Contemporary Historical Epistemologies

The term “historical epistemology” began circulating in the Anglosphere since the late1990s and early 2000s thanks to a relatively identifiable, albeit disparate, group of historians and philosophers of science with different backgrounds who appealed to this form of inquiry to describe their work. The fragmentation of contemporary forms of historical epistemology into a variety of distant topics and divergent approaches has generated some skepticism about the legitimacy of the method of historical epistemology vis-à-vis the history and philosophy of science and has led critics to emphasize the conceptual problems ostensibly undermining the entire enterprise. In this chapter, I show that there is a continuity between contemporary uses of the term ‘historical epistemology’ and the later phases of the Anglophone debate over the ‘marriage’ of history and philosophy of science. I also argue that the 1990s narrative about the ‘invention’ of historical epistemology by Anglophone philosophers and historians of science partially emerged due to insufficient consideration of other forms of historical epistemology.