History and philosophy of science takes form

Abstract

During the past hundred years the strength of the amalgam of history and philosophy of science (HPS) has waxed and waned, while assuming multiple forms and acquiring different imprints. In the 1940s and 1950s, philosopher Gerd Buchdahl and colleagues in Melbourne, Australia, assembled a methodologically powerful version of HPS, drawing on their readings, with general historians, of the philosophical works of R.G. Collingwood and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others. Buchdahl later tried to export this pioneering conceptualization to Cambridge University, where he came to lead a new department of HPS. To appreciate the qualities and dimensions of the innovative mode of inquiry, it is necessary to understand the ecology of knowledge that promoted its emergence in an out-of-the-way settler colonial society, a productively marginal site where unanticipated filiations and alliances might be licensed to unsettled émigré scholars such as Buchdahl. Accordingly, this essay brushes off a forgotten genealogy of the relations of history and philosophy and science, thereby revealing a neglected past cognitive identity of HPS and suggesting a means to re-imagine its future.