of the twentieth century was within the general parameters of the new historiography advocated by Kuhn. However, much of that historiographical development did not adequately contemplate debates inherent to history or historiography tout court. The same distancing also occurs with the sociology of science, as exemplified by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar in the book Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, in which the investigation is theoretically and methodologically based on the scientific field of the sociology of science. Like the history of science, perhaps the historiography of science is not yet being used to its full potential. It still seems to be primarily endeavoring to contextualize scientific events and their historical passages and narrate the history of “eminent” institutions and scientists (Kragh 2007, 187). Unfortunately, it often reinforces the “history of the victors” that history has identified and fought against. A new historiography of science that is critical and openly problematizes the writing of history of science and the craft of the historian of science and, of course, promotes reflection on the theoretical and methodological bases of historiography would be fundamental for the continuous revision of the writing of history of science. Unfortunately, the perspective of science with a scientism character is still present in fields such as science education.9 Thus, the goal here is to conduct theoretical reflections on the scientific field of history and historiography of science, considering the relationship between history and history of science based on tools and theories inherent to historiography tout court, and especially on the “historiographical operation” proposed by Michel de Certeau. French historiography has other influential authors for reflection on the writing of history and even on the concept of “historiographical operation,” among them Paul Ricoeur, who classifies it into three phases: “the documentary phase, the explanatory/comprehensive phase, the representative phase (writing/reading)” (Reis 2010, 46). However, the choice of the historian Michel de Certeau to promote

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Since the last decade of the twentieth century with the article Science Teaching: The Role of History and Philosophy of Science (1994) by Michael Matthews and more intensely in the first decade of the twenty-first century with the publication of the literature review The Nature of Science Education: A bibliography (Bell, R. Abd-el-khalick, F.; Lederman, N. G.; Mccomas, W. F.), specialists in science education have advocated the insertion of philosophy of science and history of science in science teaching to aid the understanding of the Nature of Science and make science teaching more attractive. See also Vieira (2022) and Matthews (2014).

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theoretical reflections on the historiography of science has to do with the emphasis he gives to the practice and the social place (next to the narrative), which are essential dimensions to “make science” and “think science and its history” also from a lived perspective, while the other authors concentrate more on narrative and hermeneutics. In this sense, it is relevant to highlight the trends and currents in the historiography of science and their tensions involving history and the history of science to enable theoretical reflections on the historiography of science. Thus, we can verify the viability of a “historiographical operation of science,” in this case, with a Certeaunian bias, as an element to help consolidate the role of history in the historiography of science. Indeed, the historiography of science is an essential locus for theoretical, conceptual, and methodological discussions about the writing and narrative of science and its history.

Historiography of Science in the Light of Historiography The paths of the history of science and history stricto sensu, although autonomous, are complex and, in their dynamics, intersect and oscillate between distances and approximations that change with every new “discovery,” every new trace, or new look at the past or every scientific and historical-social change. Exactly the same process occurs with historiographical currents. Historiographical displacements are much more dynamic and complex than traditional positivist or even anti-positivist historiography presents them and are represented by positions of both ruptures and continuities. Such displacements are not fixed, empty, mechanical, cumulative, or revolutionary structures. Instead, they are complex spaces of tension, dialogues, consensuses, disagreements, exchanges, transpositions, and struggles, where theories, methodologies, and concepts, simultaneously or not, make up the historiographical trends in multiple spaces and temporalities, coexist, or are silenced. From among the various currents of the historiography of science, we have didactically separated two centrals “historiographical trends,”10 namely, scientism and anti-scientism. The scientism historiographical trend is represented by George Sarton’s “historiography of the positivist science” and the Vienna Circle’s “logical positivism.” The “anti-scientism historiographical trend,” on the other hand, is represented by the “sociological historiography of science” of authors such as Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, Robert Merton, David Bloor, Barry Barnes (Strong Program), and Bruno Latour. In this anti-scientism historiography, we also insert the “historical epistemology” and the “discontinuity historiography” of Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Alexandre Koyré, and their Parisian nucleus of historians and philosophers of science. Finally, there is the “historical historiography 10

We have avoided terms like historiographical currents, paradigms, schools, and movements, using “historiographical trends” because it is broader and encompasses all the others.

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of science,” whose leading representatives are Thomas Kuhn and James Bryant Conant. Conant is the author of the 1947 book, On Understanding Science: An Historical Approach. Paolo Rossi is also representative, especially with the book The Birth of Modern Science. Therefore, the anti-scientism historiographical trend represented by the “sociological historiography of science,” the “historical epistemology,” and the “historical historiography of science” contributed to the development of social-historical historiography that rose strongly after 1962 when Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared. However, the positivist historiographical current that emerged in the nineteenth century, starting from the scientific process of the human sciences inspired by Auguste Comte’s positivism, was based on the inductivist model structured on the idea of “social physics.” In other words, Comte conditioned the analysis of social phenomena to the light of physical and chemical elements. The positivist basis in the history of science not only constituted its founding structure but remained strong until the 1960s (and still today in some historiographies) with the contribution of the Belgian chemist and historian of science, Georges Sarton. He was an outspoken supporter of Comtean positivism, a Harvard professor,11 and founder of the journal Isis (1912). Sarton conceived science as “a systematized positive knowledge” (Debus 1991, 3 and 13), in which science and the human spirit would submit to the “law of three states” proposed by Comte to develop toward the positive state in a cumulative, linear, and teleological way. The logical empiricism current of the historiography of science, which originated with the members of the Vienna Circle in the early twentieth century, gained strength with the publication of its Manifesto in 1929, written by Rudolf Carnap in collaboration with Hans Hahn and Otto Neurath. That current had several impacts on the historiography of science and the history of science in Europe. Still, in the interwar period, because of the displacement of its members caused by the political situation in the face of the Nazi ascension, logical empiricism came to the United States with greater force against metaphysics in science. This movement explained the scientific conception of the world based on a unified language of logic deprived of any speculative philosophy or subjective psychological element. Positivism and logical empiricism guided their history and philosophy of science by having as central tenets objectivity and the search for truth. Thus, they allied with the Cartesian-Newtonian “explanatory” thought of science, which was in force for over three centuries. That perspective defended the neutrality of scientists,

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Sarton, a professor at Harvard from 1940 to 1951, had Thomas Kuhn as a student. Although Kuhn recognized Sarton’s importance as a historian of science, in his opinion, “there was a sort of history of science to do that Sarton wasn’t doing. [. . .] There were a number of other people who taught it within one or another of the science departments. But what they taught often was not quite history – in my terms, at least, not quite history; it was textbook history” (Kuhn 2000, 283).

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reinforcing scientism in everyday practice. Still today, we can find aspects of this approach, especially in the history of science developed in the respective fields of study (physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology). The social and historical current in the historiography of science, which emerged long before its most illustrious representative, Thomas Kuhn, had its initial path paved by quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. The new physics science was initiated in the late nineteenth century, with its apex at the threshold of the twentieth century with Max Planck and Albert Einstein. Shocking the dominant tradition and its absolute certainties, the theory of relativity, in which Albert Einstein departed from the same quantum hypothesis as Max Planck to solve the problem of the photoelectric effect in 1905, was welcomed by Bachelard as the beginning of a “new scientific spirit” (Bachelard 2007 [1938], 9). This social and historical current promoted the rupture of absolute certainties in science (also in epistemology and history of science) when it included the observer and rejected the neutrality of science. This new approach has brought about substantial changes in the concepts of space and time. According to the French historian Lucien Febvre, cofounder with Marc Bloch of the Annales movement, the “drama of relativity came to shake, to shock, the whole edifice of the sciences” (Febvre 1989, 35–36) (my translations), namely, natural sciences and also humanities. Of course, that includes history and historiography. In some circumstances, the deconstruction of the dominant image of science, supposedly neutral and bearer of absolute truths that remained hegemonic throughout the modern era until the early twentieth century, remains alive. Such an image of science is still present, especially in textbooks and curricula for basic education, as well as for society in general, outside the specialized academic circles that have history or philosophy of science in their curriculum. This ongoing process of deconstruction of the image of science has not established a break from the previous paradigm. The hegemonic conception of science suffered its first shake with quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, which inserted the observer as a participant in the scientific process, and, perhaps, the second significant shake occurred with the insertion of the social-historical perspective consolidated (but not inaugurated) by Kuhnian thought in the second half of the twentieth century. However, as the scientific field is a space of disputes and tensions, resistance was and still is present to provoke historiography to expel this “foreign body” capable of tarnishing science, still conceived with a mechanistic bias and not as a living and dynamic organism. Several defense mechanisms were created to protect the scientific edifice, such as the dichotomy of internalism versus externalism or Hans Reichenbach’s context of discovery and context of justification; Imre Lakatos’ “hard core” unreachable by “external” aspects. We can also cite the case of Thomas Kuhn’s history of science and the Strong Program, accused of relativism. Throughout the history of science, criticism of relativism has worked as a defender and preserver of the dominant image of science. Kuhn pointed out that the appropriate path for operationalizing the necessary change capable of impacting the dominant image of science, which is certainly less and less scientific, is through, among other things, the then “new historiography” practiced Alexandre Koyré’s Parisian nucleus. Kuhn attributes to this historiographical current the merit of having taught him to think differently from the conceptions

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of the history of science in vogue at the time. However, this new French historiography of science would only be a part of the project of changing the image of science. Kuhn highlighted the relevance of interdisciplinarity, which he used in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when he mobilized authors from various traditions. Kuhn cited some of them in his preface: Jean Piaget; B. L. Whorf, on the effect of language on world conceptions; the Gestalt psychologists; Ludwik Fleck, for having anticipated many of his ideas on the sociology of the scientific community; A. O. Lovejoy, for having contributed to the formation of the conception of the history of scientific ideas; W. V. O. Quine, for having provided access to the puzzles of the analyticsynthetic distinction; and, of course, the leading historians of the French current, Alexandre Koyré, Émile Meyerson, Hélène Metzger, and Anneliese Maier. The search for the consolidation of the social-historical role of science responsible for promoting new openings in the historiography of science, brought about by Kuhn, does not mean that the history of science or historiography of science is mediated by the theoretical and methodological scope of the historical field. Where are the historians and their conceptions of history? The consequences of this absence lead us to question: which theory should guide the writing of the history of science? Indeed, the theories and methodologies are according to the analysis that is intended to be made of the object. If it is historical knowledge, the object is the past. It is expected to be interdisciplinary with different areas and to use the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological apparatus of historiography. Despite the interdisciplinarity and the reciprocal impacts, in the face of the diversity of the themes treated, it is quite usual for the history of science to be confused with other fields, such as philosophy of science or sociology of science, sometimes disrespecting the conceptual and theoretical-methodological autonomy of each one and in relation to the history of science. Kuhn himself anticipated this issue when analyzing the relevance of the history of science by differentiating it from the philosophy of science, the sociology of science, and the theory of science. For him, the impacts of the history of science on the fields are indirect and contribute to the promotion of a greater understanding of scientific activity, with “the philosophy of science [being today] the field in which the impact of the history of science is most apparent” (Kuhn 1968/1977, 121). For Kuhn, A second field in which the history of science is likely to have increasing effects is the sociology of science. Ultimately, neither the concerns nor the techniques of that field need to be historical. But in the present underdeveloped state of their specialty, sociologists of science can well learn from history something about the shape of the enterprise they investigate. (Kuhn 1968/1977, 121)

Finally, Kuhn refers to the impacts that the field of history of science would have on the “science of science”12 or theory of science, which represents the “theoretical analysis of the structure and behavior of science itself” (Kuhn 1968/1977, 122).

According to Condé, “Kuhn may not have known the article in which Ludwik Fleck uses the expression ‘science of science,’ and thus he took as a reference the expression used by Price (1966), twenty years after Fleck, but in a sense very close to that of the Polish thinker” (Condé 2017, 66).

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It is also interesting to highlight conceptual aspects of what “social” and “historical” mean, concepts sometimes used indistinctly by the history of science, but, if considered from their respective fields, they change the relationship with the object and the form of analysis. The historical and the social, in analytical, conceptual, and methodological terms (they belong to distinct scientific fields), have a fundamental difference. This difference was the result of one of the most significant academic debates that took place in the mid-twentieth century between the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) and the Annales historian Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) about “historical time.” In 1949, the French anthropologist LéviStrauss, one of the representatives of the structuralist current, published the manifesto “History and Ethnology,” republished in 1958 as an introduction to the book Structural Anthropology, in which he heavily criticized history. According to LéviStrauss, unlike the natural sciences, history did not have a scientific model capable of guaranteeing the objectivity of the results. In response to Lévi-Strauss’ article, Fernand Braudel published in 1958 in the Revue des Annales the article-manifesto “History and Social Sciences – The long duration.” He presented a defense of the scientific status of history, precisely establishing that the “historian’s greatest trump card: time, not that of the traditional event/dating pair, but that of long duration, which conditions even the most immutable structures explored by the anthropologist” (Dosse 2012, 71). For Braudel, this is what establishes the difference between history and sociology. The historian’s craft somehow begins and ends with time, and the historian’s time is distinct from the sociologist’s time. The “time of the historian is the measure.” Therefore, it is impossible to escape from the time of the world, which is not, however, just the short time of the “event” (histoire événementielle) nor the time of the immutable, eternal social “structure” but the time of “long duration” in which event and structure intertwine in a “dialectic of duration.” So, it is because history works with the plurality of times and durations of complex social life with a view to an articulation that considers the “social durations, the multiple and contradictory times of men’s lives” (Braudel 1965). Thus, it is not enough merely to produce historiography of science because, for it to be sufficiently historical, it requires a specific theoretical reflection on the “historical making” of the concepts and methodologies that define it. For example, the Italian philosopher and historian Paolo Rossi uses the lenses of history and does not limit himself to contextualization alone. From a historiographical perspective, Rossi (2001) critically deconstructs and problematizes the birth of modern experimental science, hitherto seen essentially from an epistemological perspective, demonstrating that historical, social, and ontological dimensions of an epoch permeate the society and the individuals. Thus, Rossi integrates this approach into the historiographical analysis of modern science, which proves to be much more complex and plural than demonstrated by the historiography of the time. Rossi is not content with the account of “facts” and events. He does not exalt the winners. Instead, he questions and problematizes science forged in the “bloody and muddy river of history” (Rossi 2001, 9). The historian tout court is aware of the intense theoretical and historiographical debates that began in the nineteenth century among German historicists and French

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historiographers, contrary to Auguste Comte’s positivism. Those debates still constitute the theoretical and historiographical basis of the historian’s craft. Historians are responsible for the history of a “narrated past” represented by the clipping concerning the “lived past.” Given that (in most cases) conscious selection, the historian leaves marks and silences capable of modifying the course of history when brought to the surface. The process evidences the historian’s presence and the certainty of his non-neutrality, allowing him to recognize himself and be recognized as part of the history produced. Not conforming to the “given” and establishing criticism are among the conditions for being a historian. This position has been taken because the scientific process of history around hermeneutics contradicts the mere registration and verification of facts; the problem-history and writing of history must be problematized as a way to decipher the traces of this Other, the past (de Certeau 2011b). Also, the singularity and unrepeatability of historical events are conditions of history assimilated by historiography. The official sources come stamped with doubts (Febvre 1989), contrary to what the historicists Leopold Von Ranke in Germany and Langlois and Seignobos in France with their Methodical School held, namely, that the “facts speak for themselves.” Dilthey (2010) argues that history is as scientific as the other sciences precisely because of its specificity of being particularizing and provisional, characteristic of the analysis of “men in time” (Bloch 1993). This critical historiography reveals, for example, the power devices correlated to the processes of knowledge constitution (knowledge-power), as well as the discursive practices and institutional disciplinary power disseminated throughout the social fabric of a regulatory and normative nature (Foucault 2004), as relevant elements of analysis that should be considered in the writing of history and history of science. The traditional historiography of science, often close to what was disseminated by “social physics” and logical empiricism, primarily until the mid-twentieth century, steeped in the scientific spirit of science itself, sought universal standards and repeatability tending toward reproduction, in conflict with the unrepeatability and particularizing bias of history. It chose to preserve historical memory through traditional writing even in the face of new sources, such as Isaac Newton’s manuscripts13 on alchemy, universal interpretation, theological controversies over the apocalypse, and occult wisdom. This knowledge, alien to official science, could shake the structure of scientific knowledge instead of opening itself to criticality through historiography and reveal cracks in science, compromising its “strong status” and objectivity, thus keeping away from the “phantom of relativism.”

13

According to Rossi (2001), the Royal Society refused to acquire his manuscripts with religious content upon Newton’s death and recommended the family not to show them to anyone. Also, the University of Cambridge, the British Museum, and the American universities of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton refused to acquire Newton’s manuscripts, all for the same reason: to preserve the Newtonian “image of science.” However, part of these manuscripts on alchemy, universal interpretation, theological controversies on the apocalypse, and occult wisdom “was acquired in 1936 by John Maynard Lord Keynes” (Rossi 2001, 408), and the State of Israel received most of them and, eighteen years after the acquisition, made them available at the University Library in Jerusalem.

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It so happens that the historiography of science is expected to do the same as historiography stricto sensu can do, because historiography is more than an activity of essentially critical history. Its historiographical revision should be accompanied by problematization, the possibility of expanding the historical sources, recognizing the provisional and not universality, and the temporal, theoretical, and methodological multiplicity. Consequently, it is also necessary to question, analyze, and reflect on the task of the historian of science. It is no longer about absolute truth, as the traditional historiography of science sought to be but about establishing provisional truths, incomplete in the face of the incapacity to reconstruct the Other (past) in its totality, and not to be reduced to a historiographical monism, since it is even more efficient when it reveals the complexity existing inside science.

Historiography as a Concept of History: Toward a “Historiographical Operation” of Science The historiographical question of science can be considered a critical activity with its starting and ending points in textual history and its historical-scientific traces. The focus of historiography is on the narrative of the history of science, its writing, its place of production, its practice, and its temporalities, whose past mediated by technique also demands reflection about the historian’s task. Indeed, there is not a single way to write history or history of science, but, perhaps, in the origin of the professionalization of the discipline of the history of science detached from the theoretical and methodological field of history, there was a germ that prevented the flourishing of a historiography of science genuinely historical in its way of doing and in its historiographical practice. To conceive that science and the history of science are historical is a path with no return, and this is a milestone for the historiography of science, especially that it be recognized as historical by the use of methods and theories. It is a commonplace in historiography stricto sensu, as it should also be in the historiography of science, that the possible way to make history is from the selection, the temporality, and its object, even if that object is nature. Everything is historical, including science and nature, which, situated in a temporality, have “lived” histories that are narrated and others that are clearly silenced. The Indian historian and subaltern studies scholar, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), in his article “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” demonstrates how geology and climate can help us to understand this temporal dimension of nature. Viewing science in its aspect as a human activity, he sustains that changes in nature, as in in the case of climate, are anthropogenic, derived from human actions, thereby breaking the boundary between “human history” and “natural history.” The historian Michel de Certeau leaves no doubt that the object of historiography is history. Therefore, the logos of the Other is the past (heterology). The past is the Other that is dead but still is there (de Certeau 1975/2011a). It is because it is neither possessed nor controlled. It escapes us. The past is unpredictable, unexpected, excluded, immigrant, and marginalized. The foreigner can assume multiple

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meanings and forms with other values, beliefs, habits, and knowledge. The past differentiates the present from it but maintains its primordial value of representing what is missing. In this sense, history is always ambivalent: the place it assigns to the past is equally a way of making room for a future (de Certeau 1975/2011a, 89). Thus, the historian (with specific training or not) has, in historiography, the task of making science and society historically “thinkable” and understandable. Namely, it is part of his or her craft of the narrative of knowledge that intends to apprehend the absent alterity, that which “has already passed” [a passé] but which still “bothers” the present and generates displacements. Nevertheless, how would it be possible to confer objectivity on and ensure the necessary distance for the métier of the historian of science? The methodological resource for analyzing the writing of history developed by Michel de Certeau called “historiographical operation” contributes not only to guaranteeing the scientific status of historiography but also to simplifying the question of how we give meaning to the Other (past). Based on the “social place,” the “practice,” and the “writing,” in the historiographical operation, the “writing of history” (in this case, the history of science), the analysis of this writing and the making of history happen, stem from the “heterology.” This heterology, in turn, is represented by two “supposedly distinct” places through the cut between past (historical-scientific event) and present (professional scientific research), based on the presence of an absence in which the past (the absent Other) reveals itself. For Certeau, the “social place” is essential to the historian’s practice, with a relevant role in historical research because it is impossible to think of history disconnected from a social place. In the same way, it is impossible to think of the historian disconnected from practice. The place of production (space-time) determines the relationship with the social body responsible for what is said and what is not said (silence provoked by the clippings). Among several possibilities, this place can be the laboratory, the scientific journal, the museum, the archives, and the academic institution that makes interlocution with peers possible. Indeed, there is no determinism since Certeau himself does not deny that it is possible to act on this space, modify it, and change its limits and possibilities (de Certeau 1975/2011a). In this social place, the interdictions or acceptances occur, but they will not necessarily be linked to nature, science, or epistemology since the historiographical making may be implicated with a place of political and economic production or power relations (Foucault, 2004). Dominique Pestre (1996) reminds us that modern science has always been linked to all kinds of power. Modern science has been carefully monitored by the constituted powers whose scientists have been at the service of princes, democratic and authoritarian states, and commercial, industrial, and military companies (Pestre 1996). All historiographical research is articulated to a social place represented by the weight that the institution and the social place of individuals and scientists (and of the historian himself) have on constructing the historian’s narrative. For example, when producing the historiography of science involving the scientific contributions of Isaac Newton, we must dedicate ourselves to the critical analysis of the impacts of his social place as president of the Royal Society for 24 years (1703–1727). It is necessary to investigate the hypothesis of the influence of this place on European,

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mainly British, intellectual and scientific life, in regard to the dissemination and consolidation of Newtonian thought and theories. According to Certeau, the institution is inscribed in a complex that allows only one type of production and forbids others. The place has the dual function of making certain research possible due to the common conjuncture and problems and, at the same time, making others impossible by assuming the role of censorship concerning the postulates present in the analysis. It is on the “combination between permission and interdiction” that the work that aims to modify it acts, and that may invert the order between the interdicted and the permitted. After going through the social place, which represents the first moment of the historiographical operation, Certeau explains that the researcher must concentrate on the second moment, that is, the analysis of the operation with the “practice,” considering that to “make history,” in this case, history of science, consists of scientific practice. Therefore, this scientific practice must be added to the production techniques and the social practice for writing organization to accomplish historiographical production (de Certeau 1975/2011a, 78) because historiography, even though it varies according to different contexts, is a practice inherent to the métier of the historian. Therefore, it must be mediated by the historians’ technique. The historian’s practice resembles that of a worker who, based on the selection of sources, critically promotes articulation between the lived and the narrated, the natural, and the cultural, considering that the very clipping and selection of sources are subject to the actions of the social place where the researcher is inserted (de Certeau 1975/ 2011a, 8 and 82). This means that the historian works on a material whose handling process must obey established rules, and it is up to him, through his practice, to transport it from the lived world or scientific practice to the historical field. According to Certeau, the mediation of writing by scientific practice in the light of theories avoids the production of dogmas with a tendency to the reproduction of absolute truths, as occurs in the scientistic bias of science, and contributes to the acceptance of results and provisional truths in science, nonetheless true for being provisional. Moreover, this understanding tends to minimize accusations of relativism by conceiving as being the natural result of research, the displacements of scientific-historical reality, nature, and scientific practice caused by historiography. Allied to the social place and the scientific and social practice is “writing,” which for historiography is the record of the absent lived past (the Other). It is the action of “content” over “form” that “ends up making history, as well as telling stories” (de Certeau 1975/2011a, 95 and 105). Writing is, in a way, collective since it results from academic validation and interlocution with peers, but, at the same time, it is the fruit of the choice and experiences of the writer and the social place to which he or she belongs. For Certeau, the writing of history remains controlled by the practices from which it results. The writing of history is itself a social practice that gives its reader a very determined place, in which “it is built in function of an institution” (de Certeau 1975/2011a, 66), and present from the methodology to the selection of sources since it is through it that the discipline is organized.

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The first imposition of writing consists in prescribing as a beginning what, in truth, is the point of arrival, whose true discourse particularizes and is provisional in the form of a narrative of the past, which it is not, but which would not be thinkable without writing. This simultaneously opens up space for the present. In other words, narrativity puts the dead, that is, the past, on stage and, paradoxically, “buries the dead, as a means of establishing a place for the living” (de Certeau 1975/2011a, 107). An emblematic example of the historiography of science that still echoes and aims to promote the burial of the dead as a way to establish a place for the living was the publication in 1947 of On Understanding Science: An Historical Approach, by James Bryant Conant, a chemist and historian of science. Conant dedicated the writing of the history of science to laypeople and nonscientists (project carried out at Harvard University in which Thomas Kuhn participated as a fellow) to positively disseminate science in the face of the episodes of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Besides writing, Conant’s scientific practice as a historian of science and the social practice of the world he lived in, together with the various social places he occupied in his “several lives,” illustrate the phases of the historiographical operation proposed by Certeau. In 1941, Conant participated in the Manhattan Project as a chemist and president of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). He remained in this position for most of the war as directly responsible for the work on the Uranium S-1 Committee. In 1946, in the postwar period, he assumed the presidency of the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to promote and control the development of atomic science and technology in peacetime. According to him, the postwar population needed to overcome the wave of pessimism and be enlightened as to the potentialities of science and atomic energy. He wanted to demonstrate that atomic energy was not only intended for the manufacture of nuclear weapons but also for the defense of the nation; his writing of the history of science aimed to bring science closer to society using the historical cases of science. In this way, the past of science, nature, and the history of science presents itself as a possibility always open to doubt and question. This past must be mediated by the use of the operation by the researcher, promoting an open and fluid locus for reflection and analysis of the problems concerning the past then “deformed” by distance and whose conceptual and theoretical-methodological apparatus has the attribution of “making present” the absence and challenging the established limits: Even if historiographical analysis postulates a continuity (genealogy), solidarity (filiation) or collusion (sympathy) between its operators and its objects, it establishes a difference between one and the other, marked, moreover, from the beginning, by a will to objectivity. The space it organizes is at the same time divided and hierarchized, comprising a “proper” (the present of practice) and an “other” (a studied “past”). On the one hand, such a boundary crosses the practice in which the research apparatus is distinguished from the material treated. On the other, the scriptural staging in which the discourse of interpretative knowledge dominates the past represented, quoted and known. (de Certeau 1975/2011a, 72 and 73)

In historiography, the operation transforms the “medium” and makes the organization the condition for a “transformation.” Thus, the combination between sources and techniques does not aim only to make documents speak or to give voice to

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silence; it means transforming something that occupied a specific position or role into another result, which through the historiographical operation operates the redistribution of space-time causing historiographical displacements. Just as in scientific research and history, historiography begins with the gesture of separating, gathering, and transforming into “documents” particular objects, artifacts, discoveries, and scientific inventions by distributing them in another way. According to Certeau, this attitude of taking from the lived world and transporting it to the narrated world consists in the production of documents by the simple fact of recopying, transcribing, or photographing the objects while changing their place and status. The ethnographic work of science established by Bruno Latour and Woolgar seems to describe what Certeau says when they clarify that their first contact with the laboratory allowed them to verify the central role of what they call “literary inscription.” For Latour and Woolgar, in the laboratory, “documents of a diverse nature are permanently produced, to operate a transformation between various types of statements, a transformation that gives or subtracts the status of scientific fact” (my translation) (Latour and Woolgar 1997, 158). According to the authors, a laboratory is a place of “literary inscription” where the production of articles is one of the highlights of the scientific research process and constitutes an “essential purpose” in the scientists’ activity. Undoubtedly, the literary inscription constitutes a relevant object and a source for the historiography of science produced in a particular spacetime and should be subjected to criticism and analyzed from an interdisciplinary perspective. Furthermore, it should be subjected to potential deconstruction (without determinism) that will culminate in historiographical writing or rewriting of science. Very close to the conclusions reached by the French historian Lucien Febvre, cofounder of the historical current of the Annales, according to Burke (1990), the “historiographical revolution” of history – also the historiography of science whose objects are the history of science and science itself – is constituted as a human activity subject to hermeneutic interpretation. Thus, just like historiography stricto sensu, the historiography of science must submit its scientific-historical sources to problematized criticism considering aspects beyond the analyzed formulas, theories, and epistemologies around science and the scientists. Also, part of this historical approach is the expanded use of scientific-historical sources, such as epistles, notes, and diaries. Thus, it must be open to new disciplinary alliances, expanding the frontiers, which is also a revolution for the historiography of science. Indeed, the critical and problematized handling of scientific-historical sources is not new to the historiography of science, but a better systematization is essential for it to become an assumption of analysis. Thomas Kuhn makes a significant contribution in this sense in the book The Copernican Revolution, written simultaneously with his main work. In the preface of his book, he warns that the “combination of science and intellectual history is, however, essential in approaching the plural structure of the Copernican Revolution” (Kuhn 1957, viii). In his analysis, Kuhn uses the broadening of sources and the widening of disciplinary boundaries. Contrary to the then traditional historiography of science for which the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium [1543] promoted a Scientific Revolution, Kuhn refers to the work and thought of Copernicus as

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inaugurator of a revolutionary process and not as a revolution per se. In his critical analysis of the historiography of science, by problematizing the Copernican writings, Kuhn ends up situating him as an heir to the theory of the ancients: The De Revolutionibus itself must be a constant puzzle and paradox, for, measured in terms of its consequences, it is a relatively staid, sober, and unrevolutionary work. Most of the essential elements by which we know the Copernican Revolution – easy and accurate computations of planetary position, the abolition of epicycles and eccentrics, the dissolution of the spheres, the Sun a star, the infinite expansion of the universe – these and many others are not to be found anywhere in Copernicus’ work. In every respect except the earth’s motion, the De Revolutionibus seems more closely akin to the works of ancient and medieval astronomers and cosmologists than to the writings of the succeeding generations who based their work upon Copernicus’ and who made explicit the radical consequences that even its author had not seen in his work. The significance of the De Revolutionibus lies, then, less in what it says itself than in what it caused others to say. The book gave rise to a revolution that it had scarcely enunciated. It is a revolution-making rather than a revolutionary text. (Kuhn 1957, 135)

In a study of The Copernican Revolution, Vieira (2014) highlights that the historiographical analysis performed by Kuhn, in a way, deconstructs the traditional historiography of science that Copernicus was responsible for the modern scientific revolution, while he was not even a modern. On the contrary, he was a man situated in the transition from the medieval to the modern. That is, he was involved in the mental atmosphere of the cultural renaissance and with the social demands of the time. An important point was the reform of the Julian calendar,14 which was an essential contribution to the receptivity of the heliocentric model. According to Kuhn, the Renaissance cultural effervescence that took over the mental atmosphere at the time of Copernicus, driven by a revisit to Neoplatonism, extended to “science,” contaminating it with “a new belief in the possibility and importance of discovering simple arithmetic and geometric regularities in nature, and a new view of the sun as the source of all vital principles and forces in the universe” (Kuhn 1957, 128). Since Proclus15 in the fifth century, the Neoplatonists found in mathematics the key to the essential nature of God and the soul of the world, that is, the universe, representing the eternal and the real amid the imperfect and irregular appearance of

14

Vieira (2014) points out that since the thirteenth century, the existence of cumulative errors and the need to reform the Julian calendar were already being discussed. In the sixteenth century, the reform became an official project of the Church, and Copernicus was asked to advise the Papacy about it; however, he refused because the existing theories and observations did not yet allow the elaboration of an adequate calendar. “Reform of the calendar demanded, said Copernicus, reform in astronomy. [. . .] The Gregorian calendar, first adopted in 1582, was in fact based upon computations that made use of Copernicus’ work” (Kuhn 1957, 126). 15 “Copernicus’ friend and teacher at Bologna, Domenico Maria de Novara, was a close associate of the Florentine Neoplatonists who translated Proclus and other authors of his school” (Kuhn 1957, 129).

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the earthly world. “This symbolic identification of the sun and God is found repeatedly in Renaissance literature and art” (Kuhn 1957, 130). According to Kuhn, that is the image of the universe established by Copernicus: In the middle of all sits Sun enthroned. In this most beautiful temple, could we place this luminary in any better position from which he can illuminate the whole at once? He is rightly called the Lamp, the Mind, the Ruler of the Universe; Hermes Trismegistus names him the Visible God, Sophocles’ Electra calls him the All-seeing. So the Sun sits upon a royal throne ruling his children the planets which circle around him. (Kuhn 1957, 179–180)

The historiographical revision of science promoted by Kuhn regarding the Copernican revolution confirms, in a way, what we have said so far. The historiography of science performed in a critical way, problematized with the use of extended historical-scientific sources, in this case, beyond the analysis of calculations and theories, from a historiographical operation enables the insertion of Copernicus’s “social place” and his “scientific and social practices” in its field of analysis. Even though Kuhn did not reference the Certeaunian historiographical operation, we can still glimpse some of its traces in Kuhnian methodology. The historiography of science shifts the weight of scientism focused on the theories, epistemologies, scientific discoveries, and nature itself, responsible for the rupture or change in science, to the writing and analysis of scientific production. In other words, the historiography of science itself, based on objective criteria guided by the “historiographical operation of science,” can promote significant changes in the history of science and epistemology by revisiting sources or using new scientifichistorical sources.

From Theoretical Reflection to Methodology For historiography, this is a natural and, at the same time, revealing path. Natural because theory and methodology are like “Siamese sisters.” While one “looks up high seeking to see something new in the starry sky,” the “other, decidedly practical, points to the ground, in search of concrete solutions to confirm or reject the hypotheses put forward by the sister” (Barros 2011, 76). Revealing, because it unveils the structuring function of historiography, which is the “making,” the writing of history, intrinsically linked to the practice and the métier of the historian.16 The conceptual polysemy proper to historiography reverberates in establishing an “operational concept of historiography.” This requires reflections on the dubieties that mark the very concept of history (Malerba 2002). The same occurs with the concept of the history of science. This is primarily due to the ambiguity of a history of science “without history.” In other words, in various cases, history is produced 16

The historian we refer to is not only the one with an academic background in stricto sensu history. On the contrary, he is a professional who writes history using the theoretical and methodological framework of history, which is so often not observed in the history of science.

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without using the theoretical-methodological tools of history such as the source treatment techniques or without analysis involving conceptual discussions about time and/or narrative. The concept of the historiography of science is also still undergoing consolidation. On the one hand, this concept is defined as the analysis of the different ways of writing the history of science (and the authors themselves), and on the other hand, it questions the theoretical and methodological scope of the different historiographical trends and currents in science. However, this double attribution of the historiography of science unfolds in a third attribution. It functions as a locus, a space of tension and convergence for analyzing the result of the alliance between the writing and the history of science through the “historiographical operation of science” of Certeaunian inspiration. This methodology makes it possible to think or rethink the historiographical investigation of science and the “writing of history” of science concerning its practice and social place, to write or rewrite it problematically in the light of the complexity of the historical (or scientific-historical) sources. In this way, the past comes into focus that fosters the emergence of possible fissures provoked by current concerns and questionings and capable of operating the deconstruction or re-signification of this past. As another tool, the historiographical operation of science would attempt to apprehend history and the history of science from a historiographical perspective. The existing relation between social place, scientific and social practice, and the realization of writing is analyzed to avoid accumulating historical sources as if they represented direct access to the past without the necessary technical-scientific mediation. This would also be a way to avoid anachronism, that is, a contemporary look at the past without considering diachrony and historicity. Everything can be considered historical since it is situated in temporality. In this sense, science and nature are also historical (geology helps us to understand this temporal dimension of nature). However, history is divided into “lived” history represented by the “practical past” and narrated history, represented by the “historical past,” the latter elaborated and constructed through the historian’s craft (Oakeshott 2003, 62). In other terms, they are mediated by technique (de Certeau 1975/2011a). There is no escape from the lived or narrated past. Otherwise, it would mean the absence of our existence as to the former and memory as to the latter.

Conclusion Facing the problem of a history of science that is also history but developed outside the theory of history and historiography stricto sensu, in this chapter, we seek to build a theoretical and methodological reflection on the scientific field of the historiography of science. Employing a Certeaunian historiographical operation, we demonstrate that the historiography of science can work as a locus for a critical understanding of the development and dynamics of science and its history. This work presents itself as another analytical possibility, in which the concepts and tools

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from the field of historiography tout court contribute to enabling the understanding of the history of science and science itself from a genuinely historical perspective. However, the theoretical and methodological reflection proposal does not annul the immense and fruitful existing historiographical production of science. There is no doubt about the legitimacy of the work done. Our proposal simply aims to highlight how the humanities, in the ambit of their theoretical-methodological scope, analyze the production of history of science and science. The primary purpose is to contribute to expanding the debate on the scientific field of the historiography of science and its relation to history. The object of history is the criticism and problematization of the “writing of history of science.” This history must consider the practice, social place of production, and the métier of the historian of science. In that way, the history of science is not crystallized in time, and not being the bearer of absolute truths, it is, therefore, subject to being revisited from the analysis of new sources, traces, and the unsaid, silenced by time.

Cross-References ▶ Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History: Toward a Rapprochement Between Disciplines That Never Ruptured ▶ Thomas Kuhn’s Legacy for the Historiography of Science

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Dosse F (2012) A História. Unesp, São Paulo Febvre L (1953/1989) Combates pela História. Editora Presença, Lisboa Foucault M (2004) Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France 1978–1979. Seuil; Gallimard, Paris Gavroglu K (2007) O Passado das Ciências como História. Porto Editora, Porto Gutting G (2002) Thomas Kuhn and French philosophy of science. In: Nickles T (ed) Thomas Kuhn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hobsbawm E (1995) Age of extremes: the short twentieth century, 1914–1991. Abacus, London Kragh H (2007) History, science and history of science. In: Gavroglu K, Renn J (eds) Positioning the history of science. Boston studies in the philosophy of science, vol 248. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-5420-3_19 Kuhn TS (2000) The road since structure: philosophical essays, 1970–1993, with autobiographical interview. In: Conant J, Haugeland J (eds). The University of Chicago Press Kuhn TS (1957) Copernican revolution. Harvard University Press Kuhn TS (1970 [1962]) The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Kuhn TS (1977 [1968]) The essential tension. University of Chicago Press Latour B, Woolgar S (1997) AVida de Laboratório: a Produção dos Fatos Científicos. Trans. Angela Vianna. Relume Dumará, Rio de Janeiro Lévi-Strauss C (1958) Anthropologie structurale. Plon, Paris Maia CA (2013) História das ciências: uma história de historiadores ausentes: precondições para o aparecimento dos sciences studies. EdUERJ, Rio de Janeiro Malerba J (2002) Em Busca de um Conceito de Historiografia – Elementos para uma Discussão. Varia História 27:1–62 Matthews MR (ed) (2014) International handbook of research in history, philosophy and science teaching. Springer Oakeshott M (2003) Sobre a História. Topbooks/Liberty Fund, Rio de Janeiro Offenstadt N (2011) L’historiographie. Presses Universitaires de France Pestre D (1996) Por uma nova história social e cultural das ciências: novas definições, novos objetos, novas abordagens. Cadernos IG/Unicamp 6(1):3–56 Reis JC (2010) O Desafio Historiográfico. ed. FGV, Rio de Janeiro Rossi P (2001) O Nascimento da Ciência Moderna na Europa. EDUSC, São Paulo Vieira AMRS (2014) Diálogos Possíveis Entre História e História da Ciência: Analogias e Interfaces entre a Historiografia da Ciência Francesa e a Historiografia dos Annales com o Pensamento de Thomas Kuhn. Master dissertation, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais – UFMG Vieira AMRS (2021) The place of history in the history of science: notes for reflections in the Brazilian context. Transversal Int J Historiogr Sci 11:1–19. https://doi.org/10.24117/2526-2270. 2021.i11.08 Vieira AMRS (2022) Natureza da ciência e a educação científica: compreendendo a dimensão histórica e o papel da historicidade. Fino Traço, Belo Horizonte. ISBN:978-85-8054-525-8 Walch J (1990) Historiographie Structurale. Masson, Paris Zeller L (2021) L’histoire de l’historiographie de 1981 à nos jours: Étude comparée: L’historiographie de Charles-Olivier Carbonell et L’historiographie de Nicolas Offenstadt. Histoire:dumas0334921

Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History: Toward a Rapprochement Between Disciplines That Never Ruptured

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plan for the Chapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part 1: Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part 2: Historiography of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part 3: Philosophy of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part 4: Further Observations, Hesse (Again), and Prospects for an Interdisciplinary Confraternity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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It has been observed that the history of science and the philosophy of science have largely gone in very different directions in recent decades. I argue that there is a parallel story to tell about the relationship between historiography, including the historiography of science, and the philosophy of history. This chapter puts historiography, including the historiography of science, in conversation with the philosophy of history. I contend that the lack of dialogue between the philosophy of history and historiography as such (including the historiography of science) parallels – in terms of its effects on each academic discipline – what has been, until more recently, the lack of dialogue between the philosophy of science and the history of science. The chapter charts the ways in which the historiography of science and the philosophy of history – despite what might be expectations to the contrary, rooted in an appreciation of these two fields’ common preoccupation with metalevel reflections on history – developed independently of each other and with surprisingly little interaction over the last 80 years. I begin the chapter by M. Waldschlagel (*) Anna Maria College, Paxton, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4_32

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considering observations that philosopher of science Mary Hesse made in 1973 about the relationship between the historiography of science and the philosophy of history. After a brief discussion of historiography, I offer an account of the development of the historiography of science from Kuhn onward; I then provide an account of the development of the philosophy of history, with special attention to the contribution and influence of Carl G. Hempel. After returning to further examine themes in Hesse, I conclude by speculating about how a connection between the two areas may be achieved. I contend that the lessons we can glean by effecting cross-fertilization between the two areas is pregnant with possibility for a reinvigorated historiography of science and a resuscitated philosophy of history, which has languished on the sidelines of philosophy for roughly 60 years. Keywords

Historiography of science · Mary Hesse · Whig histories of science · French postmodernism · Sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) · Integrated history and philosophy of science (iHPS) · Philosophy of history · Carl G. Hempel · General laws in history · Deductive-nomological model

Introduction Philosopher of science Mary Hesse begins her 1973 paper “Reasons and Evaluation in the History of Science” with a series of claims, asserting that the historiography of science, more than the history of other aspects of human thought, is peculiarly subject to philosophic fashion. This shows itself in two ways: first in the way historical studies reflect views of the nature of science current in contemporary philosophy of science, and second in the philosophy of history presupposed. (Hesse 1973, 128)

Hesse here makes three claims. The first claim is communicated in the first sentence. The truth value of the first claim appears to hinge on what counts as “philosophic fashion.” (I suggest that we swap this phrase for “intellectual trends” instead, as it seems less narrow and more accurate in today’s academic vernacular and environment). The second claim – that the discipline of history, through the prism of the historiography of science, reflects views of the nature of science current in contemporary philosophy of science – appears largely false, with respect to the state and direction of much of the discipline of the history of science in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Hesse’s third claim – that the historiography of science’s purported susceptibility to intellectual trends is demonstrated in the way it tacitly assumes a philosophy of history – is provocative. Consider Hesse’s second claim. Assuming that she was right in 1973 to make this claim, we must ask what happened between then and now to make this claim false, when applied to the historiography of science today. Part of the answer, I contend, will be revealed by an analysis of the historiography of science’s reaction to Kuhn’s seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. However, the reactions to Kuhn’s work alone does not

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account for why Hesse’s second claim is false. That is, why in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the historiography of science’s failure to reflect views about the nature of science found in contemporary philosophy of science cannot be fully captured by an explanation appealing to reactions to Kuhn. In a recent essay, historian Jan Golinski explores an aspect of Thomas Kuhn’s legacy “whereby the history and the philosophy of science have largely gone their separate ways in recent decades” (Golinski 2012, 13). Golinski accounts for the diverse reception of Kuhn’s Structure (as it is conventionally abbreviated), by examining the respective concerns and interpretive priorities that historians and philosophers (and, later, sociologists) brought with them in the study of Kuhn’s work. Golinski, following John Zammito, observes with a hint of irony that “historians and philosophers of science began to speak of their fields as ‘married’ to one another in the 1960s, at just about the point when it began to appear that they were heading for a divorce” (Golinski 2012, 13).1 I argue that there is a parallel story to tell about the relationship between historiography, including the historiography of science, and the philosophy of history. This parallel story (or some variation of it) is explicitly acknowledged in Hesse’s third claim. That is, Hesse makes a direct tie between the historiography of science and the philosophy of history. However, it appears that there was never any such marriage between these two disciplines; the few declarations of joy expressed in the anticipation of the possible nuptials were overshadowed by the ambivalence of the expected guests – the larger community of philosophers and historians who, by and large, couldn’t have cared less about a relationship between historiography (of science) and the philosophy of history. This neglect had a threefold cause. First, it was partially due to the scant attention given, in the 1960s through the present period, to the philosophy of history as a subfield in philosophy. Second, it is also due to the underappreciation of the study of historiography by historians themselves. A possible third cause can be traced to the manner in which the historiography of science is largely marginalized even within historiography.

1

However, the relationship between the history of science and the philosophy of science is more complex than Golinski appears to acknowledge. In considering the respective genealogies of the history of science and the philosophy of science, Larry Laudan makes the following observations: “During the great flowering of these disciplines in the century from the 1830s until the 1930s, the two subjects developed side-by-side, generally in very close liaison. . .Beginning sometime during the 1930s, however, each discipline began to go its own way. Philosophers of science, smitten with logical positivism’s alluring promise of rigor, began to think that the method of conceptual analysis alone was sufficient to formulate an adequate understanding of the scientific enterprise. . . Historians of science. . . since the 1940s and 1950s have generally been chary about using the historical record to address broad or general questions about the nature of scientific change and about the justification of science. By the late 1950s, therefore, history and philosophy of science had become as remote from one another’s concerns as they had once been intimately intertwined. . . During the 1960s, there emerged a small but influential handful of scholars (e.g., Feyerabend, Hanson, Buchdahl, Toulmin, and Kuhn) who sought to persuade philosophers to re-think their dismissal of the relevance of historical research to philosophy of science.” See Laudan 1990, 47–48.

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This chapter puts historiography, including the historiography of science, in conversation with the philosophy of history. I contend that the lack of dialogue between the philosophy of history and historiography as such (including the historiography of science) parallels – in terms of its effects on each academic discipline – what has been, until more recently, the lack of dialogue between the philosophy of science and the history of science.2 That is, there might have been interesting and productive exchanges that most likely would have happened, but did not, because of the lack of dialogue between these complementary fields. I contend that the lessons we can glean by effecting cross-fertilization between the two areas is pregnant with possibility for a reinvigorated historiography of science and a resuscitated philosophy of history, which has languished on the sidelines of philosophy for roughly 60 years.

Plan for the Chapter While Golinski observes that the history of science and the philosophy of science were pulled apart due to their incompatible interpretations of Kuhn’s Structure, there was, inconveniently, no such singular work that drove the historiography of science and the philosophy of history apart. The chapter charts the ways in which the historiography of science and the philosophy of history – despite what might be expectations to the contrary, rooted in an appreciation of these two fields’ common preoccupation with metalevel reflections on history – developed independently of each other and with surprisingly little interaction over the last 80 years. After offering an account of the development of the historiography of science from Kuhn onward, I provide an account of the development of the philosophy of history. I conclude by speculating about how a connection between the two areas may be achieved. I begin with a brief discussion of historiography.

Part 1: Historiography By and large, historiography has traditionally been a relatively neglected subfield of history. In the “General Introduction” to his 1997 Companion to Historiography, historian Michael Bentley, referring to the state of affairs of the profession in the early 1980s, writes that “[f]ifteen years ago, when I first considered mounting undergraduate courses in ‘historiography,’ most students and not a few colleagues possessed barely more than a blurred notion of what the word meant” (Bentley 1997, xi). More recently, in speculating about the lack of enthusiasm generally shown by Regarding this lack of dialogue, Nicholas Jardine makes the following observation: “Theoretically inclined historians of science these days tend to turn to sociology and anthropology for inspiration, not to philosophy. Philosophers of science still dabble for examples in the history of science. But only a few – Hacking, Daston, Galison, and Jardine, for example – take historical issues to be central to the philosophy of science.” See Jardine 2011, 294. 2

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historians for historiography, historian Jeremy D. Popkin, in From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography, observes that the “most common encounters that lead young people to an interest in history provide them with little preparation for understanding the issues that drive historiographical debates” (Popkin 2015, 5). This may be due to the fact that, as Popkin acknowledges, historiography “necessarily involves philosophical questions” (Popkin 2015, 6). In fact, Bentley contends that “historiography cannot be effectively taught or learned without a prior interest in epistemology” (Bentley 1997, xiii).3 Defining historiography is not altogether straightforward. Consider the following discussion about historiography provided by Popkin in the first chapter of From Herodotus to H-Net. Popkin writes that historiography deals with the various methods historians use in gathering data, analyzing it, and communicating it. The term “historiography” also refers to the history of history itself: understanding how historians of the past conceived of their projects and the methods they used is one of the most important ways we can gain perspective on the challenges facing historians today. Historians also speak of the historiography of particular historical topics, such as the Atlantic slave trade or the American Civil War. In this case, they are using the term to describe the way in which historical knowledge about and interpretations of those subjects have changed over time. [Historiography] asks what methods we can use to obtain reliable knowledge about the past, given that we cannot actually observe or recreate events that have already happened. Historiography also tries to account for the different ways in which historians have understood the past and to reconcile these conflicting interpretations with the notion that there is some core of truth about the past that can be known. (Popkin 2015, 3–4)

While these diverse ways of characterizing historiography lead to varying definitions of the subject, a singular definition is advisable for the purposes of this chapter. So, in using the term “historiography,” I do not mean the history of history, or the history of what previous historians have argued about a certain topic, such as the history of the history of the French Revolution, for example. Instead, following one of the characterizations identified by Popkin, I understand historiography to concern the interpretive approaches used by historians in pursuing their craft, including the development and critical investigation of these interpretive approaches.4 Similarly, historian Kathryn Olesko understands historiography to have as its object “historical methodology, including the values and principles guiding the selection of subjects, the construction of categories of historical analysis, and the demarcation of historical periodization” (Olesko 2003a, 366). In effect, historiography is an essentially selfreflective activity.5 This explains historiography’s (expected) kinship with

3

For an idiosyncratic view on the relationship between epistemology and history, see “Chapter 1: The Epistemological Problem for Historians” in Munslow 2010, 15–32. 4 Throughout this chapter, I assume this definition of historiography – a definition that bears a close family resemblance to Olesko’s definition. 5 Golinski contends that “[h]istoriographical understanding is part of the reflexive selfconsciousness of all varieties of history.” See Golinski 2005, x.

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philosophy. Instead of the job of “doing” history, historiographers examine, evaluate, and develop the interpretive approaches employed in writing history.

Part 2: Historiography of Science Most texts that serve as introductions to the subject of historiography fail to contain a unit on the historiography of science. For example, in his 997-page Companion to Historiography, Bentley declines to provide a freestanding chapter on the historiography of science as an autonomous subdiscipline. Of the 39 chapters that constitute Bentley’s edited volume, the only one that deals explicitly with the historiography of science is an eponymous chapter on the Scientific Revolution by Stephen Pumfrey, which appears in a section on early modern historiography (Pumfrey 1997, 293–306). (It should be noted that D.R. Woolf’s contribution to Bentley’s edited volume offers a brief but helpful treatment of the historiography of science in six pages, though it is featured alongside other facets of intellectual history in the chapter. See Woolf 1997, 310–315). Bentley’s self-authored text, Modern Historiography: An Introduction, which the publisher presents as the “essential introduction to the history of historical writing” (Bentley 1999, back cover of the book), does not contain any treatment of the historiography of science. Other recent texts that lack any treatment of the historiography of science include History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction, by Mark T. Gilderhus and Historiography: An Introductory Guide, by Eileen Ka-May Cheng. Despite attention to early Christian historiography, Marxist historiography, and postmodernism in history, Caroline Hoefferle’s The Essential Historiography Reader is silent on the historiography of science (with the exception of a single paragraph on Kuhn). Popkin mentions Kuhn in From Herodotus to H-Net, but leaves undeveloped any treatment of the historiography of science, and instead situates Kuhn in a discussion about historiographical approaches emerging from thinkers such as Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Carlo Ginzburg, and Lynn Hunt. A happy exception to the list generated thus far is A Concise Companion to History. With chapters on subjects concerning the status of historical knowledge and the role of causation in historical explanation, the editor, Ulinka Rublack, offers a volume that “maps some of the most significant directions and themes in contemporary ways of writing history designed to take us forward” (Rublack 2011, viii). In her chapter on “Science,” Pamela H. Smith helpfully charts the ways in which historians have engaged with and understood the role science plays in historical accounts (Smith 2011, 269–297). Nevertheless, Smith declines to provide a definition of the historiography of science in her chapter. Though this present volume may generate one, there appears to be no canonical definition of the historiography of science at present. For the sake of expediency and convenience, I again refer to Olesko, who sees the historiography of science as “the history of the treatment of science as a subject of historical investigation” (Olesko 2003a, 366). This definition dovetails with Olesko’s account of the broader category of historiography, the object of which, she proposes, concerns historical methodology. On this account, then, the historiography of science is the examination, evaluation, and development of the interpretive approaches employed in writing the history of science.

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This is consistent with what Olensko claims historical methodology entails – namely, an investigation into the “values and principles guiding the selection of subjects, the construction of categories of historical analysis, and the demarcation of historical periodization” (Olesko 2003a, 366) – in its application to science’s history. In his contribution to Bentley’s Companion to Historiography, Pumfrey observes three important features of the development of the historiography of science.6 First, Pumfrey contends that “until the 1960s much professional history of science, and still many non-specialized and science-textbook accounts, were ‘Whig histories of science’ that used present beliefs about good science as a teleological filter in a search for historical origins” (Pumfrey 1997, 294). Whig history adopts an historiographical approach that frames history as the march of progress, “starting in some benighted time and somehow directed upon, or inevitably culminating in, the glorious present,” Simon Blackburn wryly observes (Blackburn 2005, 388). While originally applied to self-satisfied accounts of British history, the term, coined in 1931 by Herbert Butterfield in his influential book The Whig Interpretation of History, is now used broadly to characterize and critique any progress-directed narrative. To claim that an account smacks of “Whig history” is, typically, not to pay it a compliment – unless it is made in a spirit of bold affirmation and defiance. Despite his reference to the practice of professional history of science in the 1960s, Pumfrey does not mention that Kuhn’s Structure, the first edition of which was published in 1962, made Whig histories of science increasingly unacceptable to historians of science influenced by a constructivist outlook.7 Ironically, in his 1949 book (revised 1957) The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800, Butterfield is guilty of the very Whiggishness he rails against, albeit in the context of science’s history instead of British history.8 In keeping with a wry attitude that lampoons as much as it purports to observe, D.R. Woolf relates how a Whig history of science tells the story of the triumph of modern reason and progress, unshackled from the chains of medieval and ancient thought systems. . . and fully realized in the Renaissance and seventeenth century by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler (in physics); Vesalius and Harvey (in anatomy); Bacon and Descartes (in the logic of scientific inquiry); and Newton in optics, mathematics and just about every other branch of science. Such an account does more than

6

My account of the development of the historiography of science will track Pumfrey’s, though my account significantly expands the analysis, which Pumfrey leaves, at best, thin. In what follows, I provide an extended treatment of the context for and responses to the first and second features identified by Pumfrey. 7 Further in this chapter, I elaborate on constructivism in some detail. The best account of constructivism remains Golinski 2005. 8 See Butterfield 1965. Butterfield’s inconsistency is acknowledged and defended by physicist Steven Weinberg, who writes that “Butterfield coined the phrase ‘the Whig interpretation of history,’ which he used to criticize historians who judge the past according to its contribution to our present enlightened practices. But when it came to the scientific revolution, Butterfield was thoroughly Whiggish, as am I.” See Weinberg 2015a, 145. For further elaboration by Weinberg, see his essay “Eye on the Present – The Whig History of Science,” in The New York Review of Books, in Weinberg 2015b.

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merely leave out the numerous thinkers on whose ideas these men built, while making its heroes into either prophets or Promethean demigods; after all, were that the only problem, it could presumably be easily rectified merely by adding further detailed studies of secondary thinkers. The most serious flaw, from the point of view of many scholars, is that this history of science has been written to emphasize gradual, evolutionary change; even during such a central period of achievement as the Scientific Revolution, emphasis has been placed on the steady march of progress. (Woolf 1997, 310–311)

The frustration lying behind Woolf’s diagnosis is palpable. However, his vexation is replaced by homage when he presents Kuhn’s contribution. The change in tone is obvious where Woolf writes that Kuhn argued that traditional accounts of the history of scientific disciplines (Herbert Butterfield’s Origins of Modern Science (1965), long the most easily readable textbook on the subject, could serve as an example) had utterly missed an important point: that scientific change manifestly did not occur in a rational, slow-but-steady march of ‘accretion’; rather, it occurred in large blips or ‘paradigm shifts,’ often as much by accident as through the application of rational methods. Or, more correctly, while ‘normal’ science, practiced from day to day by the scientific community, might often proceed quite slowly, steadily and methodically, it did so only because of the almost ruthless dominance over research of a set of beliefs, theories and hypotheses – even a set of agreed-upon questions – known as a paradigm. (Woolf 1997, 311)

Implicit in Pumfrey’s (and explicit in Woolf’s) remarks about “Whig histories of science” is the claim that there is something deeply misleading or deficient about histories of science that do not adopt a Kuhn-inspired framework for interpreting scientific change over time. Nevertheless, respectable histories of science that assume or even embrace a Whig-friendly framework, in whole or in part, are still written – and often by practicing scientists. Recent examples include theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg’s To Explain the World and cosmologist and astrophysicist John Gribbin’s The Scientists. In a similar vein, one finds in historian David Wootton’s The Invention of Science a contribution that challenges the attitude of dismissal often characterizing recent histories of science that do not repudiate the very idea of scientific progress. As if responding to Woolf, Wootton, who contends that modern science began in 1572 with Tycho Brahe’s discovery of a new star, makes the following argument: The important thing about the science of Galileo and Newton, Pascal and Boyle is that it was, in part, successful, and that it laid the foundations for future success. They did not know what the future would hold; but they did have a clear sense of what they were trying to achieve. They were confident that they were making progress, and we cannot leave that progress out of our history, any more than we can leave out the influence they had on those who came after them. . . The past not only shapes the present; in science, gains made in the past are only ever given up (except where there is censorship or religious or political interference) in order to be exchanged for greater gains made in the present. It is this peculiar feature of modern science which makes the history of science since 1572 uniquely a history of progress, and makes it inappropriate to write history of science in the same sceptical way that one might write the history of democracy or of the novel. (Wootton 2015, 553–554)

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Unlike Weinberg and Gribbin, Wootton9 devotes several chapters to issues in the historiography of science to good effect. Let’s return again to Pumfrey’s discussion of three important features of the development of the historiography of science. In identifying the second feature, Pumfrey observes that the “historiography [of science] has most clearly reflected trends, not in history, but in contemporary philosophical and sociological models of what it is to do science, for which the Scientific Revolution has been a testbed” (Pumfrey 1997, 294). The philosophical (or, as some may insist, “philosophical”) models of science and its practice adopted by historians of science in Kuhn’s wake were largely derived from or inspired by French thinkers whose work was exported to the Anglo-American intellectual community. French theorists such as JeanFrançois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida dominated. Other influences, most of which emerged from the French postwar intellectual tradition, can be traced to the work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, semiotician Roland Barthes, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Their views, which have shaped a wide variety of interpretive approaches in the humanities, from Saussure’s structuralism and Barthes’ post-structuralism to Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge and Derrida’s deconstruction, and which often fall under the label of postmodern thought, offered implications for how to think about science. In the hands of the French postmodernists, scientific theories do not actually represent the natural world; instead, for the French postmodernists, Olesko observes, scientific theories project the political, social, and economic environments in which scientific activity is found. Nature itself disappears in a created world of simulacra and the history of the sciences becomes the history of images and of what is believed embedded in them. (Olesko 2003b, 540)

While these French imports found homes in many English departments, world languages departments, anthropology and sociology departments, and some history departments in Anglophone universities from the 1960s onward, they had little in common with the direction of the work of the most important philosophers of science of the twentieth century prior to Kuhn, namely, Rudolph Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Ernest Nagel, Karl Popper, Carl G. Hempel, and Wesley C. Salmon. By and large, French postmodern thought was received with suspicion and sometimes hostility (if it was acknowledged at all) by analytic philosophers in Anglophone universities. It should be noted that, despite appearances, Pumfrey’s observation about how the historiography of science reflects trends in contemporary philosophical (or, perhaps, “philosophical”) models of what it is to do science does not support the contentious claim, which I argue is (under present circumstances) false, that Hesse makes in her 1973 paper. Again, Hesse’s claim is that the discipline of history, 9 For Wootton’s treatment of issues in the historiography of science and in philosophy, see especially Chaps. 2, 15, 16, and 17 in Wooton 2015.

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through the prism of the historiography of science, reflects views of the nature of science current in contemporary philosophy of science.10 The French postmodernists whose work was embraced by historiographers of science and other historians were not doing philosophy or the philosophy of science. They produced what, in the United States, came to be called French Theory (Cusset 2008, xiv). And French Theory, despite its uncompromising demand for critique, is not philosophy. In fact, some supporters of French Theory enthusiastically and without condescension refer to the French Theorists and the other European thinkers (e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin) who are sometimes credited as their forebears as “antiphilosophers” (Groys 2012). It is for this reason11 that I have put quotation marks around the word “philosophical” when referring to the models of what it is to do science that Pumfrey mentions. The “philosophical” models of what it is to do science that Pumfrey mentions, then, came largely from the tradition of French Theory, not the tradition of philosophical reflection. The sociological models of science and its practice to which Pumfrey refers emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, largely in response to Kuhn’s work in Structure. Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus, in their Introduction to Making Modern Science, account for the appeal of the sociological approach: Historians and sociologists of science. . . saw that it was often not enough to have good ideas or good evidence to back them up – the successful scientist has to persuade his or her colleagues to take new ideas seriously, often in competition with a host of other rival proposals. While it might be nice to imagine that the winner will always be the one with the best evidence, things are rarely so straightforward. It is rare indeed for new evidence to be so unambiguous that it commands immediate assent. Success or failure often hinges on “nonscientific” factors as well, such as access to good research funding, new jobs, or the editorial committees of important journals. The emergence of the modern form of scientific community, with its societies, meetings, and journals, thus becomes a crucial factor in the creation of science as we know it today. (Bowler and Morus 2020, 13)

In charting the sequence of certain contributions by sociologists of science, Golinski reports that Kuhn’s book. . . was given a forceful if contentious interpretation by David Bloor and Barry Barnes, at the University of Edinburgh, who articulated what they called the “Strong Programme” in the sociology of science in the 1970s. This program, with its founding proposition that science should be studied like other aspects of human culture, without regard to its supposed truth or falsity, was controversial among philosophers and many historians. It nonetheless provided an important inspiration for the field that became known as the sociology of scientific knowledge (or “SSK”), which accrued some impressive empirical case studies and began to influence the work of several leading historians by the mid-1980s. (Golinski 2005, 5)

10

This is the second of Hesse’s three claims with which she begins her 1973 paper. I am not claiming that Nietzsche and Heidegger are not philosophers, but that they have been received by some as contributing to a tradition of “antiphilosophy.” 11

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The Strong Programme and SSK are tokens of the constructivist view of science. Golinski defines “constructivism broadly as an approach that directed attention at the role of human beings as social actors in the making of scientific knowledge” (Golinski 2005, vii). A constructivist historiography, then, Golinski points out, “regards scientific knowledge primarily as a human product, made with locally situated cultural and material resources, rather than as simply the revelation of a pre-given order of nature” (Golinski 2005, ix). To state that the interpretive position of constructivism is far removed from that of the prevailing views of philosophers of science before (and even after) Kuhn is to understate considerably the distance between these outlooks. As SSK developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s with contributions by Andrew Pickering and Trevor Pinch, Golinski recounts that defenders of SSK reported contentious findings. Scientific practice was shown as open-ended and underdetermined, scientists not being compelled either by logical deduction from existing beliefs or by unambiguous evidence to develop their ideas in a particular direction. Instead, they were found to be making practical judgments that could be related to the local subculture in which their resources and skills were invested and their specific aims pursued. (Golinski 2005, 27)

It was at this juncture that French postmodern thought coincided with the intellectual space made possible by SSK, both having been underwritten by an interpretation of Kuhn’s work that was retrofitted to connect with them.12 Historian Lynn K. Nyhart explains: The new sociologists of scientific knowledge participated in a broader postmodern rejection of our unmediated access to reality, often associated with other critiques of science’s truth value. Michel Foucault challenged historians to understand how the structures of knowledge, discourse, and institutions instantiated forms of power (the entire bundle called “epistemes”) that were virtually invisible to those living inside the regimes. . . Such perspectives collectively challenged the received view of history of science in two fundamental ways. First, they demonstrated that scientific knowledge was constructed by human beings, not discovered in nature. Second, this process was not the work of individual minds but was ineluctably social. The implications for history were profound. (Nyhart 2016, 8–9)

There were implications, as well, for the possibility of a sustained and profitable interaction between the history of science and the philosophy of science. Such interactions, though, appeared increasingly unlikely. As historian Rachel Laudan observes, when it came to pronouncements about science by defenders of SSK, their “generally relativist conclusions that scientific knowledge owed more to human construction than to the natural world challenged a century-old tradition in philosophy of science and horrified scientists” (Laudan 2003, 632). The reaction made by most philosophers of science was much the same.

12

Perhaps the coupling of French postmodern thought with SSK should be expected, given that they are both forms of what Meera Nanda calls “antiscience.” See Nanda 2003, 39–41.

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Nevertheless, the fusing together of postmodernist sensibilities, informed by the French postwar intellectual tradition, with SSK in the constructivist outlook was viewed as a success for the historiography of science by most historians of science. Nyhart13 maintains that since “the late 1970s, historians of science have gradually come to accept a predominantly social constructionist account that views the development of scientific knowledge as depending heavily on the particulars of local circumstances, people, epistemes, and politics, and that doesn’t necessarily drive ever closer toward a single truth” (Nyhart 2016, 8). A significant linchpin in this interpretive approach was the reception of Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. First published in 1979 (and updated in 1986), Golinski describes the contribution by Latour and Woolgar as “a pioneer in the field of ethnographical studies of specific research laboratories” (Golinski 2005, 10). For Latour and Woolgar, the social conduct by scientists in laboratories became a subject of sociological study, inquiry into which involved bracketing the very idea that scientific discourse refers or connects to an objective reality. Like anthropologists observing the genesis and maintenance of a primitive tribe’s taboos and relations of power, Latour and Woolgar located the genesis and maintenance of “authoritative” scientific discourse in the laboratory, derived from laboratory instruments and scientists’ ability to auger what they portend, the deciphering and communication of which eventually appear as journal publications and textbooks. Latour and Woolgar’s model for what SSK can reveal about science continues to influence the history of science today. Nyhart explains that a guiding heuristic for the history of science is taken to flow from the operation of the following conditional: If knowledge of nature is made, not arrived at, then we should not expect that science will progress toward a pre-existing universal truth. One important implication is that the truth value of a claim in the past cannot be assessed by what we now believe to be true – an account of the success or failure of a scientific claim must be neutral with respect to that outcome. Evaluations of success must depend on other grounds – social, political, rhetorical – and both successes and failures must be treated similarly. (Nyhart 2016, 9)

Golinski and Nyhart appear to agree that the most influential study of a constructivist approach within the history of science to thoroughly incorporate SSK is Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump, which appeared in 1985.14 Nyhart refers to the book as the “paradigmatic example of this sociological-historical approach” (Nyhart 2016, 9). Shapin and Schaffer examine the conflict between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century over the nature and existence of the vacuum and the experimental methods devised to test it. However, Shapin and Schaffer also explore the politics of what counts as scientific

What Nyhart calls a “social constructivist account” is identical to what Golinski calls “constructivism.” 14 See Shapin and Schaffer 1985. Note that in 2018, Princeton published an edition of the book for its Princeton Classics series with a new 40-page introduction by the authors. 13

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knowledge in the seventeenth century. Golinski points out that Shapin and Schaffer “examined the discursive and technical practices through which Boyle constructed experimental facts: his use of the air pump and complementary rhetorical and social ‘technologies’ to discipline and persuade the audiences that witnessed its results” (Golinski 2005, 36). Like Latour and Woolgar, Shapin and Schaffer have exerted a powerful hold on the direction of the history of science – and perhaps beyond. The resulting controversies surrounding accounts of scientific discourse and its epistemic authority – accounts derived from postmodernist and constructivist views of science – culminated in the “science wars” of the 1990s. The science wars “saw scientists defending their role as experts offering factual information about the world against sociologists who insisted that no one version of knowledge should be accorded such privileged status” (Bowler and Morus 2020, 12). The science wars did not end with a decisive winner or loser; instead, the unique kind of skepticism it kicked up found a new home in climate change denial, COVID-19 denial, and other forms of antiscience in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Let’s return once more to Pumfrey. In identifying the third important feature of the development of the historiography of science, Pumfrey (writing in 1997) contends that “it is only in the last thirty years that academic specialization has produced an independent subdiscipline of the history of science. . . that looks more toward history and less over its shoulder at the philosophy of science. A major reason for independence is that recent research in the Scientific Revolution has actually undermined the periodization’s raison d’être as the birth of modernity” (Pumfrey 1997, 295). While he does not adequately explain this last cryptic remark, it is easy to imagine that Pumfrey, writing in 1997, may be reflecting on Steven Shapin’s 1996 publication The Scientific Revolution, the first sentence of which provocatively asserts that “[t]here was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it” (Shapin 1996, 1). Regardless, constructivist approaches in the historiography of science provided the history of science the fuel to ignite this separation from the philosophy of science. Consider Pumfrey’s focus on the independence of the history of science, achieved just over 50 years ago. Independence is often followed by assertions of independence, and assertions of independence can sometimes lead to a spirit that resists collaboration; in time, failure to collaborate can lead to insularity. It is reasonable to hold, I think, that the historiography of science became less collaborative and more insular because the history of science, with which it enjoys a largely symbiotic relationship, asserted its independence from the philosophy of science in the wake of Kuhn. Today, more than a half century since, by Pumfrey’s reckoning, the history of science achieved independence from the philosophy of science, it is precisely the present state of affairs that has led some to call for an integrated history and philosophy of science or iHPS. There are impediments, though, to achieving this integrated model. Different voices offer different visions as to what integrating the history of science and the philosophy of science should look like. Moreover, (disciplinary) independence, once achieved, is often difficult to dispense with. Perhaps one of the impediments to a fully integrated history and philosophy of science is found in the dominance of the

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constructivist approach adopted by many historians of science since the emergence of the Strong Programme and SSK, and accelerated after the publication of Leviathan and the Air-Pump. If so, perhaps a new historiographical approach to the history of science – a new methodology – may open new possibilities for what an iHPS vision requires.15 Let’s take stock. Pumfrey’s identification of the basic features of the development of the historiography of science is threefold; to these basic features I have added my own analysis. First, until the 1960s, most professional history of science was a form of Whig history that assumed a progress-directed narrative. Second, the historiography of science has imitated trends in philosophical and sociological models of what it is to do science, tokens of which include the introduction of French postmodern thought coupled with the constructivist view of science vis-à-vis the Strong Programme and SSK in the history of science. Third, that the history of science has existed as an independent subdiscipline, unfettered by any tenable connection to the philosophy of science, since only the late 1960s is an arrangement made possible by the adoption of constructivist approaches in the historiography of science. Added together, these three features of the historiography of science account for much of the disciplinary orientation (and many of the idiosyncrasies) of the history of science. It is appropriate at this point to recall that historiography is, as I argued earlier, an essentially self-reflective activity. It follows that the historiography of science, as an offshoot of the subfield of general historiography, is normatively committed to promoting this self-reflective activity. As Golinski puts it, “[h]istoriographical understanding is part of the reflexive self-consciousness of all varieties of history” (Golinski 2005, x). The philosophy of history also participates in and promotes this “reflexive self-consciousness” about matters of philosophical and foundational importance in history and in the historian’s craft. Nevertheless, there is surprisingly little interaction between the philosophy of history and historiography (including the historiography of science). Given their shared interest – metalevel reflections on history, albeit from different perspectives – the expectation of collaboration or synergy between these two fields is not unreasonable. However, the fields have largely developed in isolation from each other. Charting the development of the philosophy of history in the twentieth century may help to explain this intellectual segregation. I now turn to a brief account of the development of the philosophy of history.

Part 3: Philosophy of History A.C. Grayling edited a highly successful two-volume introduction to philosophy in the 1990s. Philosophy 1: A Guide through the Subject, which Oxford University Press bills as “the best general book on philosophy for university students: not just

15

In my 2020 publication, I propose an historiographical approach for the history of science that is inspired by and incorporates the intellectual resources of the history of philosophy. See Waldschlagel 2020, especially 64–69.

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an introduction, but a guide which will serve them throughout their studies,” contains 11 extended essays ranging from epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind to ethics, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy (Oxford University Press). The success of Philosophy 1 led to the publication of Philosophy 2: Further through the Subject; both volumes are still widely used today. Philosophy 2 contains 13 essays that explore political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, alongside still other areas, with the last six essays extending the treatment of the history of philosophy that was started in the first volume. Oxford University Press presents Philosophy 2 as an “authoritative guide through important areas of philosophy.”16 And yet, neither volume contains a chapter on the philosophy of history. In fact, despite the combined 1546 pages both volumes provide, there is no mention of the philosophy of history whatsoever. Just as historiography has traditionally been a relatively neglected subfield within history, the philosophy of history suffers from neglect in philosophy. The parallels are striking. As this present volume has as its subject the historiography of science, I will keep this section on the philosophy of history as brief as possible while simultaneously offering a diagnosis to explain why the philosophy of history developed almost entirely without any influence from or connection with historiography. And yet, both the philosophy of history and historiography (of science) are concerned with fundamental methodological and interpretive issues that have a great bearing on the nature and understanding of history. This lack of association, collaboration, and synergy is especially surprising in the light of Mary Hesse’s 1973 observations with which this chapter began. A “discipline whose subject is the condition of the historical”17 is how JouniMatti Kuukkanen defines the philosophy of history – a definition that appears wide enough to accommodate the disciplinary concerns that also typically mark historiography (Kuukkanen 2021, 1). David Carr’s more straightforward definition is that the philosophy of history is the “philosophical study of human history and of attempts to record and interpret it” (Carr 1999, 671). Consistent with Carr’s definition, Patrick Gardiner maintains that the philosophy of history covers two distinct kinds of inquiry. The first of these – commonly referred to as ‘speculative’ or ‘substantive’ philosophy of history – is broadly taken to have as its subject-matter the actual human past, the latter being viewed from a universal or synoptic standpoint and studied with the aim of disclosing the overall workings and significance of the historical process considered as a whole. The second branch of inquiry – usually entitled ‘critical’ or ‘analytical’ philosophy of history – is primarily directed toward investigating the manner in which practicing historians proceed

16

See back cover of Grayling 1998. Emphasis not mine. In elaborating upon this definition, Kuukkanen states on page 1 that the philosophy of history “is concerned with the question under what circumstances and what premises something is, can and should be considered to be part of history, either as historiographical object of history writing and interpretation or as an entity in the object world itself.” This elaboration on the definition, though, appears unnecessarily narrow – and does not appear to follow directly from Kuukkanen’s definition.

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in the course of eliciting and interpreting the particular events, developments, and so forth of which the human past is composed. Here the focus of attention is upon history regarded as a specific form of knowledge, the philosopher’s concern being with such matters as the fundamental concepts or categories historical thinking involves and the presuppositions underlying the historian’s cognitive claims and typical modes of inference. (Gardiner 2005, 386)

Regarding these two distinct forms of inquiry, the philosophy of history trades on the two primary meanings of the word “history” in English and in modern European languages. One sense of the word pertains to the temporal sequence of past human actions and events; the other sense concerns the academic discipline in which knowledge of the past is obtained (Carr 1999, 671). Furthermore, speculative or substantive philosophy of history is located under metaphysics; it is typically associated with the thought of Augustine, Herder, Vico, Hegel, Marx, Comte, Spengler, and Toynbee. Critical or analytical philosophy of history, which emerged in the 1940s, is largely preoccupied with epistemological concerns. Anticipated by Croce and Collingwood, some of its major contributors include W.H. Walsh, Patrick Gardiner, Morton White, Isaiah Berlin, William H. Dray, Ernest Nagel, W.B. Gallie, Arthur Danto, Louis O. Mink, Rex Martin, and Aviezer Tucker.18 However, I agree with Kuukkanen who acknowledges that the foundational paper of the analytical philosophy of history is Carl Gustaf Hempel’s “The Function of General Laws in History” published in 1942. It is no exaggeration to say that the discussion that follows is to a large extent an offshoot of this paper. (Kuukkanen 2021, 2)

While known as a prominent philosopher of science, Hempel19 had an outsized influence on the philosophy of history. As historian Elizabeth A. Clark observes, so “strong was the impact of Hempel’s thesis that philosophers of history for years afterward sought to work within his assumptions while modifying them to ameliorate their presumed defects” (Clark 2004, 33). By the late 1970s, though, analytical philosophy of history seemed to have petered out. Danto20 wryly observes that when Rex Martin, in 1977, published a very balanced and judicious account of Hempel’s model, I think Martin would be the first to concede that no one much cared one way or the

18

Placing the contributions of Wilhelm Dilthey in either speculative philosophy of history or analytical philosophy of history is problematic. Robert C. Scharff has argued that neither category fits Dilthey, who he sees as offering a non-analytical and unspeculative form of the philosophy of history – or, indeed, of all science, human, and natural. See Scharff 1976, 295–331. 19 For a helpful account of the arc of Hempel’s career, see “Carl G. Hempel: Logical Empiricist” in Curd 2012, 83–111. 20 The larger context for Danto’s comment is understood when one considers the following autobiographical vignette Danto offers earlier in the paper, page 71: “I recall talking. . . with the logician Richard Jeffries one evening at a rooftop party in Manhattan, when he said that whenever he thought of the Verifiability Principle, he was reminded of the Sybil of Cumae as described in the epigraph to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; when asked what she really wanted, the Sybil responded that she wanted to die.” The book by Rex Martin to which Danto refers is Martin 1977.

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other. The whole analytical philosophy of history, like its cousin the Verifiability Principle, hardly had enough life left in it to want to die. (Danto 1995, 71–72)

And so, the stage was set for a new direction for the philosophy of history. To the two distinct forms of inquiry that constitute the philosophy of history, Kuukkanen adds a third: narrativism. Kuukkanen explains that narrativism emerged in the early 1970s with the publication of Hayden White’s (1973) Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th Century Europe. Another landmark publication is Frank Ankersmit’s (1983) Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language published ten years later in 1983. ‘Narrativism’ is generally understood as a shift regarding the scientific status of historiography with a realization that history writing is conditioned by and contains various literary tropes and features. Narrativists typically emphasize that, like in literature, historians produce texts and that texts contain narratives which are not evaluable by empirical or even by any epistemological means. (Kuukkanen 2021, 3)

Kuukkanen acknowledges that dividing the philosophy of history into three distinct kinds of inquiry is an imperfect arrangement; it is not obvious where to situate the philosophical works that do not easily fall into these categories, such as the contributions by Collingwood or Gadamer. Nevertheless, dividing the philosophy of history into two (and now three) forms of inquiry is standard – a standard generated by the field’s own internal, discipline-specific conversation with (and about) itself. And yet, this discipline-specific conversation has always had implications for how the efforts of philosophers of history would be viewed by their closest kin, historians.

Part 3.1: Hempel’s Contribution to the Philosophy of History – and Reactions to Hempel In what follows, I offer a precis of Hempel’s 1942 paper “The Function of General Laws in History.” As early as 1959, Patrick Gardiner observed that Hempel’s 1942 paper had “attained the status of a kind of classic in the field” (Gardiner 1959, 269–270). And as already noted, Kuukkanen acknowledges that the trajectory of the philosophy of history after 1942 – from analytical philosophy of history to narrativism – is largely a response to Hempel’s influential paper. However, one group for whom Hempel’s paper has had little if any influence are historiographers and other historians. Case in point: in Making History: An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline, editors Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield, whose 2004 volume grew out of a course on historiography at Aberystwyth University in Wales, examine a wide variety of themes, from the professionalization of history to social movements and theory in history, to interdisciplinary influences. In the Introduction, Lambert and Schofield explain their project: This book is about how, when and why particular approaches to making history have emerged, established themselves, changed and even collapsed. . . We first explore the beginnings of professional, academic historical research and writing in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. . . The bulk of the volume concerns subsequent developments within academic history, tracing the intellectual fashions and movements through which

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academic history acquired new identities. Historians drew eclectically on the questions, methods, and sensibilities of other academic disciplines. (Lambert and Schofield 2004, 1)

In fact, in the section of the book devoted to interdisciplinarity, one finds chapters on history and psychoanalysis, history and sociology, history and anthropology, and history and literature. Conspicuous by its absence is any meaningful mention of philosophy’s influence on the discipline of history. Tellingly, Hempel is mentioned only once in the volume. Perhaps reflection on the supposed utility of the proposal outlined in Hempel’s influential paper for the discipline of history is needed. In “The Function of General Laws in History,” Hempel claims that explanations in history either are or should be modeled on explanations provided by the natural sciences. Both historical explanations and scientific explanations, Hempel argues, are expressed in the same form. That form is captured by the deductive-nomological (DN) model, which is also called the covering law model of explanation. The schema of the DN model is as follows: Explanans: statements of antecedent conditions Explanans: general law (or, what Hempel also calls universal hypothesis) Explanandum: description of the empirical phenomenon to be explained/predicted In the deductive-nomological model, one deduces the explanandum from the explanans. The model is also termed nomological because it makes an appeal to lawlike generalizations that, unlike accidental generalizations, possess a kind of necessity or counterfactual force. In the first paragraph, Hempel states that the threefold mission of his paper is to show that general laws in history and in the natural sciences function in analogous ways, that general laws are essential to historical research, and that the appeal to general laws forms the common ground on which both natural science and history stand.21 At this point, various questions emerge. Why should historians want to explain historical events by using the DN model? Aren’t historians interested in description, not explanation and prediction? Hempel’s answer is that if the discipline of history is to be a science, then the discovery of and appeal to general historical laws must be made. When analyzing a certain historical event, historians, Hempel claims, must show that the “event in question was not ‘a matter of chance,’ but was to be expected in view of certain antecedent or simultaneous conditions. The expectation referred to is not prophecy or divination, but rational scientific anticipation which rests on the assumption of general laws” (Hempel 1942, 39). Sometimes, general historical laws are offered by historians. Hempel notices that most explanations offered by historians lack an explicit statement of the regularities 21

For an interpretation of Hempel’s 1942 paper, which argues that Hempel was responding to Wilhelm Windelband’s neo-Kantian philosophy of history and that Hempel intended to defend the methodological unity of science, not introduce the question of historical explanation in the philosophy of history, see Dewulf 2018, 385–406.

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that they assume. Hempel offers two reasons for this omission. First, historians often take for granted that the universal generalization to which they appeal is common knowledge, so there is no reason to explicitly state the general law in any formal way. Second, when historians do not tacitly assume that the historical laws are common knowledge, they instead claim that it is too difficult to offer a sufficiently precise generalization that would be widely accepted as the best generalization, given that disputes will arise about which empirical evidence is relevant. Hempel offers a solution to the problem. In section 5.3, he suggests that historians interpret historical explanations by reference to probability hypotheses rather than to general deterministic laws. In section 5.4, he suggests that the explanatory analyses that historians sometimes invoke are really what he calls “explanations sketches.” Hempel states that an explanation sketch is a rather vague indication of the relevant laws and initial conditions in question, and as such require a good deal of filling-out by specific statements before they can be considered genuine explanations. One of tasks of the historian, Hempel thinks, is to fill out the explanation sketches so that history can be considered a genuine science. A filled-out explanation sketch will indicate the relevant evidence required to test the explanation and also tell historians which discoveries will tend to confirm the proposed general law. Emphasis on locating the empirical import of history’s general laws will dissuade historians from offering empirically meaningless terms – such as “reference to the historical destiny of a certain race, or to a principle of historical justice” – in the course of inquiry (Hempel 1942, 43). What Hempel calls metaphysical theories of history are inadequate models for the science of history. As a branch of empirical inquiry, the science of history will favor explanation and prediction over pseudo-scientific methods. Hempel argues that one such method that the science of history will reject, though which it is often closely associated with, is the method of empathic understanding. Employing this method, the historian imaginatively identifies herself with the historical figure she is investigating, thereby arriving at a better appreciation of both the events that the figure was embroiled in and the motives that drove the figure to do what they did. Hempel charges that the method of empathic understanding is not scientific because it does not produce an explanation. It is only a heuristic device and, moreover, is a method that history could do without. Rather than trying to imaginatively identify with a historical figure, the historian should employ the results of the science of psychology in any adequate psychological profile – a profile that would lead to explanation and prediction of the character’s behavior – of the figure. Hempel concludes the paper by reaffirming the methodological unity of empirical science. Insofar as it may have had historians and historiographers as a possible targeted audience, Hempel’s contribution does not appear to have been offered in the spirit of friendly assistance, ready to offer a helping hand to a discipline in obvious need. Hempel’s own thoughts on philosophy’s association with other disciplines may prove illuminating. In a rare autobiographical sketch of his intellectual commitments, Hempel reflects on the relationship between the philosophy of science and the first-order fields of inquiry that the philosophy of science examines. His reflections focus on his career in 1963:

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My views at the time were strongly influenced by the antinaturalism of Carnap, Popper, and similarly minded thinkers within or close to the Vienna Circle, who held that the proper task of the methodology and philosophy of science was to provide “explication” or “rational reconstructions” of the form and function of scientific reasoning. Such explications were to furnish norms or standards of rationality for the pursuit of scientific inquiry and were to be formulated with rigorous precision by means of the conceptual apparatus of logic. These norms were thus definitely not intended to provide a descriptive, “naturalistic” account of actual scientific-research practice in its diverse psychological, historical, and sociocultural aspects. Rather, they were propounded as standards for rationally sound procedure in science, standards considered to be sometimes woefully violated in actual scientific practice. (Hempel 1993, 7)

The patronizing air adopted in the last sentence is hard to ignore. And lest it be overlooked, for Hempel, analytical philosophy of history was conceived as part of the philosophy of science.22 So, the “actual scientific practice” to which Hempel refers may involve not only physics, chemistry, and biology but history as well. Perhaps because the philosophy of history after 1942 was for decades dominated by a response to Hempel, historians and historiographers appear to have expressed little to no interest in the philosophy of history. Philosopher Jonathan Gorman points out that “[h]istorians have mostly ignored philosophers of any stripe. They have long made and continue to make their own contributions to theorizing about history” (Gorman 2021, 26). One exception to this neglect is when historians disparage the contributions of philosophers of history. Ironically referring to what he calls “smart historians,” historiographer Alun Munslow scornfully describes how this discredited group have “become elegant inferentialists who. . . do this by invoking a variety of ever more. . . sophisticated theorisations, counter-factual imaginings, and even for some the divination of the scientific laws underlying the apparently ephemeral forces in human society” (Munslow 2010, 23). However, Munslow attacks a straw man23; his real target, it seems, is Hempel, who has seemingly influenced these “smart historians.” Behind Munslow’s attack lies a frustration with what he presumably takes to be, from his historiographical point of view, the irrelevance and arrogance of philosophy of history conducted in a manner styled after Hempel. Clark’s assessment of Hempel-style philosophy of history, while more polite, is no less blunt; “the early-twentieth-century effort to construe history as a science fail[ed]” she concludes (Clark 2004, 41). This is not the place to examine in detail the arguments and exchanges that led analytical philosophy of history to evaporate. In fact, according to Danto, supposing that a record of such arguments and exchanges will provide the desired illumination

22

In research I conducted as the Summer Archival Fellow in July 2022 at the Archives of Scientific Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science, I found that Hempel regularly included a unit on the philosophy of history in his Philosophy of Science seminars. Hempel included a unit on the philosophy of history as early as Spring 1953 at Princeton University and continued to do so until at least Winter 1982 at the University of Pittsburgh. 23 I’d wager that the number of professional historians guilty of what Munslow charges approximates the empty set.

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is seemingly wrongheaded. Reminding us that Kuhn’s Structure appeared in 1962 –20 years after Hempel’s paper was published – Danto argues that Kuhn advanced a view of history so powerful that, rather than being an applied science, as Hempel holds history to be, history came to be the matrix for viewing all the sciences. It all at once became the philosophical fashion to view science historically rather than logically, as an evolving system rather than a timeless calculus, as something whose shifts over time are philosophically more central to its essence than the timeless edifice of theories, related to laws which in turn were related to observation sentences; this had been the standard way in which the philosophy of science thought about its subject ante Kuhn. . . It was as though science had been swallowed whole by one of its offspring, which, under the influence of Wittgenstein, N.R. Hanson and Stephen Toulmin, not to mention Kuhn himself, had become the philosophical history of science. This transformation was consolidated under the immense prestige of Foucault’s archeologizing politics of science. . . And this overall view was nailed in place with the heavy anti-scientism of the late 1960s and the decade that followed. (Danto 1995, 72)

On Danto’s view, analytical philosophy of history faded away because the prevailing intellectual tastes changed; a victim of style, it was no longer in vogue.24 Tellingly, some of the influences that determined the trajectory of and provided the fuel for the historiography of science in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – from Kuhn’s paradigms to Foucauldian postmodernism to anti-scientism (which lies behind and animates SSK) – are the very influences that, as Danto observes, undermined the presuppositions of analytical philosophy of history.

Part 4: Further Observations, Hesse (Again), and Prospects for an Interdisciplinary Confraternity At this point, it should be clear that, despite their common preoccupation with metalevel reflections on history, the historiography of science and the philosophy of history have had very different trajectories. Given their shared subject, it is a rather strange fact that the historiography of science and the philosophy of history have developed almost entirely without any influence from the other. And yet, as philosopher Daniel Little has emphasized, regarding the historiographical tradition generally, “there is a degree of overlap between historiography and the philosophy of history in the fact that both are concerned with identifying and evaluating the standards of reasoning that are used in various historical traditions” (Little 2020). Nevertheless, the tools with which historians and philosophers of history determine how to identify and evaluate the standards of reasoning that are used in various William Dray agrees. Dray observes that when “the controversy over Hempel’s theory began to abate in the mid-1970s, this was due less to a consensus having been reached than to other issues crowding it from center stage: issues like individualism versus holism, constructionism versus realism, and the extent to which historical inquiry can be objective. There was also a sense of ennui; as one [of] Hempel’s earlier supporters recently confessed, he simply lost interest in ‘The World according to Hempel.’” (Dray 2000, 220). 24

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historical traditions differ radically from each other. Confining ourselves to only the historiography of science and the philosophy of history, those differences remain at least as striking, if not more so. The tools that historiographers of science after Kuhn have used to engage in and pursue metalevel reflections on history are derived from or inspired by French Theory, the Strong Programme, and SSK – interpretive traditions with which philosophers of history have had little involvement. Moreover, most historiographers of science after Kuhn explicitly reject any form of Whig history in favor of a constructivist interpretive approach. On the other hand, the tools that philosophers of history have used to engage in and pursue metalevel reflections on history have been derived from or inspired by trends in the philosophy of science and, more recently, accounts of literary tropes in history writing in the narrativist tradition. Nevertheless, historiographers of science have not expressed interested in applying Hempel’s DN model to frame events in the history of science. Those laboring in the historiography of science and in the philosophy of history have been working in silos; the effect is one of insularity. Because of these separate trajectories, the historiography of science and the philosophy of history, unlike the history of science and the philosophy of science, never ruptured. More accurately, they never had a chance to fracture or splinter because they were never bound together or unified in practice or in aspiration. Nevertheless, it may be fruitful to briefly speculate about what a rapprochement between – or, better still, confraternity of – these two subdisciplines might look like. First, though, I return to make a concluding remark about Hesse’s 1973 paper with which I began this chapter. Recall that Hesse begins her 1973 paper “Reasons and Evaluations in the History of Science” by making three connected claims. I argue that I have shown that Hesse’s first claim – that the “historiography of science, more than the history of other aspects of human thought, is peculiarly subject to philosophic fashion” – is warranted, though substituting “intellectual trends” for the phrase “philosophic fashion” secures, I think, the justification it enjoys (Hesse 1973, 128). On its own, Hesse’s first claim does not appear very significant. When joined with her other two claims, though, the relevance and controversial nature of her insight is revealed. Hesse’s second claim is that the discipline of history, through the prism of the historiography of science, “reflects views of the nature of science current in contemporary philosophy of science” (Hesse 1973, 128). In the section of my chapter devoted to the historiography of science, I believe that I have provided good reasons for concluding that Hesse’s second claim is, under present circumstances, false. That leaves Hesse’s third claim. Earlier, I stated that Hesse’s third claim – that the historiography of science’s purported susceptibility to various intellectual trends is demonstrated in the way it tacitly assumes a philosophy of history – is provocative. More importantly, though, Hesse’s third claim is true. However, the truth of Hesse’s third claim is obscure. It is not the case that Hesse’s third claim is true on account of a relationship that the historiography of science has (or has had) with the philosophy of history. As I’ve shown, the two disciplines have had surprisingly little common interaction.

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Nevertheless, Hesse’s claim is true because of the way in which the historiography of science has assumed a philosophy of history – or something near enough – from the so-called antiphilosophy that has informed French Theory, the Strong Programme, and SSK. The philosophy of history that much of the historiography of science has implicitly adopted, in its embrace of constructivism, is inadequate because of the antiphilosophy that underwrites it. However, there is an alternative. The historiography of science could reconsider its allegiance to French Theory and the constructivist approach that drives the Strong Programme and SSK while simultaneously opting for a philosophy of history that comes directly from the philosophical tradition itself. For this, collaboration and the building of bridges is required. This heretofore undiscovered vision may breathe new life and relevance into both the historiography of science and the philosophy of history. If a confraternity of the historiography of science and the philosophy of history were to be successful, more collaboration might follow. For example, one might imagine the historiography of science working in tandem with contemporary philosophy of science to generate a picture of the nature of science on which both historiographers of science and philosophers of science could largely agree. The insights shared and conclusions reached in this interdisciplinary undertaking could be impressive. Moreover, it could yield novel interpretative approaches for a genuinely integrated history and philosophy of science. And one felicitous sideconsequence of such an arrangement is that under the conditions outlined, whereby a genuine rapprochement between the history of science and the philosophy of science is achieved, Hesse’s second claim would (again) become true. First steps are often the most difficult to make. The question of where to begin to initiate an interdisciplinary confraternity of the historiography of science and the philosophy of history has no obvious answers. Nevertheless, there are some criteria that should appear on any checklist. Philosophers exhibiting a sincere interest in history – not just as regards its method, but as regards its substance, too – should, I submit, be a prerequisite. Consider the following observation by William Dray who, for a volume celebrating Hempel’s achievements and influence, wrote the following: Hempel’s now celebrated essay “The Function of General Laws in History”. . . [was a] single, short piece of writing, on a single problem, by a philosopher who, although already a formidable presence in the philosophy of the physical sciences, gave little indication, either then or now, of being much interested in history for its own sake, nevertheless seized and held the attention of a sizeable group of philosophers and their students for more than a generation. (Dray 2000, 217)

Dray’s backhanded compliment speaks for itself. Historians need to step up to the plate, too. There is a need for historiographers who are genuinely interested in and open to how the resources of the Western philosophical tradition can help them frame and interpret history in a more revealing way than the tradition of antiphilosophy can. What I have called the tradition of antiphilosophy goes by many different names; with less dramatic flair, historian

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Lynn Hunt calls the varieties of antiphilosophy social and cultural theories. Writing about how social and cultural theories undermined the four major historiographical traditions – Marxism, modernization, the Annales school, and identity politics25 – that directed historical research in the post-World War II era, Hunt argues that “social and cultural theories that stimulated much history writing from the 1950s onward have lost their vitality, creating uncertainty about how history will be written in the future” (Hunt 2014, 1). In my estimation, one possible means by which historians may experiment to restore the lost vitality of their history writing may be found in collaboration with philosophers who have a sincere interest in history for its own sake. If this holds for historians and philosophers as such, then the force of this recommendation should be felt more acutely regarding historiographers (of science) and philosophers of history. In closing, I am drawn to the well-known proverb offered by Imre Lakatos, expressing regret over needless and counterproductive disciplinary separation that has become all too common: “Philosophy of science without history is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind” (Lakatos 1978, 102). I leave it to those wittier than I to produce a similarly snappy aphorism about historiography and the philosophy of history.

Conclusion That the history of science and the philosophy of science have largely gone in very different directions in recent decades on account of a lack of dialogue stemming from divergent disciplinary priorities is uncontested. I have argued that a story about the relationship between historiography, including the historiography of science, and the philosophy of history parallels, in terms of its effects on each academic discipline, what has been, until recently, the lack of dialogue between the philosophy of science and the history of science. This chapter has charted the ways in which the historiography of science and the philosophy of history – despite what might be expectations to the contrary, rooted in an appreciation of these two fields’ common preoccupation with metalevel reflections on history – developed independently of each other and with surprisingly little interaction over the last 80 years. In an effort to motivate what I call an “interdisciplinary confraternity” of the historiography of science and the philosophy of history, this chapter has put these two disciplines in conversation with each other. The chapter began by considering observations that philosopher of science Mary Hesse made in 1973 about the relationship between the historiography of science and the philosophy of history. The chapter provided a brief discussion of historiography, 25

For Hunt, modernization theories draw upon the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim and German social theorist Max Weber. The Annales school is associated with the work of French historians Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and Fernand Braudel. Identity politics, as Hunt sees it, was a response to social movements, such as the civil rights movement and the women’s and gay liberation movements.

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followed by an account of the development of the historiography of science from Kuhn onward. The chapter then supplied an account of the development of the philosophy of history, with special attention to the contribution and influence of Carl G. Hempel. After returning to further examine themes in Hesse, I ended the chapter by speculating about how a connection between the two areas may be achieved. I have concluded that the lessons we can glean by effecting cross-fertilization between the two areas is pregnant with possibility for a reinvigorated historiography of science and a resuscitated philosophy of history, which has languished on the sidelines of philosophy for roughly 60 years.

Cross-References ▶ Historiography of Science and the Relationship Between History and the History of Science ▶ Pierre Duhem: Between the Historiography of Science and Philosophy of History Acknowledgments Research for this paper was partially supported by the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh where I served as Summer Archival Fellow in July 2022. I wish to thank Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science Edouard Machery and Assistant Director Kathleen Labuda for their help in making this opportunity possible. I also wish to thank University of Pittsburgh archivist Jason Rampelt, Ph.D., for his help with my archival research. Furthermore, I am grateful for feedback on earlier drafts of this paper to James Woelfel, James Bidwell, and Kevin Dowd. Lastly, I am very appreciative of the patience demonstrated by the editors of this volume, and of the encouragement that they have shown me to pursue this project.

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Index

A Abstraction, 10, 54, 56, 154, 155, 215, 234, 238, 321, 324–326, 332, 333, 406, 437 Accuracy, 243, 321, 366, 385, 447, 462 Actional sciences, 282, 283 Active connections, 92, 97 Adeel, Muhammad, 443, 448, 455, 456, 465 Africa, 183, 361, 526, 532, 538, 539 Ailly, P., 361, 364 Albuquerque, L., 357–359, 361, 367, 368, 371–373 Alchemy, 34, 431, 578 Alfonso El Sabio, 357 Almeida, F., 49–60 Almeida, T., 229–253 Althusser, L., 146, 148, 331, 364 Alunni, C., 328 American Physical Society, 452–456, 460, 462 Andreucci, F., 109 Annales, 10, 30, 35, 37, 318, 364, 374, 556, 569–571, 575, 577, 583, 612 Anthropology, 151, 220, 221, 428–430, 437, 480–486, 492, 494, 496, 536, 570, 577, 592, 597, 606 Antiphilosophy, 611, 612 Antipsychologism, 305 Anti-scientism, 573, 574, 609 Apollonius of Perga, 341, 427 Apostolic Succession, 457, 473, 474 Applied science and technology, 67, 68, 103, 106, 110, 115–117, 146, 149, 156, 168, 285, 525, 527, 529–531, 534, 536–539, 548, 557, 585 Approximation, 238, 242, 261, 325, 345, 400, 409, 431. 572, 573 Arabatzis, T., 225 Arabic and Islamic world, 531 Arboleda, L., 528, 531

Archimedes, 175, 341, 371, 427, 488, 489 Archives and libraries, 536 Aristotle, 20, 69, 153, 175. 320, 346, 360, 372, 378, 436 Arneth, A., 421, 424, 426 Arnold, D., 232, 236, 250, 251, 529, 532, 538 Arnold, M., 421, 422 Aron, R., 147 Aróstegui, J., 569 Asad, T., 511 Asprem, E., 512 Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), 450 Aubrey, J., 347, 352 Australia, 531, 545 Autobiography, 342, 453 Autochthonous, 530, 533 Autonomy, 4, 7, 13, 18, 19, 22, 45, 79, 93, 94, 109, 153, 157, 158, 161, 163–169, 219, 221, 261, 278, 280, 281, 283, 284, 288, 289, 311, 320, 482–484, 489, 490, 493, 573, 576, 594 Ávila, G., 229–253 Aztec, 534 Azurara, G., 356

B Babylonian (science, mathematics), 422, 426, 431 Bachelard, G., 36, 38, 41, 45, 49–60, 65, 71, 74, 75, 79, 86, 148, 149, 154, 217, 235–238, 251, 294–300, 304, 305, 307–312, 315–334, 364, 571, 573, 575 Bacon, F., 40, 114, 177, 180, 181, 240, 340, 350, 360, 369, 371, 379, 389, 504, 509, 516, 595 Baghramian, M., 222 Baillet, A., 378

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. L. Condé, M. Salomon (eds.), Handbook for the Historiography of Science, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27510-4

617

618 Bailly, J., 378 Baldi, B., 342, 343 Banfi, A., 105 Banks, E., 429, 430, 437 Barbour, I., 508 Barras, A., 450 Barros, J., 356, 371 Barros, J. D’Assunção, 585 Barton, R., 517 Baruzi, J., 33 Basalla, G., 527, 528, 532 Bastos, C., 537 Bayda, S., 443, 448, 455, 456, 465 Bayuk, D., 507 Beiser, F., 423 Belaval, Y., 31 Benrubi, I., 424, 431 Bensaúde, J., 356, 357, 361, 370 Bensaude-Vincent, B., 33, 455, 456, 464, 465 Bentley, M., 592–595 Béraud, L., 381–383, 391 Bergson, H., 20, 50, 53, 54, 309, 328, 358 Bernalism, 101–117 Bernal, J., 101–117 Bernoulli, J., 259, 349, 380, 385, 399, 404, 407, 408, 413 Berr, H., 32, 571 Berthelot, M., 431–433 Bhabha, H., 513 Biaye, M., 450 Binnig, G., 469, 470 Biology, 64–67, 70, 75–79, 86, 92–98, 113, 124, 133, 138–140, 230, 286, 295, 298, 299, 303, 310, 312, 320, 420, 516, 526, 567, 578, 608 Blackbody radiation, 451 Blackett, P., 115 Blackman, F., 113 Bloch, M., 329, 569, 571, 575, 578, 612 Bodin, J., 370 Boehme, J., 30, 33, 34, 44 Boltanski, L., 147 Boltzmann, L., 436 Bond, M., 515 Bonomo, M., 515 Boole-Stout, A., 553 Bordoni, S., 419–438 Bos, C., 532 Bossut, C., 378, 381, 383, 392 Boucharlat, J., 393 Boukherroub, R., 450 Boulliau, I., 408

Index Bourdé, G., 569 Bourdieu, P., 146–169, 310, 311, 511, 568 Bourgeois revolution, 358, 365, 372 Bowler, P., 269, 420, 421, 598, 601 Boyle, R., 117, 137, 143, 200–204, 223, 504, 596, 600, 601 Bragg, W., 113 Brahe, T., 71, 342, 343, 348, 425, 596 Braudel, F., 286, 364, 533, 577, 612 Braunstein, J., 32, 70, 74, 233, 236, 238, 293–312, 319, 333, 334 Brazil, 360, 364, 479, 545 Brenner, A., 6, 16, 432 Britain, 102–105, 107–110, 113, 115–116, 511, 512, 530 British Association of Scientific Workers, 404 Brooke, J., 505, 510, 511 Brouzeng, P., 434, 435 Brown, A., 103, 110 Brown, E., 398, 400–402, 404, 405, 408, 411 Brunet, Pierre, 386, 556 Brunschvicg, L., 32, 38, 39, 50, 51, 53, 309, 319, 320 Bueno, O., 222 Buffon, G., 221, 392 Burke, P., 535, 569, 570, 583 Bussotti, P., 450, 451 Butterfield, H., 114, 260, 508, 595, 596

C Cahan, D., 517 Calculus, 382, 390, 406, 407, 409, 410, 413, 559, 609 Caltech, 442–444, 460 Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group, 104, 107, 109, 110 Camões, L., 357, 358, 360, 370, 371 Canguilhem, G., 31, 51–58, 63–79, 86, 147–149, 154, 162, 232, 233, 235, 236, 238, 251, 294–300, 305–312, 316, 319, 326, 327, 329, 332–334, 573 Canseliet, E., 450 Cantor, M., 421, 422, 426, 427, 437 Capital, 30, 76, 149, 153, 158–163, 168, 169, 252, 325, 326, 333, 494 Cardano, G., 7, 342 Carlencas, F., 382 Carlyle, T., 393 Carnap, R., 87, 89, 127, 140, 244, 574, 597, 608 Carvalho, J., 359, 363–367, 370, 374 Cassini, G., 383

Index Cassirer, E., 322 Castelao-Lawless, T., 328 Castellanos-Gomez, A., 464 Castelli Gattinara, E., 38, 315–334 Castel, R., 147 Castro, J., 360–362, 365–367, 370–372, 374, 481–484 Catana, L., 433 Categories, 7, 38, 39, 44, 69, 129, 141, 153, 154, 158, 169, 177, 198, 200, 213, 216, 217, 233–235, 240, 286, 316, 320–322, 327, 465, 503–519, 534, 546, 557, 593–595, 604, 605 Cavaillès, J., 74, 148, 309, 311, 319 Cavendish laboratory, 103 Ceba, A., 516 Centers-peripheries, 534 Certeau, Michael de, 569, 572, 578–583, 586 Ceruti, M., 108 Chakrabarty, D., 481, 487, 494–497, 579 Chamboredon, J., 147, 148 Chandler, J., 232 Chartres, 462 Chasles, M., 421–424, 426 Châtelet, É., 103 Chemistry, 7, 24, 32, 50, 73, 90, 103, 110, 184, 238, 259, 302, 303, 320, 321, 331, 333, 368, 381, 420, 425, 431, 433, 448, 451, 461, 526, 553, 567, 575, 608 Child abuse, 213 Chilvers, C., 509 Chimisso, C., 432, 433, 557 China, 183, 512, 526 Chinchilla-Rodríguez, Z., 461 Churchill, W., 110 Circulation of science, 230, 537 Civilization, 30, 105, 150, 308, 357, 359, 361, 363, 424, 425, 428, 429, 525, 549 Clagett, M., 106 Clairault, A., 402, 408, 412, 413 Clark, C., 514, 604, 608 Cleri, F., 450 Coercive empiricism, 369, 374 Cognition, 85, 88, 94, 221, 235, 237 Cohen, H., 359, 360 Cohen, R., 84 Cold War, 117, 527, 548 Colonial countries, 524, 525 Colonialism, 147, 373, 513, 529, 530 Colonial/post-colonial contexts, 528, 538 Colonial science, 524, 527, 530, 532, 533 Combined Operations Headquarters, 102, 110 Communist party of Great Britain, 104

619 Complexity, 12, 14, 53, 73, 97, 142, 195, 234, 267, 269–271, 321, 408, 426, 427, 435, 437, 505, 510, 511, 535, 536, 551, 566, 579, 586 Complexity thesis, 505, 510, 511 Compton effect, 451 Comte, A., 31, 32, 55, 76, 149, 219, 294, 299–311, 318, 319, 324, 325, 431, 433, 505, 506, 513, 555, 567, 574, 578, 604 Conant, J., 574, 582 Concept, 5, 7, 13, 18, 30, 31, 34, 37–39, 45, 55–57, 64, 65, 70, 72, 75–77, 79, 89–93, 95, 125, 129, 130, 132, 140, 141, 148, 149, 153–158, 164, 196, 200, 210, 212, 218, 222–225, 233, 237–239, 247, 248, 258–262, 266, 271, 279, 287, 288, 295, 297, 298, 303, 308–311, 323, 324, 329, 331, 366, 400, 403, 404, 406, 410, 411, 430, 432, 433, 442, 443, 447, 448, 452, 456, 460, 472, 481, 482, 485–488, 492, 493, 496, 511, 513, 526, 528, 533, 534, 546, 557, 565, 572, 579, 585, 586 Conceptual vision, 463 Condé, M., 83–98, 121–143, 245, 252, 411, 465, 576 Condillac, É., 386–388 Conditions of possibility of knowledge, 281 Condorcet, M., 392, 393 Conflict thesis, 506, 507, 510 Construction of scientific knowledge, 123, 126, 133, 136, 277, 278 Constructivism (constructivist), 67–69, 134, 157, 160, 487, 595, 599–602, 610, 611 Contact zone, 535 Context of discovery, 86, 88, 126, 128, 131, 306, 575 Context of justification, 19, 86, 88, 126, 128, 131, 306, 575 Continental Europe, 419–437, 505, 514 Copernicus, N., 9–11, 20, 24, 30, 34–35, 39, 41–43, 68, 126, 141, 258, 260, 342, 343, 347, 367, 371, 372, 374, 425, 428, 451, 474, 548, 583–585, 595 Copie, G., 450 Cordani, M., 443, 448, 455, 456, 465 Correns, C., 269, 270, 458 Cortesão, A., 356, 358, 363, 364, 368 Cortesão, J., 360–364, 373 Cossali, P., 378 Costa, F., 378 Costard, G., 378 Cotter, J., 531

620 Cournot, A., 319, 421, 424–426, 428, 431, 432, 435, 437 Cozzoli, D., 101–118 Creole science, 530 Crisis, 30, 31, 37–45, 51, 84, 94, 105, 108, 109, 116, 126, 130, 132, 235, 320, 358, 425, 432, 451, 480, 485, 486, 494, 495 Critical (history, analysis, approach), 179–180, 276, 295, 296, 422, 423, 432, 495, 566, 570, 579, 580, 584 Critical rationalism, 131, 372 Crombie, A., 114, 210, 219, 220, 226, 265, 304, 309, 332 Cross-contextualization, 536 Cross-cultural interaction, 534 Crystallization of styles, 223 Cueto, M., 526, 531 Cultural translations, 535 Cunningham, A., 508 Cup of Lycurgus, 462 Curie, M., 553

D D’Alembert, J., 259, 319, 380, 385–393, 407, 408, 412, 413 Darquier, A., 382 Darwin, C., 139, 223, 269, 270, 286, 297, 304, 436, 512, 518 Darwinian biology, 286 Daston, L., 74, 122, 210, 216, 217, 225, 229–253, 278, 279, 285–290, 316, 327, 333, 594 Dauben, J., 423, 424, 426 Daubié, J., 554 Daughton, J., 512 Davidson, A., 232, 250, 251, 280, 333 Davis, K., 537 De Asua, M., 515 Debus, A., 571, 574 Decolonial, 524–538 Decolonization, 483, 485, 511, 529, 532, 547 Deductive-nomological model, 606 De Laclos, F., 33 Delambre, J., 384 Delanty, G., 513 Delaunay, C., 400 Delisle, C., 383, 384, 392, 393 Delisle, J., 383 De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, 20, 35, 258, 583 Derrida, J., 597 Descartes, R., 5, 13, 15, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36–37, 39–42, 45, 56, 78, 85, 211, 240, 303, 304, 306, 310, 364, 378, 389, 407, 504, 595

Index DeVries, H., 458 D’Holbach, P., 385 Dialectic, 55–57, 59, 79, 104, 298, 304, 319, 322, 323, 369, 402, 577 Dias, J., 359, 367, 373 Dickie, J., 515 Dickinson, D., 103 Diderot, D., 259, 385–387, 391, 392 Diesinger, H., 450 Differentials, 330, 390, 402, 406, 410, 555 Diffusion, 8, 32, 109, 135, 366, 370, 472, 524, 528 Diffusionist models, 528–536 Digital history, 559 Dijksterhuis, E., 331, 557 Dilthey, W., 398, 403, 412, 578, 604 Ding an sich, 141 Discontinuity, 12, 39, 41, 42, 44, 54, 58, 153–155, 169, 223, 236, 284, 316, 322–325, 331, 333, 432, 573 Diversity, 12, 240, 245, 246, 295, 302–304, 310, 393, 480, 492, 518, 528, 529, 544, 545, 547–552, 557, 560, 561, 567, 576 Dobb, M., 104 Dogmatism, 51, 131, 157, 164 Dohm, H., 556 Donatiello, P., 328 Dosse, F., 577 Drago, A., 31 Dray, W., 604, 609, 611 Drexler, K., 443, 452, 453, 455, 456, 460, 462–465, 467, 468, 472 Droysen, J., 422, 423, 429 Du Bois-Reymond, E., 425 Duhem, P., 3–26, 32, 36, 178, 181, 300, 311, 358, 361, 421, 432–437, 508 Durkan, C., 443, 455, 456, 464, 465 Durkheim, É., 126, 135, 149, 151, 152, 154, 358, 612 Durlo, A., 441–475

E École Pratique des Hautes Études, 35, 508 Economic history, 105, 116, 530, 537 Economy of thought, 429, 430 Eddington, A., 43, 113 Edgerton, D., 538 Edwards, S., 442, 443, 453, 462, 464, 465 Eigler, D., 470 Einstein, A., 31, 33, 53, 154, 166, 183, 199, 244, 285, 451, 474, 575

Index Einsteinian physics, 154, 286 Elberskirchen, J., 556 Elena, A., 531 Elias, N., 153 Elshakry, M., 525, 528 Elvin, L., 102, 112 Emergence of scientific objects and concepts, 226 Empire (Spanish, French, or Portuguese), 259, 297, 330, 381, 392, 512, 514, 515, 531–533, 535, 537, 548 Empirical (knowledge), 425, 433 Empiricism, 21, 37, 89, 90, 126–128, 131, 133, 136, 180, 245, 248, 279, 327, 359, 367–374, 426, 429, 431, 433, 509, 571, 574, 578 Empiricist (approach), 50, 86, 87, 89, 126, 127, 131, 136, 148, 151, 368, 374, 430, 431, 491, 518, 604 Encyclopedia Brittanica, 446 Energetics, 23, 433, 434, 436, 455, 556 Engineering, 385, 444, 447, 448, 450, 459, 514, 552 Engineering & Science, 459 Engines of creation, 452, 467 Enriques, F., 556 Epistemological break, 66, 150 Epistemological history, 74, 308, 315–334 Epistemological obstacle, 150, 317, 325, 326, 332, 333 Epistemological regionalism, 149 Épistémologie historique, 149, 152, 232, 235 Epistemology, 21, 33, 38, 49–60, 64–68, 73–80, 83–86, 89, 92–95, 97, 98, 125, 128, 131, 133, 139, 140, 142, 147–149, 151, 153–157, 164, 165, 169, 181, 190, 202, 209, 213–219, 226, 229–253, 275–291, 294–300, 306, 310, 311, 316–334, 387, 423, 426, 428, 480 Esoteric circle, 91 Estève, P., 378 Ethics, 37, 51, 165, 176, 190, 199, 214, 216, 240, 243, 248, 249, 311, 369, 544, 552, 561, 603 Euclid, 174, 175, 341, 346–348, 352, 367, 371, 382, 427, 433 Eudemus of Rhodes, 378, 424 Eudoxus of Cnidus, 433 Euler, J., 259 Euler, L., 397–413 Eurocentric, 524, 528, 537, 548, 552 Eurocentrism, 231, 535, 548, 549

621 Europe, 30, 37, 41, 45, 103, 105, 116, 231, 240, 250, 252, 259, 290, 301, 340, 342, 347, 348, 361–363, 370–373, 384, 419–437, 505, 508, 511, 513, 514, 517, 526, 527, 529, 533, 536–538, 545, 574, 605 European knowledge, 530 European science, 524, 527, 528, 533, 534 Evil anti-Feynman, 470 Evolution, 4, 8, 12–17, 20–22, 24, 43, 53, 57, 58, 90–96, 122, 124, 125, 133, 138–143, 162, 164, 230, 241, 245, 260, 264, 266–268, 282, 302, 304, 320, 322, 324–326, 358, 368, 370, 426, 429, 436, 437, 447, 495, 512, 537, 569 Exactitude, 55, 321 Exemplars, 129, 192, 198, 200, 235, 262, 265, 267, 270, 288 Exemplary practice, 265, 267, 270 Exoteric circle, 91 Explanation sketches, 607 Extra-European, 528

F Fabbri, P., 157 Fabri, H., 381 Falsification, 21, 132, 183, 261, 263, 265, 320 Fara, P., 351, 518 Farrington, B., 114 Fausto-Sterling, 546 Febvre, L., 30, 32, 318, 329, 364, 365, 569, 571, 575, 578, 583, 612 Feminism, 545, 546, 549, 553, 557 Feyerabend, P., 86, 132, 591 Feynman, R., 441–475 Field, 33, 34, 37, 39, 57, 73, 88, 90, 93, 95, 96, 102, 103, 110, 117, 122, 125, 128, 140, 141, 146–148, 150, 152–169, 175, 176, 181, 196, 212, 213, 215, 219, 220, 231, 234, 239, 240, 244, 246, 247, 249, 252, 260, 263, 265, 266, 268, 270, 276, 278, 279, 282, 287, 298, 333, 340, 342, 344, 349, 351, 352, 363, 367, 373, 378, 381, 382, 399, 401, 406, 420, 422, 423, 425, 428, 441–444, 446, 448, 450–452, 455, 456, 461, 462, 464, 469, 471, 475, 480–484, 486, 487, 489, 492, 494, 496, 505–508, 510, 511, 513, 518, 525, 528, 529, 534, 538, 545, 546, 554, 557, 559, 560, 566–569, 571, 572, 575–577, 579, 581, 585–587, 589, 591, 598, 600, 602, 605, 607, 612

622 Field(s) of research, 125, 150, 181, 333, 420, 423, 428, 456, 461, 482, 534, 568 Figueirôa, S., 523–539 Finnocchiaro, M., 518 First principles, 411, 413, 511 Fitgerald, T., 511 Fleck, L., 65, 72, 83–98, 123, 124, 129, 139, 140, 236, 237, 247, 265, 309, 573, 576 Flipse, A., 368 Folkerts, M., 424 Fontenelle, B., 348–350, 378, 380, 386 Forman, P., 103, 436 Foucault, M., 58, 64, 66, 74, 75, 78, 148, 149, 210–212, 214–216, 218, 219, 221, 222, 224–226, 232, 233, 235, 237, 240, 250, 251, 280, 294, 295, 298–300, 306–312, 318, 319, 326, 327, 329, 331–333, 529, 578, 580, 594, 597, 599, 609 Foundations of science, 420, 425, 429 Fourneau, E., 103 Fox-Keller, E., 549 Fox, R., 514 France, 30–34, 36, 38, 50, 53, 54, 58, 64, 66, 77, 109, 146–148, 153, 155, 156, 169, 211, 235, 300, 301, 307, 311, 318, 320, 347–350, 357, 358, 360, 364, 381, 391, 400, 421, 424, 433, 512, 530, 531, 545, 557, 567–570, 578 Frederick II the Great, 390 French epistemological tradition, 280 French postmodernism, 597–600, 602 French Revolution, 545, 569, 593 French theory, 598, 610, 611 Freudenthal, G., 104 Freud, S., 154, 181, 325, 327, 518 Fricker, M., 549 Fullerene, 442 Fuss, N., 399, 401

G Gage, M., 553 Gaitskell, H., 115 Galilei, G., 344 Galison, P., 122, 231, 234, 239–252, 327, 333, 421, 535, 592 Gallant, T., 516 Gallois, L., 356, 357 Galofaro, F., 328 Gamito-Marques, D., 525 Gandolfi, G., 63–79 Ganeri, J., 535 Gardiner, P., 603–605

Index Garipuy, F., 382 Gascoigne, J., 514 Gassendi, P., 342–344 Gattei, S., 132, 140, 173–185, 344–346 Gavroglu, K., 567 Gayon, J., 53, 64, 74, 76, 79, 317 Gender, 250, 525, 543–561 General laws in history, 604–606, 611 Genetics, 69, 70, 220, 223, 264, 266–270, 286, 458, 474 Genovesi, A., 378 Geographical revolution, 358–364, 374 Gerland, E., 430, 431 Germain, S., 555 Germany, 32, 34, 103, 110, 276, 279, 356, 400, 421, 514, 515, 530, 545, 556, 578 Gestalt, 90, 91, 97, 126, 128, 129, 133, 139, 579 Gibbons, E., 393 Gilbert, H., 459 Gilson, É., 40 Gingras, Y., 276, 317, 507 Globalization, 494, 495, 533, 548 Godinho, V., 364, 372 Golinski, J., 190, 239, 591–593, 595, 598–602 Google Scholar, 468 Goss, A., 532 Gottschalk, P., 512 Gouhier, H., 33, 54, 146 Graphene, 442 Greek mathematics, 220, 427 Gregory, R., 20, 108, 561 Grossman, H., 101, 104, 116, 117 Gruning, B., 146 Gusdorf, G., 378 Gutting, G., 294, 571

H Habitus, 153, 155, 159, 160, 163, 165, 168, 169 Hacking, I., 74, 132, 153, 157, 209–226, 232, 233, 235–237, 251, 265, 279, 280, 283, 303, 309, 319, 328, 332, 333, 592 Haldane, J., 113 Hall, A., 102, 114, 116, 508 Haller, R., 430, 437 Hall, K., 507 Hanegraaff, W., 106 Hankel, H., 424 Hansen, P., 400 Haraway, D., 546, 547 Hard core, 263, 264, 266, 575 Hard sciences, 70, 567

Index Harmony of illusions, 91, 92 Harootinian, D., 333 Harrison, P., 504, 505, 511 Heidegger, M., 142, 148, 168, 285, 322, 598 Heilbronner, J., 378 Heisenberg, W., 43, 55 Helm, G., 434 Helvétius, C., 385 Hempel, C., 590, 597, 604–611, 613 Hermann, J., 182, 243, 408, 424, 558 Heroization, 343–344, 347–350, 352 Hesse, M., 285–286, 590, 591, 597, 609, 610, 612, 613 Hessen, B., 74, 104, 116, 117, 123, 509, 510 Heuch Bonnevie, K., 554 Hey, A., 460 Hibbs, A., 446 Hidden (assumptions, philosophy, foundations), 18, 168, 247, 290, 322, 333, 386, 420, 425, 427, 431, 450–451 Hill, G., 400, 402, 405, 408, 410, 411 Hindu mathematics, 424 Historian of Science, 65, 79, 105, 108, 127, 128, 174, 177, 178, 193, 233, 282, 285, 317, 326, 330, 331, 367, 379, 385, 400, 406, 407, 427, 466, 526, 553, 567, 571, 572, 574, 579, 580, 582, 587 Historical conditions of possibility, 226 Historical development, 15, 88, 90, 93, 117, 217, 224, 258, 271, 319, 343, 391, 404, 544 Historical-epistemological, 79, 148, 238, 566 Historical-epistemological standpoint, 461 Historical epistemology, 21, 49–60, 64–67, 71, 73–76, 78, 79, 146–157, 169, 216, 217, 229–253, 275–291, 294, 296, 311, 316–319, 328, 329, 333, 334, 573, 574 Historical meta-epistemology, 74, 213–218, 226, 236 Historical naturalism, 195 Historical ontology, 213–218, 225, 281 Historical past, 586 Historicism (German), 164, 213, 284, 287, 291, 421–426, 428, 430 Historicist rationalism, 157, 164–167 Histories of sciences, 106, 190, 340, 380, 422, 426–432, 505, 517, 532, 595, 596 Historiographical (approach, framework, debate, operation, trend), 117, 146, 193, 230, 267, 393, 402–405, 420, 425, 427, 431, 432, 434, 435, 441–475, 544, 566, 569, 572–574, 577, 579–586, 593–595, 602

623 Historiography of science, 3–26, 31, 83–98, 102, 108, 121–143, 173–185, 190, 198, 203, 205, 231, 233, 236, 239, 252, 261, 263, 276, 287, 339–352, 377–394, 404, 408–412, 419–437, 470, 505, 513, 518, 519, 523–539, 543–561, 565–587, 589–613 History and philosophy of science, 64, 74, 86, 122, 176, 204, 223–226, 234, 258, 276, 278–280, 287, 319, 364, 389, 531, 538, 547, 550, 557, 559, 560, 568, 572, 590, 591, 601, 611 History of ideas, 65, 105, 178, 180, 185, 235, 286, 340, 505, 551 History of medicine, 32, 75, 85, 92, 153, 259, 422, 530 History of nanotechnology, 443, 446, 454, 455, 457, 461, 465, 471–475 History of nature, 259, 374, 494 History of philosophy, 33, 57, 147, 281, 283, 285, 302, 432, 433, 554, 558, 568, 602, 603 History of physics, 17, 25, 129, 430, 434, 442, 443, 492 History of the categories, 235, 286 History of the present, 210, 220, 224, 225 Hobsbawm, E., 113, 152, 247, 421, 437, 517, 566 Hodgkin, D., 103, 104, 110, 111 Hollywood, J., 358 Hooykaas, R., 358, 361, 367–374 Hopkins, F., 113 Hoste, P., 381 Huc, A., 111 Humanities, 51, 96, 108, 146, 180, 185, 190, 193, 345, 362, 363, 378, 387, 393, 403, 412, 494, 495, 506, 509, 515, 518, 566, 575, 587, 597 Human kinds, 215, 283 Human sciences, 75, 215, 224, 295, 311, 312, 535, 574 Humboldt, A., 356, 552 Hunt, L., 594, 612 Husserl, E., 51, 153, 322 Huygens, C., 429 Hybridizations, 266, 530, 535

I Idealism, 50, 51, 157, 164, 192, 423 Ideology, 6, 66, 78, 79, 233, 304, 307, 312, 317, 318, 326, 327, 332, 381, 392, 513, 516, 529 Ienna, G., 51, 145–169

624 Iggers, G., 422 Iliffe, R., 518 Illusion of transparency, 150, 165 Imperial history, 529 Imperialism, 116, 529, 532 Imperial studies, 529 Implicit (assumptions, philosophy, foundations), 150, 151, 420, 429 Incan, 530 Incommensurability, 125–130, 133, 139, 199, 262, 277, 278, 284, 289, 332 Incommensurability of paradigms, 278 India, 361, 373, 424, 512, 517, 526, 531, 532 Inequality (in the motion of the celestial bodies), 401, 403, 404, 409–411, 485, 535, 539, 546, 551 Inexact, 321, 325 Infinitesimal calculus, 401 Infinitesimal machinery, 459, 460 Integrated history and philosophy of science (iHPS), 601, 611 Intercollective circulation of thought (interkollektive Denkverkehr), 91, 93 Intercultural, 506, 528, 535, 537, 539 Interdisciplinarity, 234, 373, 567, 570, 571, 576, 606 International conference on production engineering, 447 International system of units, 466 Interpretation, 21, 24, 39, 92, 93, 96, 98, 102, 103, 124, 134, 135, 142, 157, 182, 190, 191, 193, 199, 237, 241, 243, 246, 248, 249, 267, 277, 278, 282, 299, 310, 326, 329, 355–374, 379, 392, 411, 425, 427–430, 432, 433, 436, 437, 442, 443, 450, 452, 453, 456–458, 461–466, 468, 470–475, 497, 509, 515, 525, 535, 546, 578, 583, 592, 593, 595, 598, 599, 603, 606 Intracollective circulation of thought (intrakollektiver Denkverkehr), 91 Invisibility of revolutions, 278, 282, 287 Islamic, 358, 360, 363, 526, 531, 548 Islamic Science, 548

J James, W., 50 Jami, C., 531 Jarnicki, P., 83–98, 139 Jensen, V., 518 Jet Propulsion Lab, 459

Index Jijie, R., 450 Jombert, C., 385 Jones, G., 115 Jorland, G., 34, 39 Josephson, J., 512 Journal of microelectromechanical systems, 459, 460 Jung, K., 325, 327

K Kaiser, W., 514 Kant, I., 65, 141, 214, 222, 240, 242, 279, 281, 299, 320, 323, 486, 554, 555, 557 Kästner, A., 378 Keill, J., 408 Kepler, J., 21, 31, 35, 68, 175, 183, 184, 261, 372, 384, 406–409, 413, 595 Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, 175 Kepler’s 2nd law, 407, 409 Kepler’s 3rd law, 409 Kinds of people, 213 Klein, F., 422 Knowledge, 8, 12, 14–21, 23, 24, 32–34, 40, 42, 46, 50, 52, 54–59, 64–66, 68–74, 79, 83–85, 87–89, 91–98, 105, 109, 111, 115, 117, 122–128, 131–142, 150, 154–160, 162, 164–166, 168, 169, 174, 175, 177, 179, 181–185, 190–205, 212, 214–217, 219, 221, 222, 224, 230, 231, 233, 234, 236, 238, 240–248, 250, 251, 260, 262, 276–278, 280–283, 288–290, 295–297, 299, 301, 302, 304, 306–308, 310, 312, 316, 319–328, 331, 333, 334, 344, 345, 348, 351, 357, 358, 361–364, 367–371, 373, 374, 379, 385–391, 393, 405, 413, 422, 424, 425, 427–430, 432–434, 436, 438, 457, 461, 473, 481, 487, 489, 494, 497, 507, 510, 513, 514, 524, 525, 527–532, 534–536, 538, 539, 544, 546–556, 559, 560, 567, 570, 574, 576, 578, 580, 582, 593, 594, 597–601, 604, 605, 607 Kovalevskaya, S., 553 Koyré, A., 19, 29–46, 52–54, 58, 87, 102, 105, 107, 116, 118, 127, 139, 143, 147–149, 151, 193, 260, 300, 309, 311, 319, 364, 365, 367, 508–510, 556, 571, 573, 575, 576 Kragh, H., 466, 572 Krais, B., 148, 149 Krohn, W., 105, 108

Index Krüger, L., 234, 278–286, 289, 290 Krzeminski, C., 450 Kuhn, T., 31, 68, 72, 74, 84–86, 91–93, 95, 98, 105, 121–143, 162, 185, 193, 199, 231, 234, 247, 252, 260, 262–265, 267, 268, 270, 271, 276–282, 284, 287, 288, 290, 291, 302, 331, 332, 371, 425, 435, 450, 460, 465, 508, 509, 567, 568, 570–572, 574–576, 582–585, 590 Kusch, M., 191, 222 Kuukkanen, J., 603–605

L Labour Party, 102, 104, 108, 110, 115, 116, 363 Ladd-Franklin, C., 554, 555, 558, 559 Laffitte, P., 31, 32, 301, 426, 431 Lafuente, A., 527, 528, 531 Lagrange, J., 14, 392, 393, 407, 410, 433, 493, 555 Lakatos, I., 263–265, 268, 279, 318, 483, 575, 612 Lalande, J., 381, 384, 392 Lami, E., 421 Lampin, E., 450 Langevin, P., 43 Language, 18, 24, 32, 44, 52, 89, 90, 123–125, 138–143, 150, 151, 153, 180, 191, 198, 199, 202, 212, 218, 245, 252, 258, 297, 305, 316, 320, 324, 344, 345, 348, 365, 366, 369, 370, 386, 387, 391, 398, 408, 411, 421, 424, 426, 427, 437, 475, 507, 516, 551, 559, 567, 574, 576, 597, 603–605 Latin America, 505, 506, 512, 514, 515, 526, 530, 531, 538, 539, 548 Latour, B., 68, 92, 117, 124, 156, 157, 235, 479–494, 496, 497, 528, 572, 573, 583, 600, 601 Laudan, L., 263–265, 267, 268, 277, 306, 379, 591, 599 Lear, J., 444, 456 Le Breton, A., 385 Lecourt, D., 55, 74, 77, 308, 316, 317, 331 Leibniz, G., 147, 153, 211, 349, 493 Leite, D., 364 Leite, F., 3–26 Lejeune Dirichlet, J., 426 Lenin, V., 104, 116 Lenoble, R., 556 Lévi-Strauss, C., 577, 597 Levy, D., 115 Lexicon, 129, 139–141

625 Life, 32, 45, 50, 53, 54, 57, 63–79, 89, 90, 92, 94–97, 104, 105, 109, 114, 115, 117, 124, 137, 139, 140, 143, 147, 149, 156, 157, 176, 179, 196, 199–205, 214, 216, 223, 232, 233, 238, 242, 249, 250, 259, 285, 299, 305, 311, 312, 317, 329, 333, 342, 343, 345, 346, 349, 350, 352, 364, 366, 369, 371, 372, 378, 379, 381, 382, 385, 390, 392, 398, 410, 413, 420, 421, 425, 427, 430, 433, 457, 460, 484, 488, 494, 495, 505, 507, 512, 514, 516, 527, 538, 547, 552, 555, 559, 572, 577, 581, 600, 605, 611 Lightman, B., 507, 510 Lilley, S., 114 Lindberg, D., 510 Littré, E., 300, 301, 303, 426, 568 Livingstone, D., 511 Locke, J., 279, 385–387, 389, 511 Locus, 252, 527, 566, 573, 582, 586 Logarithm, 410 Logical positivism, 89, 236, 573, 591 Logicism, 51, 157, 163–167 Longino, H., 546, 550, 553 Looping effect, 215, 312 Lopes, M., 525, 536 Louis XV, 383 Lovelace, A., 553 Lützen, J., 426 Lycurgus, 462

M Mach, E., 421, 428–430, 434, 436, 437 MacKenzie, J., 529 MacLeod, K., 525, 529–533, 537 MacLeod, R., 525, 529–533, 537 Macro-scientific consensus, 266, 267, 271 Mad Travelers, 225 Maia, C., 249, 252, 571 Maier, A., 556, 557, 571, 576 Making up people, 215, 224 Maldonado, C., 460 Malerba, J., 585 Manifesto document, 474 Manning, P., 538 March, J., 516 Margalho, P., 373 Martínez, M., 209–226 Martin, H., 168, 569 Martini, M., 189–205 Martin, N., 6, 18 Martin, T., 508

626 Marxism, 51, 102–105, 108, 109, 116, 132, 154, 612 Marx, K., 149, 509, 604 Massicotte, G., 318 Masuzawa, T., 511 Materials science, 461 Mathematicians, 16, 92, 246, 341–343, 346–349, 352, 357, 366–368, 379, 380, 385, 398–405, 407–412, 420–424, 426, 427, 432, 433, 437, 554, 555, 558 Mathematicians-historians, 421, 437 Mathematics, 6, 13, 16, 22, 25, 33, 50, 53, 66, 70, 90, 92, 135, 136, 157, 164, 175, 218, 244, 299, 303, 304, 312, 318, 320, 321, 333, 340–343, 346–349, 359, 368, 369, 371, 372, 374, 380–383, 390–392, 399, 405, 411, 420, 422–424, 426, 427, 433, 556, 559, 567, 575, 584, 595 Mathematics and physics for nanotechnology, 454 Mathon de la Cour, J., 381, 382, 393 Matilda effect, 553, 559 Matteoli, G., 337–394 Mauss, M., 149, 163 Mavhunga, C., 532 Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 74, 230, 234, 252, 276, 279, 286, 289 Mayan, 534 McCray, P., 457, 531 McCray, W., 458 McDougall, W., 115 McLaren, P., 529 McQuillan, C., 423 Meaning finitism, 191, 192, 198 Mechanics, 5, 11, 13, 17, 30, 54, 55, 66, 70, 94, 103, 154, 262, 312, 371, 391, 403, 405, 406, 411, 425, 428, 433, 435–437, 492, 493, 508, 526, 575 Mechanism, 13, 72, 95, 138, 140, 149, 158, 165, 194, 200, 201, 203, 244, 269, 270, 284, 369, 379, 429, 496, 533, 553, 575 Medicine, 32, 44, 66, 69–71, 75, 76, 78, 79, 85, 87, 92, 94, 113, 124, 153, 251–253, 259, 295, 309, 312, 333, 340, 343, 346, 380, 422, 446, 448, 495, 512, 524, 525, 529–531, 534, 537 Mehra, J., 460 Meitner, L., 553 Mélin, T., 450 Mendel, G., 269, 458, 474 Mendel-like approach, 473 Mendonça, A., 289 Merleau-Ponty, M., 148, 153, 309

Index Merton, R., 67, 102, 194, 248, 508, 573 Metaphor, 14, 24, 93, 137, 176, 199, 244, 247, 286, 325, 327, 332, 370, 388, 435, 547 Meta-theoretical (commitment, research, practices), 420, 425, 428, 429, 434, 435, 437 Methods (scientific, historical), 164, 190, 191, 193, 194, 204, 249, 281, 282, 325, 357, 516, 544, 569, 607 Métier of the historian, 580, 581, 585, 587 Metropolitan, 524, 525, 528–530, 533 Metropolitan science, 533 Metz, A., 33 Metzger, H., 424, 556, 557, 571, 576 Meyerson, É., 30, 32–34, 38, 39, 42, 53, 54, 300, 319, 571, 576 Micro-scientific consensus, 266, 267, 271 Middle East, 425, 538, 539 Mieli, A., 30, 32, 36, 363, 364, 530, 556 Milhaud, G., 302, 432, 433 Militant (histories, historiographies, scientists), 420, 436, 437 Milliet Dechales, C. Mill, J. Mind Möbius, P. Modern philosophy of nature, 289 Moivre, A., 408 Molecular engineering, 450, 467 Montaigne, M., 40, 41 Montmort, P., 380 Montucla, J., 377–394 Moore, H., 425 Morange, M., 64, 103 Morus, I., 420, 421, 598, 601 Motoyama, S., 530, 531 Moulin, A., 530 Mountbatten, L., 110, 111 Mouy, P., 557 Moving metropolis, 532, 533 Moya Diez, I., 334 Mughals, 535 Multiculturalism, 481, 528, 529 Multiple personality disorder, 211, 213, 215, 216, 225 Mundialization, 533, 534 Mundialization of science, 534 Muñoz-Écija, T., 461 Museum collections and herbaria, 536 Musil, R., 103 Mutations of the thought style, 93 Myth, 72, 133, 178, 341, 344, 352, 514, 518, 570

Index N Nagels, M., 450 Nanoparticle, 446, 450, 462 Nanoscience, 444, 450, 455, 456, 461, 464, 465, 470, 471, 475 Nanosolutions for the 21st century, 452 Nanotechnology, 441–475 Nanoworld, 444, 446, 453, 455–457, 460, 465 Narrated past, 578, 586 Narrative, 4, 5, 12, 17, 18, 183, 190, 191, 193, 194, 205, 239, 244, 252, 284, 287, 290, 297, 379, 394, 442, 453, 480–497, 510, 512, 514–518, 524, 525, 529, 535, 539, 547, 548, 551, 566, 567, 569, 570, 573, 579, 580, 582, 586, 595, 602, 605 Narrativism, 605 Nationalism, 103, 363, 513–516, 519, 530 National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), 448, 449 Natural classes, 283 Nature of science, 205, 427, 430, 432, 436, 566, 572, 590, 591, 598, 610, 611 Navarro, J., 503–519 Naville, E., 421, 432, 435 Nedostup, R., 512 Needham, J., 102, 113, 114, 363, 510 Nemeth, E., 105 Nesselmann, G., 421, 423, 424 Newton, I., 11, 31, 104, 166, 175, 199, 259, 266, 285, 286, 319, 349–352, 369, 372, 379, 389, 405–408, 412, 413, 428, 474, 504, 508, 509, 518, 578, 580, 596 Newtonian physics, 6, 66, 157, 286, 324 Newton’s Law Of Universal Gravitation, 285 Niche, 140 Nicolaidis, E., 265 Nietzsche, F., 280, 307, 309, 598 Nineteenth century, 13, 30, 32, 38, 45, 50, 94, 113, 175, 178, 211, 241–243, 246, 260, 269, 286, 289, 294, 302, 308, 320, 356, 393, 398, 400, 403, 405, 412, 419–437, 504, 512, 514, 516, 517, 529, 534, 544, 548, 560, 567, 574, 575, 577 Noakes, R., 513 Noether, E., 553 Non-European science, 528 Nongbri, B., 511 Non-Western science, 528 Normality, 77, 233 Normal Science, 129, 130, 139, 162, 268, 270, 278, 284, 287, 596 Norms, 72, 74, 160, 162, 164–167, 193, 202, 203, 217, 221, 222, 248, 251, 312, 333, 508, 544, 549–552, 556, 608

627 Nostradamus, 458, 472, 473 Nostradamus approach, 473 Nostradamus-like reading, 458 Numbers, R., 365, 510, 518 Nunes, P., 358–360, 362, 366, 367, 371, 372, 374 Nussbaum, M., 506 Nuttall, G., 113 Nye, M., 105, 109, 116, 117 Nyhart, L., 526, 599, 600

O Oakeshott, M., 586 Objectivity, 53, 55, 59, 72, 89, 92, 96, 97, 126, 128, 133, 165–168, 213, 217, 222, 230, 231, 233–235, 237–253, 286, 289, 296, 323, 326, 328, 329, 422, 544, 547, 549, 574, 577, 578, 580, 582 Obregón, D., 531 Observation of nature, 137, 351, 517 Offenstadt, N., 569 Olberg, O., 556 Olesko, K., 593–595, 597 Oliveira, B., 465 Oliveira, F., 363 Olschki, L., 356, 359, 374 Olwell, R., 509 Ontological conception of history, 283 Oppenheim, J., 513 Organizing concepts, 217, 226 Origins of the history of science, 506–510 Orta, G., 360, 370, 371 Ortega, M., 527, 528, 531 Osborne, M., 531 Ostwald, W., 434 Ottoman Empire, 531

P Pacific circle, 538, 539 Pamlin, D., 452, 453, 456, 462, 464, 465 Pangenesis, 269 Panofsky, E., 153 Paracelse, 44 Paradigm, 78, 91, 93, 95, 122, 125–130, 132–134, 136, 139–141, 143, 152, 156, 162, 199, 201, 262–266, 268, 277, 278, 284, 286–289, 402, 403, 411, 412, 443, 446, 450, 451, 457, 461, 465, 471, 547, 556, 560, 573, 575, 596, 600, 609 Paradigm shift, 91, 93, 95, 125, 129, 130, 140, 262, 547, 560, 596

628 Partial solutions, 401, 403, 411, 412 Pascal, B., 348, 435 Pasquali, R., 515 Passeron, J., 147, 148 Passive connections, 92, 97 Past, 5, 12, 16, 17, 20, 23, 25, 30, 31, 33, 34, 41–44, 56–58, 72, 89, 91, 98, 102, 105, 106, 109, 111, 140, 162, 165, 174, 179, 182, 184, 190–195, 198, 204, 205, 210, 216, 218, 224, 235, 238, 252, 264, 276, 278, 282–284, 287, 296–299, 324, 327, 329, 330, 332, 352, 378, 386, 411, 423, 429, 431, 433, 450, 458, 462, 491, 496, 524, 527, 530, 531, 538, 551, 553, 559, 566, 567, 569, 573, 576, 578–582, 586, 593, 595, 596, 600, 603, 604 Pathways of discovery, 427, 432, 434 Paul, H., 31, 399 Peart, S., 115 Peiffer, J., 423, 426 Peirce, C., 558, 559 Perception of the form (Gestaltsehen), 90 Pereira, D., 366 Pereira, G., 368 Peripheral countries, 527, 530 Pestre, D., 235, 580 Peter the Great, 383 Petitjean, P., 363, 530, 531 Phalkey, J., 532 Phenomenology, 54, 64, 147, 295, 320, 324, 328 Phénoménotechnique, 237, 320, 327, 328 Philosophie biologique, 64, 77 Philosophy of biology, 64, 70, 76, 79 Philosophy of history, 3–26, 55, 190, 320, 423, 497, 515, 589–613 Philosophy of life, 65, 69, 75, 78, 79 Philosophy of science, 15, 30, 32–34, 38, 39, 52, 64, 74, 86, 87, 112–114, 122, 124, 131, 133, 176, 185, 198, 204, 223–226, 258, 260, 264, 267, 276, 278–281, 283, 287, 305, 318, 319, 321, 323, 364, 389, 398, 411, 412, 421, 431, 437, 494, 518, 531, 538, 547, 550, 555, 557, 559, 560, 568, 572, 574–576, 589–592, 598, 599, 601, 605, 607–612 Photoelectric effect, 451, 575 Pickstone, J., 420 Pisano, R., 441–475 Plenty of Room, 443–446, 450, 452–459, 461, 462, 464, 467–470, 472, 474 Pluralism, 56, 58, 149, 190, 205, 514, 547, 549 Podgorny, I., 536

Index Poggendorff, J., 421, 427, 428, 431 Poirier, R., 33, 308 Pojman, P., 429 Polanco, X., 533, 534 Polanyi, M., 109, 110, 246, 247 Polycentric, 535, 539 Polycentrism, 535 Polyphonic history, 535, 539 Polyphony, 535 Popkin, J., 593, 594 Popper, K., 86, 124, 128, 130–142, 176, 178–183, 185, 261–263, 265, 267, 320, 597, 608 Portuguese decadence, 433 Portuguese nautical science, 361, 363, 364 Portuguese Renaissance, 364 Portuondo, M., 536 Positivism, 8, 13, 53, 79, 89, 157, 164, 236, 296, 302, 363, 373, 380, 431 Positivism (French), 421–426 Positivity, 89, 131, 221, 222, 303 Poskett, J., 524 Post-colonial, 524 Post-colonial science, 524 Power, 14, 21, 65, 76, 79, 109, 122, 133, 135, 137–139, 148, 152, 154, 156, 158, 159, 161, 162, 167, 169, 184, 185, 190, 196, 204, 214–216, 233, 251, 261, 262, 290, 295, 298, 299, 301, 306, 307, 311, 319, 320, 325, 326, 332, 333, 356, 379, 387, 401, 402, 407, 409, 410, 430, 434, 436, 453, 461, 481, 492–497, 506, 510, 513, 514, 517, 528, 529, 534, 535, 546, 548, 552, 553, 559, 560, 569, 578, 580, 599–601, 609 Power series, 410 Practical past, 586 Practice, 18, 40, 64–69, 72–77, 79, 85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 96, 97, 117, 123, 125, 126, 129, 133, 134, 136, 138, 140, 147, 149–151, 153–157, 159, 160, 162, 168, 169, 190–192, 194–200, 202, 203, 205, 216, 217, 219, 221–224, 226, 230, 231, 235, 239–244, 249–252, 265–267, 270, 276, 284, 286–288, 302, 307, 316, 317, 320–325, 329, 330, 332–334, 357, 360, 362, 374, 378, 382, 386, 401, 420–423, 425, 427–430, 432–437, 452, 461, 480, 483, 489, 490, 492, 493, 497, 506, 510, 511, 514, 516, 524, 527–530, 532–534, 537, 544–551, 553, 556, 557, 561, 566, 569, 570, 573, 575, 578–582, 585–587, 595–599, 601, 605, 608, 610

Index Pradeep, T., 453, 462, 464 Pratt, M., 535 Precession, 398, 400, 401, 403–405, 515 Precision, 23, 55, 77, 96, 97, 111, 321, 433, 454, 608 Prehistory of modern thought, 364–367 Pre-ideas (Präideen), 87 Preston, J., 430 Príncipe, J., 355–374 Principia - Philosphiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 104, 259, 379, 407, 451 Principles, 5, 10, 18, 21, 24, 25, 42–44, 52, 55, 58, 95, 129, 135, 149, 153–155, 159, 160, 162–168, 177, 212, 214, 222, 249, 252, 260, 297, 303, 305, 321, 323, 332, 345, 357, 367, 369, 387–389, 403, 406, 407, 410–413, 428, 429, 433, 434, 446, 452, 454, 457, 466, 467, 511, 513, 550, 551, 571, 584, 593, 595, 604, 607 Probability, 17, 44, 137, 181, 210–213, 216–218, 220, 224, 225, 232, 233, 239, 279, 280, 286, 290, 425, 432, 607 Professionalization, 420, 421, 437, 557, 579, 605 Progress (scientific, social), 15, 22, 66, 133, 330, 372, 383, 421, 422, 424, 428, 431–433, 435, 437, 548, 560, 596 Progress/backwardness dichotomy, 527 Progress in science, 277 Prophecy, 463, 606 Protásio, D., 356 Proto-ideas (Urideen), 87, 91, 93, 95 Psychoanalysis, 58, 59, 132, 238, 290, 320, 324, 325, 327, 331, 518, 606 Psychology, 79, 128, 164, 176, 181, 240, 244, 302, 305, 306, 310, 311, 318, 323, 324, 327, 365, 518, 558, 570, 607 Ptolemy, C., 10, 183, 341, 361, 371, 374 Pumfrey, S., 594–598, 601, 602 Pure science, 36, 107 Purkert, W., 426

Q Qing, 535 Quantum mechanics, 53, 54, 94, 103, 154, 312, 406, 411, 451, 492, 575 Quate, C., 469 Queijo Olano, J., 275–291 Quesada, M., 358

R Radical incommensurability, 277 Raj, K., 231, 525, 527, 529, 532, 534, 535, 537, 538

629 Ramus, P., 340–342, 368 Ranke, L., 422, 578 Rankine, W., 433 Raposo, P., 526 Rapple, B., 421, 422 Rasmussen, A., 38 Ratcliffe, J., 113, 114 Rationalism, 38, 50, 52–54, 59, 72, 131, 149, 150, 157, 165–167, 296, 298, 299, 312, 323, 327, 371, 372, 374 Raven, D., 105, 510 Ravenstein, G., 356, 357 Realism, 43, 52, 157, 164, 182, 220, 224, 236, 264, 268, 323, 609 Reality, 38, 42, 52–54, 56, 84, 85, 94, 128, 152, 154, 156, 161, 163–167, 181, 194, 195, 199, 201–203, 205, 214, 222, 234, 237, 244, 245, 260, 299, 320–325, 328, 371, 387, 411, 412, 428, 475, 481–483, 491, 493, 529, 530, 552, 559, 581, 599, 600 Reason, 10, 14, 21, 25, 26, 32, 37–41, 43, 51, 53–57, 59, 66, 86, 91, 102, 137, 138, 141, 142, 145–169, 202, 213, 214, 217, 219, 221, 223, 235, 241, 244, 246, 248, 261, 284, 285, 288, 295, 298, 299, 303, 312, 320–323, 325–328, 332, 333, 366–368, 371, 374, 379, 384, 385, 387–389, 450, 456, 505, 509, 529, 533, 538, 547, 554, 555, 578, 595, 601, 607 Reasoning, 25, 177, 210, 218–224, 233, 265–267, 288, 303, 304, 312, 318, 328, 332, 357, 367, 371, 411, 485, 525, 544, 559, 608, 609 Recurring History, 329 Redondi, P., 31, 36, 294, 308 Reduction, 69, 72, 93, 162, 244, 261–263, 265, 319, 425 Reference system, 88, 89, 92, 96, 97 Reflexivity, 67, 146, 148, 154, 155, 167–169 Regiomontanus, 341, 342, 356 Regis, E., 459 Reichenbach, H., 86, 88, 126, 597 Reichenberger, A., 543–561 Reingold, N., 525, 531 Reinisch, J., 109 Reis, J., 572 Relativism, 126, 130, 131, 133, 134, 140, 142, 157, 163–168, 222, 277, 279, 287, 290, 480, 549, 575, 578, 581 Religion, 33, 106, 126, 128, 134, 135, 157, 318, 358, 368, 424, 426, 503–519, 550, 551, 603 Renaissance, 5, 6, 9, 35, 40, 105, 112, 117, 183, 211, 218, 329, 340, 342–344, 352, 360, 362, 364, 368, 370, 372, 374, 378, 389, 431, 515, 584, 585, 595

630 Renn, J., 74, 234, 316 Representing and Intervening, 215, 225 Rerum gestarum, 569 Research program, 8, 178, 180, 184, 234, 261, 263–266, 289, 428, 547, 560 Research tradition, 20, 131, 263–266, 437 Res gestae, 569 Reuter, M., 547 Rêverie, 59, 317 Revolution of experience, 359, 373, 374 intellectual, 37, 39, 431 scientific, 7, 24, 31, 34–37, 39, 45, 46, 84, 93, 95, 107, 112, 114–116, 123–130, 132, 134, 135, 139, 157, 161–163, 230, 245, 257–271, 277, 278, 284, 287, 308, 324, 364, 374, 398, 428, 450–451, 505–509, 526, 567, 570–572, 574, 576, 584, 594–597, 601 Rewriting the Soul, 211, 225 Rey, A., 32, 35, 38, 50, 74, 295–298, 300, 302, 304, 307–309, 319, 364, 366 Rheinberger, H., 64, 65, 67, 74, 190, 234, 237, 276, 316 Rizzolio, F., 443, 448, 455, 456, 465 Robarts, J., 475 Robbins, J., 460 Roberts, L., 535, 537 Robinet, J., 431 Rohrer, H., 469, 470 Romero, P., 443, 453, 454, 462, 464, 465 Rossi, P., 574, 577, 578 Rossiter, M., 553, 559 Ross, S., 420 Rothenberg, M., 525 Rousseau, J., 386 Rudwick, M., 518 Rupture, 5, 7, 12, 13, 24–26, 39, 41, 42, 54, 59, 95, 139, 212, 217, 299, 300, 308, 309, 322, 323, 330, 331, 333, 364, 365, 495, 497, 573, 575, 585 Russell, B., 106, 244 Rutherford, E., 107, 113 S Saldaña, J., 530, 531 Salomon, M., 29–46 Sanders, W., 454, 464, 465 Santarém, Visconde de, 356, 364 Santoro, M., 146 Santos, B., 251, 485, 529 Santos, J., 357

Index Saraiva, A., 357–359, 361, 367, 371–373 Sarton, G., 32, 35, 105–108, 193, 363, 427, 433, 507, 556, 573, 574 Savérien, A., 382–384 Scanning tunneling microscope (STM), 450, 457, 469 Schaffer, S., 93, 117, 122, 124, 137, 143, 193–195, 198–200, 204, 248, 350, 600, 601 Schiebinger, L., 532, 546 Schlick, M., 87, 245 Schmaus, W., 260, 506 Schmidgen, H., 65, 334 Schöttler, P., 424 Science and religion, 504–519 Science and technology studies, 67, 103, 146, 156, 168, 557 Science in Manueline style, 367–373 Science in society, 105, 106, 450 Science magazine, 443, 459 Science news, 459 Science studies, 142, 233, 239, 247, 288, 290, 480, 481, 483, 484, 491, 529, 534, 544, 553, 556 Science wars, 480, 492, 601 Scientific authority, 158, 282, 284, 370 Scientific biography, 342–343 Scientific boundaries, 198 Scientific change, 193, 194, 259, 260, 262, 263, 267, 270, 276, 278, 591, 596 Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR), 449 Scientific communities, 21, 55, 84, 88, 91, 98, 125, 126, 128, 129, 133–135, 139–141, 161, 165–167, 196, 198, 219, 237, 262, 264, 266, 277, 278, 280, 284, 430, 434, 461, 469, 489, 527, 576, 596, 598 Scientific debate, 470–471, 538 Scientific fact, 67–71, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90–93, 95–98, 126, 128, 162, 165–167, 483, 570, 572, 583, 598, 600 Scientific-historical sources, 583, 586 Scientific periphery, 527 Scientific practice, 18, 68, 76, 77, 79, 89, 92, 125, 134, 149, 156, 160, 168, 190, 191, 195, 198, 199, 219, 239, 242, 244, 249, 253, 320, 323–325, 327, 420, 421, 425, 427–430, 432–437, 480, 483, 489, 490, 497, 532–534, 547, 556, 581, 582, 599, 608

Index Scientific revolution, 7, 24, 31, 34–37, 39, 46, 84, 93, 95, 104, 112, 114–116, 123–130, 132, 134, 135, 138–140, 157, 161–163, 230, 233, 245, 257–271, 277, 278, 280–282, 284, 287, 289, 308, 324, 364, 374, 398, 428, 450–451, 505–509, 526, 567, 570–572, 574, 576, 583, 584, 590, 594–597, 601 Scientific textbooks, 126 Scientific theories, 30, 31, 34. 44, 70, 88, 96, 128, 132, 133, 149, 176, 178, 180, 182, 198, 261, 262, 270, 330, 420, 432, 434, 437, 597 Scientific thought, 29–46, 51–53, 56, 57, 90, 95, 97, 98, 177, 324, 325, 330, 386, 424, 482, 548 Scientism, 296, 421, 424, 572–575, 585, 609 Scientists-historians, 421, 437 Scott, J., 546 Scriba, C. J., 424 Segre, M., 339–353 Selin, H., 524 Selleri, F., 450 Semi-peripheries, peripheries, 534 Senior Scientists Group, 102, 115 Sérgio, A., 358–360, 365, 372, 373 Serres, M., 307, 326, 330, 331, 488 Seth, S., 531 Sex, 545, 546, 551 Shan, Y., 257–271 Shapin, S., 93, 117, 122, 124, 137, 143, 189–205, 233, 248, 277, 281, 509, 600, 601 Sharon, M., 443, 454, 456, 464, 465 Sigerist, H., 32 Silva, L., 357–359, 364, 367, 370, 373 Simões, V., 372 Simos, M., 225 Singer, C., 75, 113, 114 Singularity, 41, 280, 365, 458, 578 Sivasundaram, S., 532, 535, 536 Skepticism, 22, 40, 43, 157, 164, 352, 555, 601 Snow, C., 108 Social-historical, 152, 574–576 Social place, 573, 580–582, 585–587 Social sciences, 67, 102, 112, 127, 146–150, 157, 167–169, 176, 577 Social studies of science, 116, 190, 290, 528 Sociology, 67, 73, 84, 92, 105, 125–129, 134–138, 146–152, 155–164, 168, 169, 191, 193, 194, 198, 199, 205, 213, 220, 235, 247, 248, 276, 277, 279, 281, 287, 288, 303, 305, 311, 320, 480, 483, 484, 487, 493, 529, 531, 553, 567, 570, 572, 576, 577, 597, 598, 606

631 Sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), 134–139, 156, 191, 193, 205, 277, 598 Sokal Affair, 156 Solid-state physics, 446, 450, 451 Sombrio, M., 525 Somsen, G., 526 Sophisticated empiricism, 367–373 Sources (primary, secondary), 240, 408, 423, 433, 487, 488, 491, 493, 497 South Asia, 536 Space Shuttle Challenger, 459 Spain, 400, 530, 531, 536 Spirochaeta pallida, 96 Sputnik, 115 Starostin, D., 397–413 Stenhouse, J., 512 Stevin, S., 429 Stoffel, J., 7, 11, 435 Strong program, 67, 124, 135–139, 143, 191, 205, 277, 480, 483, 573, 575, 598, 599, 602, 610, 611 Structuralism (structuralist), 160, 245, 364, 374, 577, 597 Structure, 7, 22, 31, 32, 37, 43, 52, 54, 68, 69, 75, 84, 86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 104, 115, 116, 139, 140, 147, 150, 153–163, 165–169, 184, 192, 204, 211, 212, 216–218, 223, 224, 234, 235, 239, 242, 244–246, 260, 262, 270, 282, 286–289, 321, 324, 371, 372, 379, 394, 424, 435, 449, 451, 452, 481, 483, 487, 489, 492, 515, 516, 524, 528, 533, 534, 536, 546, 553, 556, 560, 567, 570–574, 576–578, 583, 599 Stukeley, W., 350–352 Style of reasoning, 220–223, 265, 303, 332 Style of scientific reasoning, 218, 219, 222, 312 Style of scientific thinking, 218 Styles of scientific thinking and doing, 225 Sudhoff, K., 32 Sustainability, 23 Swerdlow, N., 341, 421, 422 Synthesizing-web, 270 Syphilis, 85–88, 93, 95–97 Systematization (of science), 155, 420, 422, 425, 430, 434, 436, 525, 583 System of opinions, 91 Szunerits, S., 450

T Tacit (assumptions, philosophy, foundations), 73, 203, 246, 247, 323, 420, 425, 427, 431, 511 Tampakis, K., 503–519

632 Taniguchi, N., 442, 447–449, 453–455, 460 Tannery, P., 16, 17, 32, 301, 311, 421, 426, 427, 432, 433, 435 Tarrant, N., 514 Tartaglia, N., 342 Technique, 19, 43, 55, 106, 110, 112, 114, 117, 140, 151, 152, 175, 221, 235, 237–239, 243, 246, 300, 307, 309, 311, 320, 327, 328, 367, 383, 406, 410, 447, 448, 463, 533, 534, 559, 566, 576, 579, 581, 582, 586 Teixeira, F., 363, 367 Telkes-Klein, E., 33 Temporalities, 57, 147, 152, 155, 163, 169, 230, 239–241, 252, 298, 570, 573, 579, 586 Temporal members, 400–402, 404, 405 Theaetetus of Athens, 433 The nanotech pioneers, 453 Theophrastus of Lesbos, 424 Theoretical and methodological, 95, 125, 532, 566, 567, 571, 572, 576, 579, 585–587 Theory, 5, 8–11, 13–15, 18, 21–25, 31, 33, 38, 42, 52, 54, 55, 66–68, 72, 74, 76, 77, 84–89, 92, 94, 96, 97, 122–12, 126, 127, 130–133, 136–143, 147–149, 151–153, 157, 158, 161, 165–167, 169, 177–181, 190, 191, 194, 199, 214, 217, 222, 230, 232, 234, 237, 240, 244, 249, 259–263, 265, 266, 268–270, 284, 285, 295, 296, 304, 310, 323, 327, 328, 331–333, 357, 358, 368, 369, 374, 398–406, 408–413, 425, 427, 429, 430, 432, 434–436, 457, 483, 484, 493, 494, 496, 518, 551, 555, 558, 567, 570, 575, 576, 584–586, 598, 605, 609–611 Thermodynamics, 13, 24, 262, 420, 428, 433–437, 492, 493, 556 The United States of America, 35, 84, 115, 183, 290, 482, 555 Thompson, E., 113, 248 Thorndike, L., 106 Thought collective, 83–98, 237 Thought style, 83–98, 236, 265 Tisserand, F., 400–405, 407, 409, 411 Tjiattas, M., 328 Tolomas, C., 391 Tonni, E., 515 Torricelli, E., 200 Toumey, C., 442–444, 457, 458, 460, 461, 463, 466, 469–475 Trading zones, 535, 537 Tradition (s) (scientific, mathematical, historical, positivist), 67, 185, 235, 277, 425, 433, 434, 436, 437, 507, 518, 527, 533, 609, 610

Index Transient mental illness, 213, 215 Trigonometric series, 407 Truth, 14–16, 40, 41, 45, 52, 59, 64, 65, 71, 78, 79, 133, 136–138, 156, 157, 164–167, 177, 181–185, 190, 191, 195–197, 201–203, 211, 215, 217–219, 221–224, 233, 238, 241–244, 247, 252, 261, 262, 279, 283, 284, 296–298, 303, 306–308, 310, 312, 320, 321, 325, 329, 330, 332, 333, 346, 351, 359, 366, 370, 386, 387, 423, 431, 432, 511, 515, 544, 549, 552, 555, 574, 575, 579, 581, 582, 587, 590, 593, 598–600, 610 Truthfulness, 223 Tschermak, E., 270, 458 Tuccinardi, T., 443, 448, 455, 456, 465 Turner, F., 105, 517

U Unconscious, 14, 150, 151, 154, 168, 323–325, 364 Ungureanu, J., 507 Unification, 5, 11, 265, 303, 359, 422, 431, 433, 434, 514, 515 Union internationale de chimie, 466 University of Berkeley, 279 University of Bielefeld, 279 University of Cambridge, 102, 105, 578 University of Göttingen, 279 University of Harvard, 232, 582 University of Heidelberg, 279, 424 University of Pittsburgh, 538, 608 University of Princeton, 608 University of science, 447

V Vagelli, M., 215, 328 Validity and legitimacy of knowledge, 281–282 Values, 10, 16, 17, 23, 50, 52, 67, 68, 71, 72, 85, 88, 109, 111, 113, 123, 125, 133, 157, 163, 167, 179–182, 190, 195, 197, 198, 203, 204, 213, 216, 217, 221, 222, 231, 235, 237, 238, 241, 244, 245, 248, 249, 251, 262, 287, 289, 290, 295, 296, 302, 303, 307, 320, 325, 328, 330, 340, 356–358, 360, 365, 366, 368, 369, 371, 378, 384, 385, 392, 394, 398, 401, 402, 404, 410, 412, 426, 427, 433, 451, 452, 458, 463, 465, 493, 495, 509, 517, 524, 534, 536, 544, 549, 550, 552, 553, 556, 580, 590, 593, 595, 599, 600 Vargas-Quesada, B., 461 Vasari, G., 344–346, 378

Index Videira, A., 275–291, 487 Vieira, A., 565–587 Vienna Circle, 86, 87, 89, 90, 94, 126–128, 131–133, 245, 302, 509, 573, 574, 608 Vitalism, 69, 71, 76, 77, 298 Viviani, V., 344–347, 349, 350, 352 Voltaire, 385, 386 Vuillemin, J., 147

W Wagner, P., 295, 319 Walch, J., 569 Waldschlagel, M., 589–613 Weber, A., 536 Weber, M., 149, 369 Weidler, J., 378, 384, 392 Weinberg, S., 595–597 Wernick, A., 506 Werskey, G., 102–104, 112, 116 Western culture, 127, 231, 526 Western science, 114, 510, 511, 526–529 Whewell, W., 178, 260, 424 Whig histories of science, 595, 596 Whitehead, A., 398, 411, 412, 482, 490, 493 White heat, 115 Williams, B., 115, 223 Williams, L., 108 Williams, P., 508 Willig Lima, N., 479–485 Wilson, H., 102, 108, 115 Windelband, W., 398, 403, 412, 606 Wittgenstein, L., 136, 140–142 Wolfe, C., 63–80 Wolicka, S., 554

633 Women history, 545–550, 560 movement, 545, 560 rights, 545, 546, 560 studies, 545, 561 Woolgar, S., 156, 157, 480, 572, 583, 600, 601 Wootton, D., 596, 597 Words in their sites, 210–213, 224 World/global history, 530 World-science, 456, 533, 534 Writing of history, 205, 566, 567, 569, 572, 578, 580, 581, 585–587 Writing of history of science, 567, 572, 586, 587 Wunenburger, J., 317 Wussing, H., 424 Wyrouboff, G., 32, 301

Y Yalçınkaya, A., 512

Z Zacutt, A., 356, 357, 362, 364 Zalar, J., 514 Zambelli, P., 33, 36 Zampati, L., 515 Zaoui, H., 450 Zeller, L., 568 Zeuthen, H., 426, 427 Zilsel, E., 87, 105, 117, 123, 359, 360, 374, 509, 510 Zuckerman, S., 104, 108, 110 Zyvex, 460