Gerardo Ienna

The Italian intellectual and academic scene has been a lively site for the development of meta-scientific reflections. Many works have explored the intersections of epistemology and the history of science, developing integrated reflections on them. Moreover, in recent years, various attempts have been made to legitimize certain individual thinkers or Italian historical-philosophical currents within debates on historical epistemology.These appendices extend this research by proposing the first formalization of a hypothetical, specifically Italian canon in historical epistemology. My objectives are as follows: (1) to call attention to some of the main contributions in this context; (2) to show how, in various cases, they have been interconnected with international debates; and (3) to foreground how Italian contributions to historical epistemology have been characterized by political connotations. Within Italian historical-philosophical production, the study of the sciences from both historical and epistemological perspectives has been hindered by the enormous legacy of Benedetto Croce’s thought. Indeed, precisely in reactions to the Italian tradition of historicism and neo-idealism have the roots of Italian historical epistemology been found. I propose a path that, starting from Federigo Enriques and passing through Antonio Gramsci, Ludovico Geymonat, Giulio Preti, Galvano della Volpe, Paolo Rossi, and Aldo Giorgio Gargani, arrives at the hotly contested debates of the so-called Italian Science Wars of the 1970s regarding the neutrality or non-neutrality of scientific knowledge.

The historiographical literature dedicated to historical epistemology tends to adopt a normative approach. On the contrary, this chapter proposes a description of the uses that have been made of the label “French historical epistemology [épistémologie historique]” (FHE) in the French context in relation to the sociocultural context from which it emerged. This reconstruction brings its canonization process to light. The first section takes the reader inside the field of historical epistemology and provides some preliminary definitions. The second section details how a broad discussion developed around the legacy of positivism in the transitional period between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, resulting in various intellectual tensions that led to the formation of a polarized intellectual space within which FHE developed. I describe the international circulation of ideas that generated the emergence of different intellectual reactions to positivism and how these factors were correlated with the institutionalization dynamics for the philosophy of science in various national contexts. The third section reconstructs the emergence of the label “épistémologie historique” in France and how this term was used from the early twentieth century until the 1970s. The fourth section argues that the success of FHE can be tracked to the French political-cultural climate of the 1970s. This section also analyzes how the “major canon” of this tradition, consisting of Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Foucault, emerged. In the last section, I show how the crystallization of this “major canon” gradually obscured the key role played by French mathematical thought, which I therefore propose as a “minor canon” of FHE.

The best way to bring out the specificity of the intellectual program that has come together under the label “French historical epistemology” (FHE) is to focus on the theoretical positions taken up in relation to the major debates in the epistemological field as well as the historiography of scientific thought, both in France and internationally. This chapter foregrounds some distinct traits of this tradition, paying particular attention to Canguilhem’s institutional and pedagogical role. The first section—focusing specifically on Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Cavaillès—shows how one of the central theses of FHE is that rationality is an emergent property of scientific-technical activity. Such a stance generates a form of epistemological materialism—that is, a perspective focused on the material features producing rationality, whether practices, discourses, or objects to be understood rigorously in their historicity. Corresponding to this is also a specific way of understanding the relationship between common sense and science that can be described in terms of constructivist realism. However, FHE was also characterized by theoretical positions regarding historiographical matters, which are addressed in the second and third sections. Indeed, compared to many of Bachelard’s predecessors, he held a discontinuist conception of the history of scientific thought, triggering a real controversy that emerged within historiography between “continuists” and “discontinuists,” involving Duhem, Meyerson, Alistair Crombie, Koyré, and Canguilhem. I also bring out the main characteristics of the models of “recurrent history” and “presentism” developed within the methodology of French historical research (with particular reference to the Annales tradition). In addition, I accentuate the specificities of FHE (focusing on Bachelard, Canguilhem, Koyré, and Metzger) compared to the Anglophone debates on Whiggism and anti-Whiggism, as well as Herbert Butterfield and his subsequent reception in Anglophone debates with, for example, Crombie, Kuhn, and the sociology of scientific knowledge. The fourth section reconstructs the thesis of epistemological regionalism advocated by Bachelard and other FHE authors as a firmly antithetical position to the “unity of science” thesis proposed by neo-positivism. Instead, the fifth section explores a specific region of rationality, namely mathematical thought, reconstructing the main theses of the “minor canon” of FHE put forward by figures such as Brunschvicg, Bachelard, Cavaillès, Lautman, Gonseth, the Bourbaki group, Desanti, and Gilles Châtelet.

In addition to historical epistemology’s focus on the fragmentation of scientific reason, both on the historical-diachronic level and in its regional pluralization, it foregrounds the intrinsically social and political dimensions of knowledge. Indeed, the existence of a third pole of mediation between the natural referent—that is, the research object—and the activity of the knowing subject is central to historical epistemology. However, what is controversial is how this mediation should be characterized. As the previous chapters show, historicizing scientific facts necessarily implies dealing with the cultural and social components that impact the processes of constituting and developing scientific knowledge. The first section reconstructs the reasons why authors who were affiliated with French historical epistemology (FHE) were been directly involved in the international debate on “internalism” and “externalism” (except for Koyré). I show how Meyerson, Metzger, Bachelard, and Canguilhem, while taking different positions, integrated social and anthropological perspectives into their theoretical and methodological systems. The second section shows how the legacy of Bachelard-Canguilhemism developed different directions with authors such as Althusser, Foucault, and Bourdieu. In particular, I describe how Canguilhem imparted a significant twist or bend in the development of this tradition by shifting the axis of interest from the physical-mathematical sciences toward the biological and life sciences. This process opened FHE to the human and social sciences, which had not been included previously. I also detail how, starting from common historical-epistemological references, Althusser, Foucault, and Bourdieu pursued three trajectories in their analyses of scientific knowledge, though they were marked by a common tendency to focus on the links between power and knowledge and between science and society.

This book forms an important part of the current revival of the debate around the category of historical epistemology. The term "historical epistemology" designates a methodology or research program aimed at building a historically informed theory of knowledge and/or a history of science and technology that enhances its epistemological aspects. This book offers an original panorama of the French debate surrounding the emergence and consolidation of the intellectual program of historical epistemology over a period ranging from the end of the 19th century to the second half of the 20th century. The first section of this book sets out to reconstruct sociologically and historically the processes of circulation of ideas - both nationally and internationally - that constituted the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the very idea of historical epistemology in the French intellectual context. The second section aims instead to highlight the main theoretical positions - both epistemological and historiographical - that would make it possible to trace a relative unity of intent among the authors who make up the canon of historical epistemology (in their oppositional relationship to other intellectual trends). Particular attention is also paid to defining a "minor canon" of this tradition, represented by what is known as "mathematical thought". The third part of the volume focuses instead on reconstructing the anthropological, sociological and political perspectives underlying the methodology employed by authors belonging to historical epistemology. The three parts combined make for a uniquely broad yet focused book that is of interest to historians, philosophers and scientists alike.

In this essay, we examine the institutional affiliations of Isis contributors and editors in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, and analyze what the articles and book reviews in Isis suggest about contributors’ engagement with the field of science studies more broadly. For much of the late twentieth century, we argue, Isis was a US-dominated journal, in terms of both the affiliations of its contributors and the intellectual trends it engaged with. Methodological developments in European science and technology studies (STS), for example, were generally not reflected in Isis’s research content until many years after they were originated, although the Isis book reviews frequently considered books by STS researchers. This US dominance has begun to change in recent years, however, with the establishments of editorial offices outside the United States and an increasing number of contributions from scholars outside the US. Current citation patterns in Isis reveal that the journal’s research articles reflect strong engagement with STS more broadly.

Recent debates in the history of science aimed at reconstructing the history of scientific diplomacy have privileged the analysis of forms of diplomacy coming from above. Instead, the objective of this paper is to raise awareness of these debates by looking at attempts at scientific diplomacy from below. Such a shift in perspective might allow us to observe the impact of marginalized social agents on the construction of international diplomatic choices. This article particularly focuses attention on how the legacy of Bernalism has fostered the emergence of two different types of science diplomacy. On the one hand, Bernalism has influenced the goals of organizations such as UNESCO and the World Peace Council, which are forms of science diplomacy I would term from above. On the other hand, Bernalism has also been at the origin of radical scientific movements that I propose to interpret as forms of scientific diplomacy from below. These have, in fact, played a cardinal role not only in raising public awareness of the social and political roles of science, but also in the more direct participation of scientists in defining the political objectives of their research activity. From this point of view, I analyze how an association like the World Federation of Scientific Workers proposed (at least in the beginning) greater democratic participation than the top‐down structures of other forms of scientific internationalism.