When Historiography Met Epistemology

Book excerpt: In When Historiography Met Epistemology, Stefano Bordoni shows the emergence of sophisticated histories and philosophies of science in French speaking countries in the second half of the nineteenth century. That process involved mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, and was deeply linked to other processes that transformed the cultural and material landscape of Europe. In the literature, the emergence of the history and philosophy of science is chronologically associated with the turn of the twentieth century: the author points out that this meaningful starting point should be moved backwards. Since the 1860s, sophisticated histories of science and critical meta-theoretical remarks on scientific practice began to compete with naïve historical reconstructions and dogmatic views on science.