93:4 October 2010
Philosophical History of Science

Advisory Editor: Niccolò Guicciardini, University of Bergamo

The cultural turn in the history of science has displaced the once common view of science as a system of thought with a new conception of science as a social or cultural phenomenon. This trend has driven a wedge between the history of science as sociocultural process and epistemological or methodological questions about science as a system of thought. As a result, the more traditional philosophical history of science, in which the system of thought is at the center and our present knowledge provides the language in which past science is discussed, is in disfavor. Nonetheless a few thinkers have swum against this tide, notably Howard Stein, in whose work the concepts of present science are used uncompromisingly in the study of early modern and even ancient science. These essays re-examine the methodological debates about the history of science and focus on specific analyses such as those to be found in Stein's work. They avoid the endlessly repeated generalities that have made these debates so fruitless in recent years.

Table of Contents:

Michael Friedman

A Post-Kuhnian Approach to the History and Philosophy of Science

Menachem Fisch

Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency

George E. Smith

Revisiting Accepted Science: The Indispensability of the History of Science

Domenico Bertoloni Meli

Patterns of Transformation in Seventeenth-Century Mechanics

Bence Nanay

Rational Reconstruction Reconsidered

A.W. Carus

The Pragmatics of Scientific Knowledge: Howard Stein's Reshaping of Logical Empiricism

Gábor Á. Zemplén & Tamás Demeter

Being Charitable to Scientific Controversies: On the Demonstrativity of Newton's Experimentum Crucis

Andrew Janiak

Substance and Action in Descartes and Newton