Abstract
The article shows the strategic analogies, but also the differences between Bachelard and Canguilhem on the use of the history of science for epistemology. It emphasizes the importance of the ideology for Canguilhem, and the conceptual essence he recognizes in the history of science, which is read in its internal specific differences and in its complex articulations with life and reality. No concept, in fact, comes from nothing. The link between history and epistemology is not however of subjection, but of mutual influence. Canguilhem radicalizes the thought of Bachelard, and recognizes the historicity of every aspect of scientific knowledge, even of its less valued features and above all of errors. All aspects of Science are historical. The object of the history of science is not the object of the sciences, because it is always a discourse. This is why the history of science is inevitably linked to other forms of history. This opens up a pluralist conception of History and of Time, thinking of the sciences in their real body and no longer ideal or legal. Thus Canguilhem opens the way to the researches of Foucault and Serres.
Highlights
When we speak of “historical epistemology” we immediately think of Georges Canguilhem,2 and of Gaston Bachelard, because it would have been the latter to start the particular union between the history of the sciences and epistemology that bears that name
What I will briefly try to do in these pages is to adhere to some guiding principles of Canguilhem and Bachelard to reveal a conceptual context related to the socalled “historical epistemology” (Canguilhem 1977, 22), and more precisely to the strategic use of history of the sciences for epistemology and for the philosophy of science
There is undoubtedly a strategic use of the history of science that Canguilhem inherits directly and explicitly from Bachelard, placing himself in a community of intent that makes its historical-epistemological practice perfectly coherent and consequential to that of Bachelard – even if in some respects it will be much more elaborate and articulate, decidedly more critical, open and conscious of its limits. This seems to me confirmed by two considerations: 1) when he mentions Bachelard, Canguilhem almost never expresses a criticism against him7 both on the epistemology level, and on the role of this in the history of science; 2) when he speaks of Koyré, he tends to emphasize more the epistemological affinity with Bachelard than their
Summary
When we speak of “historical epistemology” we immediately think of Georges Canguilhem,2 and of Gaston Bachelard, because it would have been the latter to start the particular union between the history of the sciences and epistemology that bears that name.
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