What (Good) Is French Historical Epistemology?

In this chapter, I discuss how French historical epistemology—though constituting neither a philosophical tradition nor a proper philosophical school—produced a distinct “stylestyle” indebted to the philosophical and historiographic debates prevailing in France from the early twentieth century until at least the late 1960s. The most salient features of this style are typically considered as most distinctly and originally represented by the works of BachelardBachelard, Gaston and CanguilhemCanguilhem, Georges, and not infrequently also associated with the work of Michel FoucaultFoucault, Michel. To distinguish the specificity and development of multifarious methodology characterizing this stylestyle, I contrast it with an alternative, more empirical trend irrigating French discussions of the relationship between philosophy and history during the first decades of the twentieth century. This empirical approach mobilized the metaphor of the laboratorylaboratory (history of science as) in attempt to articulate how philosophers take up the history of science as a “mental microscope” in order to make philosophical generalizations. The “normative turn” instantiated by French historical epistemology, and by Bachelard and Canguilhem in particular, instead employed the metaphor of the tribunaltribunal (history of science as). Despite upholding an a posteriori approach, Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault offer a “critical” history of rationality opposed to both the ideal of a totalizing historytotal history and the ideal of objective, neutral observation of history. Analyzing this normative and “critical” stylistic approach offers us a better grasp on the specificity of the contributions of these thinkers—not only within the French context but also with respect to Anglophone debates.