Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 9 views

    Reconsidering Historical Epistemology FR

    Uploaded by

    Tyfun Prasthika

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Reconsidering Historical Epistemology FR

    Uploaded by

    Tyfun Prasthika
    9 views9 pages

    Original Title

    Reconsidering_Historical_Epistemology_Fr

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    9 views9 pages

    Reconsidering Historical Epistemology FR

    Uploaded by

    Tyfun Prasthika

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    You are on page 1of 9

    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

    Volume 61

    Series Editor
    Charles T. Wolfe, Département de philosophie & ERRAPHIS,
    Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse, France

    Editorial Board Members


    Catherine Abou-Nemeh, School of History, Philosophy, Political Science,
    Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
    Rachel A. Ankeny, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia
    Peter Anstey, School of Humanities, University of Sydney, Sydney,
    NSW, Australia
    Delphine Bellis, Paul Valéry University, Montpellier, France
    Meyssa Ben Saad, Université de la Manouba, Manouba, Tunisia
    Hourya Bentouhami, University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France
    Antonio Clericuzio, Roma Tre University, Roma, Italy
    Sophia M. Connell, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK
    Matthew Daniel Eddy, Durham University, Durham, UK
    Nicholas Dew, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
    Ofer Gal, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney,
    Sydney, Australia
    Laura Georgescu, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
    Thierry Hoquet, Université Paris Nanterre, Nanterre, France
    Clemency Montelle, School of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Canterbury,
    Christchurch, New Zealand
    Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy
    Carla Rita Palmerino, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
    Lydia Patton, Virginia Tech, Virginia, USA
    Nicholas Rasmussen, UNSW Sydney, Kensington, Australia
    Jonathan Regier, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy
    Anne-Lise Rey, Université Paris Nanterre, Nanterre, France
    Sophie Roux, République des savoirs, École Normale Supérieure - PSL,
    Paris, France
    C. J. Schilt, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium
    Suman Seth, Cornell University, New York, USA
    Tzuchien Tho, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
    Angela Willey, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, USA
    Anna C. Zielinska, Département de Philosophie, Université de Lorraine &
    Archives Henri Poincaré, Nancy, France
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science is a peer-reviewed book series,
    dedicated to the history of science and historically informed philosophy of science.
    The series publishes original scholarship in various related areas, including new
    directions in epistemology and the history of knowledge within global and colonial
    contexts. It includes monographs, edited collections, and translations of primary
    sources in the English language. These cover a broad temporal spectrum, from
    antiquity to modernity, and all regions of the world.
    Matteo Vagelli

    Reconsidering Historical
    Epistemology
    French and Anglophone Styles in History
    and Philosophy of Science
    Matteo Vagelli
    Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage
    Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
    Venice, Italy

    ISSN 1871-7381 ISSN 2215-1958 (electronic)


    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
    ISBN 978-3-031-61554-2 ISBN 978-3-031-61555-9 (eBook)
    https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61555-9
    © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
    Switzerland AG 2024
    This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed 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

    If disposing of this product, please recycle the paper.


    To Ada
    Acknowledgments

    This book owes its existence to a multiplicity of factors. First of all, to the teach-
    ings and encouragement I received from my former advisors, Arnold I. Davidson
    and Jean-François Braunstein. The research for this volume was conducted at a
    series of institutions: the Scuola Alti Studi Fondazione San Carlo (Modena, Italy),
    the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the University of Chicago, the Goethe
    Universität Frankfurt Am Main, the Europa Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt an
    der Oder, and the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. I wish to thank these institutions
    for providing me with both the material and intellectual resources necessary to
    work on this project.
    The final steps of my research were made possible thanks to a Marie Curie
    Skłodowska Global Fellowship, which enabled research stays at Department of
    Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, at the
    Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, and at the Department
    of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University. I am very grateful
    to my three project supervisors—Marco Sgarbi, Peter Galison, and Hasok Chang—
    for their active support as well as for the many stimulating conversations they had
    with me about my work. Preliminary versions of the main ideas contained in this
    book were presented in several seminars, workshops, and conferences. They include
    the Contemporary Philosophy Workshop at the University of Chicago, the Modern
    Sciences Working Group at Harvard, and the Colloquium of the Final Theory
    Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. I
    thank the organizers of these workshops and seminars for their kind invitations to
    discuss my work and the participants for their precious feedback and comments.
    I am indebted to Ian Hacking for the series of conversations that we had starting
    in 2012. Ian sadly passed away while the preparation of this book was in its final
    stages. His death is a great loss for the philosophical community. Cheryl Misak’s
    initiative was decisive in the establishment of Hacking’s archives at the University
    of Toronto. I am thankful to her, as well as to Denis Walsh, who made my stays in
    Toronto possible, and to the archivists Daniela Ansovini and Emily Sommers, who
    assisted me during my work in the archives.

    vii
    viii Acknowledgments

    I also wish to thank Giuseppe Bianco, Daniele Lorenzini, Daniel Rodriguez


    Navas, Paolo Savoia, Jutta Schickore, Massimiliano Simons, Samuel Talcott, and
    Tuomo Tiisala, for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of some of the
    chapters of the present book. At various stages, discussions with scholars from
    many different institutions helped correct and shape my views on historical episte-
    mology. They include Caroline Angleraux, Alexander Blum, Cristina Chimisso,
    Luca Corti, Lucie Fabry, Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos, Stefano Furlan, Roberto
    Gronda, Luca Guzzardi, Gerardo Ienna, Nick Jardine, Laurent Loison, Pierre-
    Olivier Méthot, Eleonora Montuschi, Ivan Moya-Diez, Luca Paltrinieri, Eugenio
    Petrovich, Paul Roth, Sophie Roux, Florian Schmaltz, Henning Schmidgen, Helene
    Scott-Fordsmand, Skúli Sigurdsson, Alexander I. Stingl, Thomas Sturm, Gabriele
    Vissio, Denis Walsh, Oscar Westblad, and Charles T. Wolfe. I am very grateful to
    Ivan Moya-Diez for having accepted, in 2015, to work alongside me in founding the
    research network on historical epistemology and its annual workshops (episthist.
    hypotheses.org). These gatherings have been an incredible source of inspiration.
    My gratitude goes to Jean-François Braunstein, Peter Galison, and Marco Sgarbi
    for having encouraged me to publish this work and to Amanda Swain for having
    proofread my English. I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments
    and suggestions on the manuscript of the book. Despite my indebtedness to all of
    these scholars and institutions, I alone remain solely responsible for the views
    expressed in this work and for any errors that it may still contain. The unwavering
    support of my entire family and especially of Alessia, my wife, and of Ada, my
    daughter, is the foundation and fuel without which my work would be impossible.
    This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020
    research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agree-
    ment No. 101030646.
    Contents

    1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
    References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
    2 Reassessing the “Historical Turn” in Philosophy of Science . . . . . . . . 13
    2.1 The Mismatch Between History and Philosophy of Science . . . . . . 13
    2.1.1 The Institutional Setting of the History
    and Philosophy of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
    2.2 The History and Philosophy of Science “Marriage” Debate . . . . . . 22
    2.2.1 Empirical-Naturalized H&PS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
    2.2.2 Historicist, Hermeneutist H&PS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
    References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
    3 Contemporary Historical Epistemologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
    3.1 The Contemporary Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
    3.2 Marxist Understandings of Historical Epistemology. . . . . . . . . . . . 43
    3.3 New Beginnings in Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
    3.4 Historical Epistemology or Epistemology Historicized?. . . . . . . . . 52
    References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
    4 What (Good) Is French Historical Epistemology? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
    4.1 On the Existence of a “French Style” of Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . 59
    4.1.1 Epistemology, Épistémologie
    and Épistémologie Historique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
    4.2 A Posteriori Approaches to the Study of Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
    4.3 A Family Portrait? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
    References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
    5 Bachelard’s “Normative Turn” in Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
    5.1 An “Invisible Heritage” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
    5.1.1 Scientific Approximation as Historical Rectification. . . . . . 82
    5.2 Epistemological Breaks and Historical Discontinuity . . . . . . . . . . . 85
    5.3 The Epistemologist as a Judge in the Court of History . . . . . . . . . . 88
    5.4 Bachelard’s Normative Presentism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
    References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
    ix
    x Contents

    6 Canguilhem’s Historiography of the Life Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99


    6.1 A “Philosopher of Shadow” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
    6.2 Conceptual “Filiations” and the “Tact” for Recurrence . . . . . . . . . . 101
    6.3 The Tribunal Vs. the Laboratory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
    6.4 Canguilhem’s Critical Presentism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
    References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
    7 Foucault’s Archaeological History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
    7.1 The “Nonsense” of a Frenchman? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
    7.2 Archaeological Histories of the “Sciences of Man” . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
    7.3 Using the Archaeological Toolbox Against Humanist
    Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
    7.3.1 Foucault’s Analysis of Positivities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
    7.4 The Judge and the Physician . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
    7.4.1 The History of the Present as a
    “Historical Ontology of Ourselves” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
    References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
    8 Hacking’s Styles of Scientific Reasoning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
    8.1 The Styles Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
    8.1.1 Styles as Between Cognition and Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
    8.2 Styles and Foucault’s Analysis of Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
    8.2.1 The Archaeology of Language and Probability . . . . . . . . . . 185
    8.2.2 Styles of “Making People Up”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
    8.3 Historical (Meta-) Epistemology, Ontology,
    and Historiography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
    References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
    9 Styles of Science, Styles of Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
    References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

    Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

    You might also like