Reassessing the “Historical Turn” in Philosophy of Science

In this chapter I argue that philosophy of science did not become suddenly historicized at the turn of the 1960s: rather, the “historical turn” involved a longer process which expanded in the following decades and, thanks to renewed interest at the beginning of the 1990s, gained further momentum in the early 2000s. This history testifies to the fact that philosophy still struggles to find a conceptual rationale for addressing the history of science. As SchickoreSchickore, Jutta has argued, the error condemning philosophy and history to perpetual incongruity is the “confrontation modelconfrontation model”, which conceives the two disciplines as separate, pre-given building blocks. The resulting imbalance—caused by an oscillation between a priori and a posteriori approaches, with the latter in turn divided among empirical-naturalized and hermeneuticist-historicist conceptions of the relation between history and philosophy of science—has impeded the emergence of a new, synthetic approach that fully integrates philosophical and historical perspectives. History and philosophy have never merged into a single discipline, like a chemical compound, but rather have remained separate operators united by a new, hyphened umbrella (history-and-philosophy of science) term, like a chemical mixture.