Reconsidering Historical Epistemology: French and Anglophone Styles in History and Philosophy of Science
About this ebook
Vagelli’s book provides a both unique and uniquely important window into historical epistemology and its relation to contemporary philosophy of science. Unique because nowhere else can one find a single work that treats the range of topics that he covers. Uniquely important because Vagelli’s clear, concise, and comprehensive survey details key interrelationships among a range of American, British, and European views currently in play regarding historical epistemology and philosophy of science as well as the institutional and intellectual vectors driving their associated epistemological positions – Paul Roth, UC Santa Cruz, USA
Uneasily, the history and philosophy of science have bolstered and undermined each other for all too long. Would history offer nothing but potted episodes to confirm or contradict transhistorical claims about science? Would philosophy dismantle uncritical historicist accounts of scientific discoveries? Historical epistemology offers a more integrated path, at once a history of the present and a philosophy of the past. Matteo Vagelli draws together the insights of the Francophone, Anglophone and Germanophone traditions to give us a sparkling, lucid account of seeing our standards of scientific understanding as developing across time, always asking: how did we come to our standards of demonstration and argument? – Peter Galison, Harvard University, USA
About the author
Matteo Vagelli is a Marie Skłodowska Curie postdoctoral fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and at Harvard University. He holds a BA and an MA in philosophy from the University of Pisa and has obtained a PhD in philosophy from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the School of Advanced Studies Fondazione San Carlo. He has done research at the University of Cambridge, the University of Chicago, the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (FMSH) in Paris. In 2015, he co-founded an international research network on historical epistemology that comprises over 50 members of both established and young international researchers in philosophy and history of science. In 2017/2018 he held the Chair ‘French contemporary thought’ at the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt an der Oder).
