Ressources numériques en sciences humaines et sociales OpenEdition Nos plateformes OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypothèses Calenda Bibliothèques OpenEdition Freemium Suivez-nous

éH10: Intersections of Psychological Research and Psychotherapeutic Practices

 

10th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology

27-29 March 2025

Institut für Medizingeschichte und Wissenschaftsforschung (IMGWF)
Universität zu Lübeck

 

Venue: Lecture Hall (Hörsaal), IMGWF, Königstraße 42, 23552 Lübeck.

Mandatory registration via email at: epistemologiehistorique@gmail.com

 

Thursday, March 27th

14:00 Welcome

14:15 Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science
Opening lecture: My Take on Historical Epistemology. A Personal Note.

15:15 Coffee-break

15:45  Annette C. Mülberger, University of Groningen
How did personality enter the workplace? Discussions on psychotechnics and the ‘human factor’ in the 1920s

16:30 Matthew Perkins-McVey, Bar-Ilan University
On ‘Chemical Tools:’ Intoxicating the ‘Normal and the Pathological’ in the Psy-Sciences

17:15 Ilaria Fornacciari, Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic)
Mirroring Mechanical Metaphors: Materials for an Archaeology of “Emotional Competence”, from Asperger to Robot-Assisted Autism Therapy (RAAT)

 

Friday, March 28th

09:30 Catriel Fierro, Autonomous University of Barcelona
‘Yes, well… But does it work?’ Effectivity, Technological Forecast and Phonographic Recording in Carl Rogers’ Psychotherapy Research Program at The Ohio State University (1939-1945)

10:15  Francesca Carta, Ca’ Foscari University
Beck Depression Inventory: from Psychometrics to Therapy

11:00 Coffee-break 

11:30  Iván Moya Diez, IMGWF, University of Lübeck
The cognitive revolution in therapeutic practice: Strategies of scientific rationality and the relative autonomy of cognitive therapy

12:15  Fanny Mertens, University of Leipzig
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and the Imperative of Speaking Truth. A Social-Philosophical Critique of the Evolutionist Scientism of Behavioural Experiments

13:00 Lunch   

14:00 Philippe Huneman, IHPST, University Paris 1/CNRS
Ancient alienism, modern psychiatry?

14:45 Marion Farge, Marie and Louis Pasteur University
From psychoanalysis to a “new psychological culture”: topicalities of the “Psy-function”

15:30 Coffee-break 

16:00 Sarah Marks, Birkbeck, University of London
CBT in Britain: Welfare, Evidence and NHS Contexts, 1960-2010 (online presentation)          

16:45 Dylan Guével, LIER-FYT, Paris, EHESS-CNRS
“How new practical issues in the reception of patients affect psychiatric knowledge: A pragmatic history of the concept of paranoia in French psychiatry in the 1930s”

17:30 Elodie Gratreau, Université de Technologie de Compiègne
Developing ambiguous classifications for a clinically relevant psychiatric research

 

Saturday, March 29th

09:30 Martin Wieser, Sigmund Freud University Berlin
How to relax in a dictatorship. On the genesis and development of Autogenic Training in Germany

10:15  Antonia Sieler, IMGWF, University of Lübeck
‘Therapy is Change, not Adaptation’- Feminist Therapeutic Practices in the Case of the BIFF (Beratung und Information für Frauen)

11:00 Coffee-break 

11:30 Luc Surjous, Paris Cité University
The relation between science and care in medicine and psychotherapy from the perspective of Georges Canguilhem’s work

12:15 Janu Milella, IMGWF, University of Lübeck
The “Real-Life Test” at the Intersection of Epistemic and Psychotherapeutic Practices in Gender Assessment

13:00 Lunch 

14:00 Wessel de Cock, Humboldt University of Berlin
Towards a Systematic Historical Epistemology. An exemplary case study of the integration of clinical psychology into neuroscientific experimental systems in the 1990s Decade of the Brain

14:45 Grace Smith, Princeton University
Operationalizing grief: Measure-making as a looping technology in psychiatric grief in the U.S., 1975-1995

15:30 Closing remarks

 

Organizing committee:

Caroline Angleraux (iBrain U1253, INSERM de Tours)
Lucie Fabry (LIR3S, Université de Bourgogne)
Lisa Malich (IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck)
Iván Moya-Diez (IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck)
Perceval Pillon (IHPST, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/CNRS)
Matteo Vagelli (CFS, Università di Pisa)

This workshop is organized by:

ÉpistHist. Research Network on the History and the Methods of Historical Epistemology

With the support of:

IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck.
IHPST (UMR 8590), Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/CNRS.
LIR3S (UMR7366),  Université de Bourgogne/CNRS.

This workshop is founded by:

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project Number 516932573: “The cognitive revolution in therapeutic practice: adapting scientific ideals and forming subjects in Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy, 1950-1990.”

 

Reconsidering Historical Epistemology. French and Anglophone Styles in History and Philosophy of Science – Matteo Vagelli (Springer 2024)

“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, University of California-Santa Cruz)

About this book:

This book explores the key conceptual stakes underpinning historical epistemology. The strong Anglophone interest in historical epistemology, since at least the 1990s, is typically attributed to its simultaneously philosophical and historical synthetic approach to the study of science. Yet this account, considered by critics to be an unreflective assumption, has prevented historical epistemology from developing a clear understanding and definition, especially regarding how precisely historical and philosophical reflections on the sciences should be combined. Thus, this book uniquely analyses how the problems and tensions inherent to the “contemporary” phase of historical epistemology can be clarified by reference to the “classical” French phase. The archaeological method of Michel Foucault, which draws on and transforms fundamental insights by Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, is used to exert an enduring influence on the field—especially through the work of Ian Hacking and his philosophical cum historical analyses of “styles of scientific reasoning”. Though this book is of great value to academic specialists and graduate students, the fact it addresses questions broad in scope ensures it is also relevant to a range of scholars in many disciplines and will provoke discussion among those interested in foundational issues in history and philosophy of science.

Keywords

Table of contents (9 chapters)

annonce de parution | Laurent Loison, Canguilhem philosophe du vital Lire La Connaissance de la vie

Canguilhem philosophe du vitalLaurent Loison

Canguilhem philosophe du vital. Lire La Connaissance de la vie

À paraître en juillet 2025

Vrin – Bibliothèque d’Histoire de la Philosophie – Poche

Présentation

Qu’est-ce qu’un organisme vivant? Comment comprendre la relation entre un être vivant et son milieu? Pourquoi les machines ne tombent-elles pas malades? Et, plus fondamentalement encore, la vie peut-elle être un objet de connaissance? Voilà les questions que pose le philosophe Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995) dans un de ses maîtres-livres, La Connaissance de la vie, au fil de sept études qui touchent à la philosophie, à la biologie, à la médecine et à l’histoire des sciences. Les préoccupations de Canguilhem n’ont rien perdu de leur actualité : la crise de la biodiversité, le changement climatique et maintenant la possibilité d’une humanité augmentée s’en font l’écho. La Connaissance de la vie est donc plus que jamais un livre nécessaire. Mais, comme c’est un ouvrage difficile, il fallait en faciliter l’accès. C’est là l’ambition du présent essai.

L’Auteur

Laurent Loison est historien et philosophe des sciences, chercheur au CNRS (SPHERE, UMR 7219).
 

Dossier “Questions de style”, Revue de Synthèse, 145/3-4 (2024)

Revue de Synthèse, 145/3-4 (2024)


« Questions de style » / “Problems of Style”


 
Ce dossier de la Revue de Synthèse se fait l’écho de la résurgence du concept de style dans la pensée contemporaine. Prenant acte du fait que la réflexion stylistique a aujourd’hui largement débordé le cadre rhétorique, pour s’ouvrir à un questionnement plus global sur les formes de l’expérience humaine, il se propose de donner un aperçu du foisonnement des recherches actuelles sur le style dans une perspective interdisciplinaire. La fécondité théorique du style tient en effet à sa grande plasticité, dont témoignent les contributions ici réunies, qu’elles traitent d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences, d’anthropologie, de musique, de littérature ou de jeu vidéo
 
PRÉSENTATION
Rémi Mermet, Le style, encore et toujours/Style, Again and Always, p. 311-323

ARTICLES
Matteo Vagelli­, Styles of Science and the Pluralist Turn: Between Inclusion and Exclusion/Styles scientifiques et le virage pluraliste : entre inclusion et exclusion, p. 325-363

Jules Colmart, La traduction comme style de pensée chez Lévi-Strauss/Translation as a Thought Style in Lévi-Strauss’s Work, p. 365-397

Fériel Kaddour, .« Ce qui seul mérite le nom de style » : Adorno, Beethoven et les bassons de la Cinquième Symphonie/“The True Location of that which Alone Deserves to be Called Style”: Adorno, Beethoven and the Bassoons of the Fifth, p. 399-436

Clara de Courson, Détourner un héritage stylistique. Du bon usage des stylèmes galants dans l’Histoire d’une Grecque moderne de Prévost d’Exiles/Diverting a Stylistic Legacy: On the Proper Use of Gallant Stylistic Features in Prévost d’Exiles’ The Greek Girl’s Story, p. 437-460

Pierre Dernoncourt, L’actualité du style à la lumière des Soulsborne/Style in the Light of the Soulsborne Series, p. 461-495

REVUE CRITIQUE
Cindy Gervolino, Gestes et diagrammes : approches philosophiques, linguistiques et mathématiques, p. 497-504

COMPTES RENDUS
Styles artistiques, styles scientifiques, p. 505-524

Vous devez vous-même enregistrer  dans l’agenda de Theuth vos annonces de conférences et appels à communication (https://theuth.fr). Cela suppose une inscription sur le site. Cette inscription est distincte et indépendante de la liste de diffusion.

CFP 10th Workshop on Historical Epistemology

Call for Papers
10th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology:
Intersections of Psychological Research and Psychotherapeutic Practices

27-29 March 2025

IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck

Organized by:
EpistHist Research Network on the History and the Methods of Historical Epistemology

Opening lecture:
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

Ten years ago, the Research Network on the History and Methods of Historical Epistemology, EpistHist, began in Paris with its inaugural workshop on épistémologie historique. These workshops have turned into an annual opportunity to discuss key issues in the history and philosophy of sciences and engage in contemporary methodological debates. By mobilizing historical epistemology as a broad approach, the workshops mediate between 20th-century French epistemology and its recent renewal in the English-speaking world. The abstracts and programs of past editions are available on the research network’s website: https://episthist.hypotheses.org/.

After editions in Paris, Dijon, and Venice, EpistHist is now crossing the Rhine and the Elbe rivers to celebrate its first decade at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science Studies, University of Lübeck, where Hans-Jörg Rheinberger once conceived tools for interlacing the history of science with philosophy through historical epistemology.

This anniversary workshop will focus on the topic of Intersections of Psychological Research and Psychotherapeutic Practices. Here, we aim to explore which approaches within historical epistemology are most suitable for investigating the production of knowledge and practices related to the psyche.

Since Gaston Bachelard (1984) placed research instruments and techniques at the core of his epistemological history with the concept of phenomenotechnique, the role of practices has become central to understanding the production and transmission of scientific knowledge. Compared to microscopes or particle accelerators, psychology and the psy-sciences might seem to lack equivalent phenomenotechniques. However, at a closer look, the psy-sciences make widespread use of questionnaires, interviews, protocols, and other “paper tools” essential for their knowledge practices. Mitchell Ash and Thomas Sturm (2007), following Ian Hacking (1992) and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2017), have especially pointed to the role of instruments of experimentation as organizers of psychological research practices.

On a cultural and political level, following Michel Foucault’s (2008) analysis of psy-practices as disciplinary practices, scholars like Ian Hacking (1995, 1998, 2002), Arnold I. Davidson (2002), and others explored the normative effects of psy-sciences and psy-practices on subjects, subjectivity, and conceptions of selfhood, showing how concepts and categories shape experiences, resulting in new ways of “making up people.”

Nonetheless, with the notable exception of some recent works (Marks, 2017; Rosner, 2018), inquiries into the history of psy-sciences have primarily focused on the production of psy-knowledge, often overlooking psychotherapeutic practices under the assumption that these are merely applications of that knowledge. Our workshop intends to challenge this by explicitly addressing psychotherapeutic practices as equally relevant for a historical epistemology of psy-sciences. We follow Georges Canguilhem’s (1974) insight that medicine is not the mere application of knowledge generated in the life sciences but a set of diagnostic and therapeutic techniques situated at the crossroads of different disciplines and sciences. Borrowing from Canguilhem, the aim of our workshop is precisely to explore such intersections and crossroads, from experimental psychology to spiritual exercises, and from psychiatric classification systems to psychotherapeutic approaches.

We welcome proposals exploring the relationship between scientific inquiries producing knowledge and the technical development of psychotherapeutic practices. Key questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to:

  • What approach within historical epistemology helps to better understand the social, political, and normative effects of psy-practices?
  • What instruments in the psy-field can be conceptualized as “paper tools” or even phenomenotechniques?
  • To what extent and how do categories and concepts from psychotherapy help create new “kinds of people”?
  • How has the relationship between psychological research and psychotherapeutic approaches changed over time?
  • How have specific scientific inquiries shaped different psychotherapeutic practices?
  • Did the scientific knowledge produced by the psy-sciences migrate into psychotherapy, and, if so, how was it translated, transformed, and adapted in the process?
  • In what ways have psychotherapeutic techniques contributed to psychological research?
  • How have different scientific findings been used to legitimize psychotherapeutic practices?
  • What roles have cultural, institutional, and political contexts played in shaping psy-sciences, psychotherapeutic practices, and their interrelations?

Proposals (500 words, along with a brief bio of the candidate) must be submitted by November 30, 2024, in .doc format to epistemologiehistorique@gmail.com. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent by early January 2025. The workshop will be conducted in English.

Organizing committee:

Caroline Angleraux (iBrain U1253, INSERM de Tours)
Lucie Fabry (LIR3S, Université de Bourgogne)
Lisa Malich (IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck)
Iván Moya-Diez (IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck)
Perceval Pillon (IHPST, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/CNRS)
Matteo Vagelli (CFS, Università di Pisa)

This workshop is founded by:

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project Number 516932573: “The cognitive revolution in therapeutic practice: adapting scientific ideals and forming subjects in Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy, 1950-1990.”

With the support of:

IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck.
IHPST (UMR 8590), Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/CNRS.
LIR3S (UMR7366),  Université de Bourgogne/CNRS.

[parution] Basaglia. Radikales Denken, optimistisches Handeln (Psychiatrie Verlag)

Was bleibt, wenn aus Radikalität Geschichte wird?

Hundert Jahre liegt der Geburtstag von Franco Basaglia zurück. Der Psychiater aus Norditalien war dort und später weltweit Wortführer einer revolutionär kritischen Bewegung, die nichts weniger als die Überwindung der Anstalten forderte. Wo stehen wir jetzt und was ist von Basaglia geblieben?

Viele Gedanken und Ansätze, die die europäischen Reformbewegungen der 1968er hervorbrachten, sind heute entweder im täglichen Arbeitsleben eingehegt worden oder aber vergessen. Ein Mensch, der so prägend für unser Verständnis von sozialem Miteinander und Teilhabe war, verdient nun mehr als ein bloßes Auftauchen aus den Wogen der Geschichte. Basaglias Erbe steht für den Dreiklang aus Praxis, kritischer Theoriebildung und Utopie: Dies ist der Kern jeder Kreativität und Erneuerung.
In den gesammelten Worten, sowohl seinen eigenen als auch der nachfolgenden Generation, zieht eine vielstimmige und multidisziplinäre Gruppe von Autorinnen und Autoren aus Italien und Deutschland ein Zwischenfazit: Haben sich die Konflikte der Vergangenheit wirklich aufgelöst oder nur ihre Form geändert?  Wie positionieren sich die psychiatrischen Dienste (oder wir uns) in einer sich wandelnden Gesellschaft und stehen wir wieder am Anfang der Erneuerung der Psychiatrie?

Autorin Kirsten Düsberg

Kirsten Düsberg, ist Soziologin, lebt in Udine und hat an grenzüberschreitenden Projekten zur Geschichte und Gegenwart der Psychiatrie mitgewirkt.

Autorin Luciana Degano Kieser

Luciana Degano Kieser ist Ärztin für Psychiatrie, Master of Public Health, und in Italien und Deutschland tätig.

Autor Jörg Utschakowski

Jörg Utschakowski ist Diplom-Sozialarbeiter und Psychiatriereferent des Landes Bremen. Er initiierte und koordinierte das EU-Projekt EX-IN und ist im Bundesvorstand des Vereins EX-IN Deutschland.

The Historical Epistemology of Scientific Styles

9th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology

27-28 June – Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia

↓ ABSTRACTS available below ↓

JUNE 27, 2024 (Sala Morelli) 

9:00 Welcome

9:15 Guillermo Cimbora Acosta, Universidad de Sevilla

Denkstil, self-vindication, and the dialectic of experimental practices.

10:00 Stefano Pilotto, Sapienza Università di Roma

Thinking by tools. Observations on a “technical style” in history of science

11:15 Luca Sciortino, Ecampus University

Styles of reasoning and the demarcation problem 

12:00 Sofia Abelha, Universität Wien

What is new about anti-exceptionalism about logic?

15:00 Eleonora Montuschi, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia

Styles of scientific practice: the case of citizen science

15:45 Luis F. Bartolo Alegre, LMU München

Is logic a style of reasoning?

17:00 Ben Toth, CFCUL Lisbon

The summer of theory. Crombie and Foucault, styles and fields

 

JUNE 28, 2024 (Aula Baratto)

9:30 Antoine Auvé, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Style and personality in Dilthey’s epistemology: from the method of the historian to the historiography of the emergence of modern science

10:15 Paolo Babbiotti, Università di Torino

Two stylistics methods for “the problem of style” in philosophy. Compression and lingering (in Bernard Williams and Stanley Cavell) 

11:30 Aurore Franco-Ricord, IHPST Paris

Scientific styles and cultures struggles: the case of endosymbiotic theory

12:15 Caroline Angleraux, INSERM Tours

Styles and desuetude: the case study of Haeckel’s monera

15:00 Julia Reed, Bar-Ilan University

Scientific styles of making and re-making sex

15:45 Matteo Pasquinelli, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia

Three styles of AI: induction, vectorialisation, and modelling 

17:00 Johannes Endres, University of California Riverside

Style and epistemology: basic strictures, and open questions

 

This workshop is organized by:

Épistémologie Historique. Research Network on the History and the Methods of Historical Epistemology

With the support of: 

Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali;

IHPST (UMR 8590, Paris 1/CNRS);

Université de Bourgogne, LIR3S (UMR 7366 CNRS-uB)

IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck


Organizing committee:

Caroline Angleraux (iBrain U1253, INSERM de Tours)
Lucie Fabry (Université de Bourgogne, LIR3S)
Iván Moya-Diez (IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck)

Perceval Pillon (IHPST)

Matteo Vagelli (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia)

Further information: epistemologiehistorique@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ABSTRACTS

JUNE 27, 2024 (Sala Morelli) 

9:00 Welcome

9:15 Guillermo Cimbora Acosta, Universidad de Sevilla

Denkstil, self-vindication, and the dialectic of experimental practices.

In the last works of Ian Hacking, the name Ludwik Fleck began to appear with some frequency. In ‘Styles for Historians and Philosophers’, Hacking refers to Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact as the most famous instance of the idea of thought style before Crombie’s work. The fact that Hacking and Fleck coincide in their use of the notion of thought style is not coincidental, as both share the project of characterizing the objectivity attributed to scientific knowledge abandoning the theory of truth by correspondence and taking material interaction with the world as fundamental. However, besides affirming that the scope he gives to the notion of style is considerably broader than Fleck’s, we do not find many more connections between the thinking of both authors in Hacking’s published works. The aim of our presentation is to establish such connections, by interpreting Fleck from the perspective of the philosophy of scientific practices. To do so, firstly, we will show how the notion of thought style in Fleck’s work has variable scope, allowing him to speak both of the thought style of modern science or theology and of the thought style of the much more particular collective of serologists. Secondly, we will point out that in Hacking’s thought we also find two types of units of analysis with very different scopes: styles of scientific thinking, based on the self-authentication thesis, and laboratory sciences, based on the self-vindication thesis. Thirdly, we will propose to connect the proposals of both authors following the idea of Hacking’s laboratory sciences, rather than that of styles of scientific thinking. The justification for this change in the terms of the comparison is that, beyond merely pointing out the phenomenon of incommensurability, that Hacking labeled as dissociation between distant thought styles (e.g., Theology vs. Physics), Fleck’s philosophical work is dedicated to analyzing the practice of experimental sciences. In this context, Fleck proposes his triadic notion of cognition, characterized as a dialectic between active and passive elements of knowledge —adopted later by Andrew Pickering for his philosophy of scientific practices. This dialectic will allow us, finally, to establish a direct and an indirect comparison between the philosophies of Fleck and Hacking. The direct comparison will be made between Fleck’s triadic notion of cognition and Hacking’s thesis of laboratory sciences’ self-vindication, while the indirect comparison will be established between this same thesis and the pragmatic realism advocated by Pickering, which is grounded on Fleck’s dialectic between active and passive elements of knowledge.

 

10:00 Stefano Pilotto, Sapienza Università di Roma

Thinking by tools. Observations on a “technical style” in history of science

The great historian of science Alexandre Koyré, in his article dedicated to philosophers and machines, articulates the relationship between knowledge (épisteme) and technique (téchne) by admitting the historical precedence of the latter, and “since these rules [that guide technique] do not fall from the sky,” he states that “we are forced to admit an independent origin of technique, and therefore the existence of technical thought”. What Koyré postulates is the existence of a practical thought, which is essentially different from theoretical thought.
This contribution aims to critically analyse Koyré’s thesis, by considering technique as an original practice and not an application of the scientific practice or necessarily correlated to it. Therefore, in order to understand if what Koyré calls “technical thinking” can be considered an autonomous style, we will show the difference between his position and the notion of laboratory style theorised by Ian Hacking, so as to distinguish between the instrumental endowment of experimental research and its non-formalised material conditions of possibility.
In this analysis we will compare Koyré’s position to those of French historical epistemology, in particular to Canguilhem’s theses on the relationship between science and technique. Lastly, we will focus on the peculiarities of this possible style, which directs the thought by offering a modality of instrumental understanding (B. Irrgang), which can also provide heuristic analogies useful for scientific knowledge.

11:15 Luca Sciortino, Ecampus University

Styles of reasoning and the demarcation problem 

The problem of how to develop a coherent distinction between science and non-science has been extensively discussed since the beginning of the twentieth century. However, most of the proposed solutions were attempts to identify necessary and sufficient conditions that failed to take into account the complexity of scientific enterprise and that did not contemplate the existence of different degrees of scientificity. In the 1990s, Ian Hacking was one of the philosophers who observed that there might be no set of necessary and sufficient conditions for being a science and no set of features possessed by all the sciences. Nevertheless, he maintained that it is possible to distinguish between humanistic and scientific styles of reasoning — only the latter have developed what he called techniques of self-authentication.
Since Hacking did not develop these ideas further, he left many problems unsolved. For example, it is still open to question whether the authentication techniques are really peculiar only to the scientific thought; it is unclear which features are not possessed by all the sciences; and it is uncertain whether some styles of reasoning can be considered ‘more scientific’ than others rather than ‘scientific’ or ‘non-scientific’ tout court. Yet, discussing the boundaries between science and non-science, by focusing on styles of reasoning as a unity of analysis, seems a perspective worth exploring. This is the task I shall undertake in this talk.
To start with, it will be crucial to characterize the concept of ‘styles of reasoning’: which ways of thinking can be counted as ‘styles of reasoning’ in the sense of Hacking? I shall frame this issue within the ‘theory of prototypes’, a view of categorization that rests on Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblances”. According to this view, concepts are not categories defined by the common properties of its members but categories represented by best examples (prototypes). I shall summarise the fundamental theses of Hacking’s styles project and identify a set of properties of the statistical style of reasoning. Then, I shall show that there is no clear boundary to the category of styles of reasoning and that degrees of category membership for a given way of thinking are determined by its degree of similarity to a ‘prototype’ (e.g. the statistical style of reasoning). I shall also illustrate this result by showing the ‘diagram of the category of styles of reasoning’ in which different members belong to different concentric circles. The algorithmic, the postulational, the statistical, the taxonomic, the historico-genetic and the laboratory styles of reasoning will occupy the innermost circle of the ‘best examples’ or prototypes.
Furthermore, I shall argue that the effectiveness of the techniques of self-authentication and the degree of progressiveness (delivering new predictions, ‘objects’, classifications etc.) increase moving from the periphery towards the innermost circle. Finally, I shall argue that the more scientific a style is the more it is attracted towards the center of the diagram, i.e. the more properties it shares with the prototypes, the central core of scientific thought. Ultimately, there is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions for being a scientific style. Styles of reasoning differ in ‘scientificity’ as a function of the number of properties of the prototypes they possess. While a style may be less scientific than a prototype, it may not be more or less scientific than another style.

 

12:00 Sofia Abelha, Universität Wien

What is new about anti-exceptionalism about logic?

Interest in how logic intersects with science in terms of its methodology, epistemology, metaphysics, and even its values has attracted considerable attention in recent philosophy of logic literature, often discussed under the label of anti-exceptionalism about logic (hereafter AEL). The opposing traditional perspective to it is initially associated with Kant’s characterization of synthetic a priori knowledge, but also interestingly widespread in common sense through the idea that logic is the cornerstone of objectivity and certainty. From this perspective, logic is taken as a foundational discipline rooted in necessary and analytic truths, relying on a priori evidence, such as rational intuition, and possessing a distinct methodology from other scientific disciplines. AEL emerges as an attempt to overcome the shortcomings of this view in explaining the plurality and revisability of logics and, importantly, in rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction, following Quine (1980). Hence, the new concerns include how to rationally justify a choice between different logical theories or even the adoption of logical laws, how to explain logical knowledge as fallible and revisable and how to determine which is the relevant kind of data responsible for informing and regulating these theories.

A plausible way to characterize the general picture, as done by Martin & Hjortland (2022), is by identifying two main approaches to AEL: as continuity with the empirical sciences or as tradition rejection. Albeit they quickly dismiss the first alternative, it aims at exploring the similarities between logic and science in order to gain understanding over logical knowledge, for instance by comparing logics to scientific models via a logic-as-modelling view. The second approach is more comprehensive in that it is a negative thesis which consists in denying at least one of the traditional properties attributed to logic, including but not limited to generality, formality, foundationalism, apriority, analyticity, necessity and normativity. In either case the conventional position of logic as a privileged field in terms of its epistemology, methodology, and metaphysics is challenged.

But the pursuit and development of a scientifically oriented philosophy is far from new, dating at least back to the late 19th century and being distinctively promoted by the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle in the early and mid-20th century. Despite emerging from different social, political, economic, and cultural backgrounds, these movements share similar motivations and aspirations, which is made clear by anti-exceptionalists when tracing the origins of the discussion back to Quine’s (1953) empirical holism. The influence I want to recover from that period is of Pragmatism, so that a new approach to the exceptionality of logic can be put forward without incurring into the same problematic anti-metaphysical, non-cognitivist and semantic reductionist aspects of logical empiricism. I shall point out the lessons we should take from this aged discussion and propose a deflationist approach where the notion of ’truth’ and ’correctness’, that often appear to characterize theory choice and to justify logical principles, can be cashed out without implying logical realism nor monism. The main features I want to preserve are of a revisable, fallible and non-foundational perspective on logic.

 

15:00 Eleonora Montuschi, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia

Styles of scientific practice: the case of citizen science

The concept of style is useful both to describe how science ‘gets done’ and more generally to understand science as a scientific practice. In the light of this, in this talk I will question whether and how a particular way of ‘doing science’ – i.e. citizen science – can qualify itself as a style of research, and whether there is any added (epistemological or other) value to describe it this way.

15:45 Luis F. Bartolo Alegre, LMU München

Is logic a style of reasoning?

From the beginning of the styles of reasoning project, Hacking excluded logic from it. He contends that ‘styles of reasoning create the possibility for truth and falsehood’, whereas logic ‘merely preserve[s] it’ [7, p. 57]. For him, logic doesn’t generate new possibilities for establishing truth, which is what proper styles of thinking do, but rather facilitates the transition from one set of truths to another. Thirty years later, Hacking further argued ‘logic is topic-neutral in a way that styles of thinking & doing are not’, and that it can be applied universally in conversations and that arguing is a universal practice [10, p. 601-2]. Styles of thinking, instead, are more context-specific, particularly prevalent in scientific discourse but not uniformly present across cultures or historical periods.
In this talk, I’ll contend that, within Hacking’s framework, logic could indeed be classified as a style of reasoning. There are at least three reasons to argue this.
First, although ‘people everywhere make inductions, draw inferences to best explanation, make deductions’ [9, p. 12], there was no systematic treatment of arguments before Aristotle’s theory of syllogism [1]. This theory proposed a way of thinking in which we could systematically relate statements in terms of mutual exclusion, exhaustivity, necessary and sufficient conditions, etc. Moreover, there’s a debate on whether standard logic really captures the way of reasoning in other cultures or even in informal settings [cf. 6,11,12,13,18].
Second, Aristotle’s laws of syllogism were not final in the development of this discipline. Not only we had further developments of logic beyond the theory of syllogism – which at best could be compared with modern one-place predicate logic. Aristotle’s rules don’t completely agree with those of modern standard logic [cf. 3,5,17,19,21]. The crystallisation of logic in standard or classical logic meant expanding and even discarding some of Aristotle’s original theses. On the one hand, he didn’t subscribe to the principle of explosion: A,¬AB (Analytica Priora II, 63b32–39), which is featured in any standard introduction to logic. On the other hand, one of his theses is excluded from standard logic, i.e., Aristotle’s thesis: ¬(A→¬A) (Analytica Priora II, 57b3–10). Even today, logic keeps evolving and there are competing theories on what the laws of logic are: so-called non-standard or non-classical logic systems. We have, for instance, paraconsistent logics (in which the principle of explosion isn’t valid in general) and connexive logics (in which Aristotle’s thesis is valid in general).
Finally, it’s nowadays contentious to assert that logic is topic-neutral. For some authors, the existence of non-classical logics suggests that some logic systems are applicable only to specific topics [e.g. 2]. Moreover, it also seems that logic isn’t necessarily used in all (scientific) contexts. For instance, it’s difficult to argue that logic is used in the context of discovery, as sometimes serendipity or creative thinking proceeds without any need of logic. We use logic later to make sure that our conjectures are coherent. Furthermore, we know that there’s inconsistent data and theories in science [cf. 14,15], which means that the laws of explosion or non-contradiction aren’t fully satisfied by science. Some authors have argued from this that the logic used in science is paraconsistent [e.g. 4]. Others, however, have argued that not all principles of logic are used in every scientific context [20].
This seems compatible with stating that logic, as a systematic discipline, created ‘a new kind of object’ [8, p. 148]: systematic theories of the world, all of whose statements are deductively connected. It might be suggested that the logical style put these kinds of theories in the realm of the bivalent, in Hacking’s terms. We must note here that this systematic understanding of scientific theories isn’t general neither of scientific practice nor of our philosophical conceptions of scientific theories. Even within the Vienna Circle, the argument was made that, even if logic is a general and universal theory, not all scientific theories need to be systematic [16].


References
[1] Aristotle. Organon. Testo greco a fronte. Ed. by Maurizio Migliori. Trans. by Lucia Palpacelli. Milano: Bompiani, 2016.
[2] Otávio Bueno and Scott A. Shalkowski. “Modalism and Logical Pluralism”. In: Mind 118.470 (Apr. 2009), pp. 295–321. doi: 10.1093/mind/fzp033.
[3] Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa and Otávio Bueno. “Paraconsistència: Esboço de uma interpretação”. In: Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa, Jean-Yves Béziau and Otávio Bueno. Elementos da Teoria Paraconsistente de Conjuntos. Campinas: CLE, 1998, pp. 113–50.
[4] Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa and Steven French. “Inconsistency in Science. A Partial Perspective”. In: Inconsistency in Science. Ed. by Joke Meheus. Origins: Studies in the Sources of Scientific Creativity 2. Dordrecht: Springer, 2002, pp. 105–18. doi: 10. 1007/978-94-017-0085-6_6.
[5] Evandro Luís Gomes and Itala M. L. D’Ottaviano. “Aristotle’s Theory of Deduction and Paraconsistency”. forthcoming.
[6] Iván Guzmán de Rojas. Logical and Linguistic Problems of Social Communication with the Aymara People. Manuscript Reports 66e. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1985. url: http://hdl. handle.net/10625/7993.
[7] Ian Hacking. “Language, truth and reason”. In: Rationality and Relativism. Ed. by Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982, pp. 48–66.
[8] Ian Hacking. “Statistical language, statistical truth, and statistical reason: The self-authentification of a style of scientific reasoning”. In: The Social Dimensions of Science. Ed. by Ernan McMullin. Studies in science and the humanities form the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values III. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992, pp. 130–157.
[9] Ian Hacking. “‘Style’ for historians and philosophers”. In: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part A 23.1 (1992), pp. 1–20. doi: 10.1016/0039-3681(92)90024-Z.
[10] Ian Hacking. “‘Language, truth and reason’ 30 years later”. In: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part A 43.4 (2012). Special Issue: Styles of Thinking, pp. 599–609. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2012.07.002.
[11] James F. Hamill. Ethno-logic. The Anthropology of Human Reasoning. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
[12] Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. La mentalité primitive. The Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford, 29 May 1931. Oxford: Clarendon, 1931.
[13] Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. Paris: PUF, 1951.
[14] María del Rosario Martínez-Ordaz and Luis Estrada-González, eds. Humana.Mente. Journal of Philosophical Studies 10.32 (Aug. 2017): Beyond Toleration? Inconsistency and Pluralism in the Empirical Sciences. url: http://humanamente.eu/index.php/HM/issue/view/ 22.
[15] Joke Meheus, ed. Inconsistency in Science. Origins: Studies in the Sources of Scientific Creativity 2. Dordrecht: Springer, 2002. isbn: 9789401700856. doi: 10.1007/978-94-017-0085-6.
[16] Otto Neurath. “Pseudorationalismus der Falsifikation”. In: Erkenntnis 5.1 (1st Dec. 1935), pp. 353–65. doi: 10.1007/BF00172326.
[17] Graham Priest. “Paraconsistency and dialetheism”. In: The Many Valued and Nonmonotonic Turn in Logic. Ed. by Dov M. Gabbay and John Woods. Vol. 8. Handbook of the History of Logic. North-Holland, 2007, pp. 129–204. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1874-5857(07)80006-9.
[18] Graham Priest. “The Logic of the Catuskoti”. In: Comparative Philosophy 1.2 (2010), pp. 24–51. doi: 10.31979/2151-6014(2010).010206.
[19] Graham Priest and Richard Routley. “Introduction: Paraconsistent logics”. In: Studia Logica 43 (1–2 Mar. 1984): Paraconsistent Logics. Publication dedicated to Ayda I. Arruda. Ed. by Graham Priest and Richard Routley, pp. 3–16. doi: 10.1007/BF00935736.
[20] Peter Vickers. Understanding Inconsistent Science. Dordrecht: Oxford University Press, 2013.
[21] Heinrich Wansing. “Connexive Logic”. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023). Ed. by Edward N. Zalta. url: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/logicconnexive.

 

17:00 Ben Toth, CFCUL Lisbon

The summer of theory. Crombie and Foucault, styles and fields


In this proposed paper I describe the limitations of style as an explanatory category in science studies. I outline an alternative, Foucault’s archaeological method and argue that it covers the same ground as AC Crombie’s intellectual commitments, but in a more systematic way.

The six categories of scientific method set out in Crombie’s Styles of Scientific Thinking were not novel, but the claim that they represented persistent styles of thought offered a new, historically informed, philosophy of science (Crombie 1994). Crombie’s advocacy of style rested on what he called three intellectual commitments – three capacities of style to facilitate intellectual enquiry over the long run. The first was its capacity to interface between man and nature; the second was its capacity to guide enquiry and warrant findings; and the third was the capacity to provide a psychological and social disposition to stabilise a field of enquiry.
Crombie’s work was endorsed by Ian Hacking in his “styles project”. In an age of what Hacking saw as narrowly focussed studies he praised the ambition of Crombie’s programme. Stylistics Hacking wrote “covers the waterfront and provides a directory …in a readily recognisable and fairly satisfactory way” (Hacking 2012)
As this quotation suggests, Hacking’s endorsement was partial. Modifying Crombie, Hacking christened his approach styles of reasoning rather than Crombie’s styles of thinking, and focussed on the capacity of styles to produce objective knowledge. In doing so Hacking presented style as the central element of a Foucaultian episteme – “for Hacking” wrote Sciortino, “of all the elements that characterise an episteme, eg. assumptions, unspoken truths, institutions, knowledges, social activities, the material traces left behind by a particular epoch, what really counts in order to understand the emergence of new true-or-false statements is what he calls the ‘style of reasoning’. (Sciortino 2024:155)
As (Kusch 2010) describes, Hacking’s work on styles developed and moved on from Crombie. But the validity of the central concept – style – remained somewhat unexamined.
The connotations of the word style – something both humanly fashioned and open to change – give it an appealing diffuse resonance for science studies. The claim I will make in this paper is that style – whether a style of thinking or a style of reasoning – is not a sufficiently original category to underpin the intellectual commitments in the projects of Crombie or Hacking, or more generally of historical epistemology or science studies.
Starting with Foucault’s refusal, in Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 1969) to accept style as a category of analysis, I will examine the limitations of style as a category of intellectual enquiry. I will argue that:

1 The Archaeology has been relatively overlooked because the concept of episteme in Order of Things (Foucault 1966) is more amenable to the sort of periodisation seen in historical epistemology, and because Foucault’s later work is more intuitively appealing.
2 The methodology set out in Archaeology remains relevant to science studies, as (Kusch 1991) argued.
3 The method it proposes addresses the intellectual commitments Crombie sought from his styles project, but that a discursive field is a more appealing starting point for historical epistemology and science studies than a style of either thinking or reasoning.


References
Crombie, A. C. (1994). Styles of scientific thinking in the European tradition (3 vols.). Duckworth.
Foucault, M. (1966) Les mots et les choses. Gallimard. Trans. The order of things. Tavistock 1970.
Foucault, M. (1969) L’archéologie du savoir. Gallimard. Trans. The archaeology of knowledge.Tavistock 1972.
Hacking, I. (1994). Styles of scientific thinking or reasoning: a new analytical tool for historians and philosophers of the sciences. In: Gavroglu, K. et al (eds) Trends in the historiography of science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 151. Springer, Dordrecht.
Hacking, I. (2012) ‘Language, Truth and Reason’ 30 years later. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A,Volume 43: 599-609.
Kusch, M. (1991) Foucault’s strata and fields. Springer (Synthese Library).
Kusch, M. (2010) Hacking’s historical epistemology: a critique of styles of reasoning. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 41: 158–173.
Sciortino, L. (2024) History of rationalities. Ways of thinking from Vico to Hacking and beyond. Palgrave Macmillan.


JUNE 28, 2024 (Aula Baratto)

9:30 Antoine Auvé, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Style and personality in Dilthey’s epistemology: from the method of the historian to the historiography of the emergence of modern science

The figure and thought of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) seem relevant for an investigation of the notion of “scientific style(s)” in the perspective of historical epistemology. Recent Dilthey-scholarship has notably been linking his “Geisteswissenschaften” epistemology to the contemporary current of historical epistemology (Hamid 2016, Campe 2023, though the depiction of Dilthey as a forerunner of Foucault had already been suggested, e.g. Kremer-Marietti 1970), to the point of reviving a “Dilthey-project” (Hartung 2023). We can find in Dilthey an investigation of the specific difference between scientific styles understood as specific methodological approaches, the most general distinction being between sciences of nature and sciences of history. Arguably, “explanation” and “understanding” correspond to different scientific styles and even characters, or put in other words, different approaches amount to different epistemic profiles of the individual researchers/scientists.
Yet, Dilthey’s work could seem at first to be undermined by such a reference to these two correlated concepts of “style” and “personality”. Indeed, Dilthey is heir to the German historicist tradition (Beiser 2011) and to the idea of personal intuition and richness of inner experience as exclusively being the main characteristics of the procedures of the historian, as can be found J. G. Droysen (Droysen 1977) and as is also championed in H. von Helmholtz’ ascription of “artistic induction” to the Geisteswissenschaften (Helmholtz 2017). And indeed many of Dilthey’s works that could be seen as an anticipation of historical epistemology take the form of monographs, of detailed era-picturing or of biographies. More generally, the way Dilthey held the style of a Carlyle to be complementary to the “pure fact”-motto of a historian like L. v. Ranke (Dilthey 1927) seems to bespeak for the concept of “style” as being indigenous to the domain of history, thus coining an only regional association of cognitive, hermeneutical-critical and aesthetic processes (Makkreel 1968).
We would nevertheless wish to unfold the deeper connection between these two aspects, namely the general distinction of respective epistemic styles i.e. methods of natural and historical sciences on the one hand and the specific historiographical style of monographs and biographies that displays Dilthey’s contribution to the history of sciences during the Renaissance and the Classical Age (Dilthey 1914) on the other hand. The historiographical style then serves as a device to depict the crucial epistemic status of personality and style of both naturalists and humanists at the beginning of the Modern Age. Dilthey extends the “style/personality of scientist” framework to encompass the broader concern of the emergence of modern science as a whole. The condition of emergence of modern (now including the natural) sciences, would precisely be the new figure of the scientist and humanist as a highly idiosyncratic and stylized individual, thus establishing a close connection between biographical portraits of scientists/humanists and studying an épistémè as conditioning the institution of new scientific objects and domains (the main one being, precisely, that of “nature” and “humanities”). The category of “style” would thus also be highly relevant to challenge to problem of the “incarnation” of the epistemic hegemony of natural sciences in the new figure of the natural scientist (Dilthey 1982).
 


References.
Beiser, F.C., 2011,  The German historicist tradition, Oxford University Press.
Campe, R., 2023, “Humanities nach den Geisteswissenschaften”, Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 97:23–32.
Dilthey, W., 1891-1904 [1914], Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 2, hrsg. von Misch, G., Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen.
id., 1910 [1927], Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 7, hrsg. von Groethuysen, B..
id., ca. 1870-1895 [1982], Grundlegung der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Ausarbeitungen und Entwürfe zum Zweiten Band der Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (ca. 1870 – 1895), Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 19, hrsg. von Johach, H., und Rodi, F..
Droysen, J.G., 1857 [1977], Historik, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, Bd. 1, hrsg. Von Blanke, H.W., und Leygh, P., Frommann-Holzboog, Stuttgart-Bad-Cannstatt.
Hamid, N., 2016, “Dilthey on the unity of science”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 25:4, 635-656.
Hartung, G., 2023, “Philosophiegeschichtsschreibung und die Idee der Geistesgeschichte – das Dilthey-Projekt”, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 97, 95–104.
von Helmhotlz, H., 1862 [2017], “Ueber das Verhältnis der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesammtheit der Wissenschaft. Akademische Festrede gehalten zu Heidelberg beim Antritt des Prorectorates”, Philosophische und populärwissenschaftliche Schriften, Bd. 1, hrsg. von Heidelberger, M., Helmut, P., und Schiemann, G., Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 181-207.
Kremer-Marietti, A., 1970,  “La méthodologie de Dilthey”, Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, PUF, °160, 423-444.
Makkreel, R.A., 1968, “Toward a Concept of Style: An Interpretation of Wilhelm Dilthey’s Psycho-Historical Account of the Imagination”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 27:2, 171-182.

 

10:15 Paolo Babbiotti, Università di Torino

Two stylistics methods for “the problem of style” in philosophy. Compression and lingering (in Bernard Williams and Stanley Cavell) 

In my presentation I will focus on what I call Cavell and Williams’s “stylistic methods”, namely “lingering” and “compression”. I have dealt in more detail with various aspects related to compression in Williams and the art of lingering in Cavell, respectively, in “Compression. Nietzsche, Williams, and the Problem of Style” (European Journal of Philosophy, 2021) and “Lingering. Wittgenstein, Cavell, and the Problem of Style” (Philosophy and Literature, 2023). When I speak of stylistic method, I mean the systematic use of a writing style to achieve philosophical purposes. In particular, the philosophical purpose that I will investigate in Cavell and Williams is maximal: to show that style matters in philosophy. This is why, emphatically, I will speak of “the problem of style” (and not just one problem among others). The stylistic methods found and cultivated by Cavell and Williams in their writing constitute an argument in favour of stylistic awareness — against those who believe that “in philosophy one has to get it right first, and then add the style afterwards”. This dictum, common to certain analytical philosophers, was efficiently criticised by Bernard Williams when he wrote that: “One should not approach philosophical writing in the spirit of the analytic philosopher who (in actual fact) said to another when they were trying to write a book together, ‘Let’s get it right first and you can put the style in afterwards’”. On this metaphilosophical point both Stanley Cavell and Bernard Williams agree. However, their stylistic methods, while sharing a common intent, turned out to be very different, even opposite, in their realisation: Williams preferred to cultivate concise, pungent and allusive (i.e. compressed) writing; whereas Cavell preferred to cultivate digressive, reflective and intimate (i.e. lingering) writing.

11:30 Aurore Franco-Ricord, IHPST Paris

Scientific styles and cultures struggles: the case of endosymbiotic theory

In 1967, Margulis published the article that was to transform the field of evolutionary science: On the origin of mitosing cells. Presenting the phenomenon of endoymbiosis as an explanation for the appearance of eukaryotic cells, the article received a mixed reception, being rejected by ten or so journals the year before its publication and discussed over the following two decades, and its impact was assessed as being less than hoped (Sagan 2016). For Margulis, the assertion of a constitutive relationality of cellular identity is confronted with the casual rejection of biologists, their reluctance to the idea that the study of communities should provide more theoretical and ontological advances on evolution than that of isolated organisms. However, a historical epistemology reveals a balance of power between different scientific styles, from which derives a hierarchy of evidence structuring the field of evolutionary science: a dominant style – the genetic style presenting evidence of probability based on calculation – and marginal styles, including Margulis’ style – the cytological style presenting plausible evidence based on observation and cytology. This difference in styles, which is both rich – in the form of scientific pluralism – and difficult – in the form of controversies between scientists in the evolutionary sciences – seems to shape and condition a certain number of ontological presuppositions, which explain a certain form of scientific resistance to endosymbiotic theory: opposing the probable to the plausible, the ordinary to the extraordinary, the irreducible to the relational, or the determined to the contingent. I propose to draw up a historical epistemology of the concept of endosymbiosis at several points in its history, from 1967 to the present day. At the time of its publication, based on the balance of power between different scientific styles and cultures, the epistemological inadequacy of cytological observations as sufficient and therefore valid evidence reflects the construction of a field dominated by the genetic sciences, inherited from the modern synthesis. This will lead us to reflect on the broader ontological conceptions that arise from this and make the dynamics of the evolutionary sciences conflicting, in particular through the more traditional conception of the history of evolution informed by a genealogical conception (Angelini, 2023). Finally, we will examine the more contemporary opposition of two models derived from eukaryogenesis: exogenous and endogenous, within which a reaffirmation of this ‘conflict of styles’ is emerging on the one hand, opposing cell biology and biochemistry, and presenting the constitutive relationality for the former and a relativisation of this relationality for the latter (O’Malley, 2010).

12:15 Caroline Angleraux, INSERM Tours

Styles and desuetude: the case study of Haeckel’s monera

 

15:00 Julia Reed, Bar-Ilan University

Scientific styles of making and re-making sex

After the publication of Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), historians of medicine and gender critiqued his argument that the “two-sex body” of sex difference in Western science and medicine emerged at the end of the eighteenth century (circa 1800) to replace the older “one-sex body.” Before the beginning of the nineteenth century, according to Laqueur, “there was only one sex to pick from” in Western medicine; every human body was more or less male due to complexional heat. Katharine Park’s recent expanded critique of Laqueur in Isis gives new urgency and inspiration to the historical study of human sex difference and determination. According to Park, the “one-sex body” was a relatively specific and short-lived scientific object in medicine that developed in late medieval and early modern Latin surgical texts and then migrated out of learned medicine into European vernaculars in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

This paper, “Scientific Styles of Making and Re-Making Sex,” investigates the uses and limitations of the notion of scientific styles for historicizing human sex difference and determination, focusing on the scholarly debates concerning the “one-sex body” and the “two-sex body.” First, I ask how understanding the history of the “one-sex body” and the “two-sex body” in late medieval and early modern medicine might be framed as the overlap and interaction of specific styles discussed by Crombie and Hacking—the experimental, hypothetical modeling, and the taxonomic. Drawing on Park’s argument that the “one-sex body” emerged in interpretations of the Latin translation of Galen’s On the Use of Parts in late medieval Latin surgical writing, I argue that the scientific objects pertaining to sex difference and reproductive biology—including male and female seeds, intersex or hermaphroditic anatomies, and “male” or “female” complexional heat—can be effectively understood to belong to different medical theories (the Hippocratic and the Aristotelian) as well as to combinations of scientific styles in anatomy and medicine. Secondly, I argue that the one-sex body was developed as a scientific object in surgical texts that combined the styles of experiment and hypothetical modeling for specific professional ends, namely, to define spatial and visual relationships that were practically relevant for surgeons to teach the proper identification, manipulation, and repair of different body parts. Following critics of Laqueur, I argue that the two-sex body was not a late-eighteenth century invention: rather, it was an effect of combined scientific styles in anatomy and medicine that allowed new (and competing) forms of evidence, scientific objects (such as the true hermaphrodite of an intermediate sex between male and female), and true or false sentences about sex difference, determination (by medical and legal experts), and the relationships between anatomy, gender presentation, and social roles. Finally, I suggest some possibilities and limitations for using scientific styles to understand the social history of sex difference across scientific and non-scientific domains—medical, legal, religious, and social—with some concluding remarks about contemporary debates about sex and gender.

15:45 Matteo Pasquinelli, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia

Three styles of AI: induction, vectorialisation, and modelling 

 

17:00 Johannes Endres, University of California Riverside

Style and epistemology: basic strictures, and open questions

The modern concept of style goes back to Johann Joachim Winkelmann’s History of Ancient Art from 1764 in which it serves as a comparative category that allows art works to be discussed in juxtaposition with each other despite their different historical and cultural backgrounds, subjects, authorship, and material properties. As Winckelmann understands it, style makes the assessment of such differences possible in the first place. Because if no comparison would be reasonably feasible, all differences, whichever they were, would remain insignificant: “Without style, art historians have nothing to talk about, no problem to solve” (Whitney Davis). Style is thus not something art historians also do; instead, it is what they do. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that Heinrich Wölfflin, as late as in 1915, could conceive of style as the principle of art history.
Obviously, the same is not true when it comes to the role of style in the history and philosophy of science, where it became relevant only when the kind of art history that Winckelmann and Wölfflin envisioned had already come to an end. To Ludwik Fleck, when adopting the art-historical concept, Wölfflin was not even a footnote, while he is just a footnote to Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge which references Panofsky and his iconographical method throughout. That, I argue, is not a coincidence. It rather seems that the central relevance of style to the methodology of art history needed to be forgotten for it to acquire a new usefulness in a context mostly ignorant of the former. Yet such ignorance did not serve the concept’s new career well, and it has not been helpful to clarifying commonalities and differences of its use in art history as compared to the contexts of its later applications either.
First of all, in art history style does not carry any considerable epistemological weight. Neither Winckelmann nor Wölfflin refer to it in that sense. To them, it is a historical category of form, which crystallizes in the aesthetic appearances of a work. As a “Sehform” (optical scheme) in Wölfflin’s words, style functions much like Kant’s forms of intuition, which are not epistemologically expressive, at least no more than the human eye is, if epistemology is to remain a meaningful concept. That is not to say that art history did not link its subject to the notion of a “Weltanschauung” (world view) at all. On the contrary, examples of a world-view art history are abundant, especially in the aftermath of Wölfflin’s Principles and his famous claim that “each new form of crystallization [in artistic perception] brings a new aspect of world content to light”. However, such attempts stand in an older tradition, one not shared by either Wölfflin or Winckelmann, that of Hegel’s “Geisteswissenschaft” and his philosophy of history. It is a tradition that is also underlying Alois Riegl’s suggestion that style relates to the “world view of a period,” or Fleck’s concept of a “Denkstil” (style of reasoning), or Foucault’s foray into a history of knowledge formations. In all these cases, a collective style of sorts is believed to predetermine the cultural expressions of a time, place, or people. In art history, such attempts of grounding style in an epistemological framework let to highly problematic assumptions regarding the national or racial character of style supposedly regulating the artistic practices of those who perform them. While Wölfflin might not be innocent of such expansions, his theory of a “double root of style” as well as Winckelmann’s use of style as a classificatory tool point in an entirely different direction.
For all these reasons it seems timely and necessary to take a step back and call to mind basic strictures of style in art history as they might help inform its extensions into other fields as well as its possible use as an epistemological concept. My paper therefore proposes to delineate seven principles that distinguish style from concepts such as form, paradigm, or episteme, and to formulate a couple of open questions with which recent interdisciplinary discussions of style have left us at this point.

Variations on Styles, Historical and Philosophical Perspectives

Spring 2024 – Online Seminar

Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia – Department of Philosophy and Cultural HeritageEuropean Commission – This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101030646, “EPISTYLE”

Organizer:Matteo Vagelli (Ca’ Foscari/Harvard)

Link zoom:https://unive.zoom.us/j/88956275068

APRIL 29, 2024

17.30h CET – 16.30h GMT – 11.30 GMT-5

Chunglin Kwa, University of Amsterdam

The Dance and the Machine: The Islamic Reinterpretation of Ptolemy 

MAY 20, 2024

17.30h CET – 16.30h GMT – 11.30 GMT-5

Paolo Babbiotti, Università di Torino

Some Reflections on Style from the Perspective of Contemporary Anglo- American Philosophy

MAY 27, 2024

17.30h CET – 16.30h GMT – 11.30 GMT-5

Monica Calabritto, CUNYTruth, Verisimilitude, and Fiction: Narrativizing Early Modern Medicine and Law

JUNE 3, 2024

17.30h CET – 16.30h GMT – 11.30 GMT-5

Sergio Martinez, UNAM

Styles of Reasoning as Emergent Features of Cognitive Niches

JUNE 24, 2023

17.30h CET – 16.30h GMT – 11.30 GMT-5

Arianna Betti & Hein van den Berg, University of Amsterdam

Hacking for the Future: How to Model Styles of Reasoning and Scientific Revolutions

Further information:infoepistyle@gmail.com

Website:unive.it/epistyle

Matteo Vagelli, PhD

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice/Harvard University) 

unive.it/epistyle

CFP – 9th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology: The Historical Epistemology of Scientific Styles (Venice, 27-28 June 2024)

Call for papers

9th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology

The Historical Epistemology of Scientific Styles

Venice, 27-28 June 2024

 

Abstract 

Presentation of the research network

This Workshop is the 9th edition of the annual meeting of the International Research Network on the History and Methods of Historical Epistemology. This network, founded in 2015, currently brings together 80 members from different countries, whose work is related to historical epistemology in a broad sense. It thus welcomes specialists in French epistemology of the xx century as well as people who have contributed to the renewal of historical epistemology under the impulse of members of the Max Planck Institute in the history of science. The objective of the activities of this network is not so much to separate historical epistemology radically from other studies of science, but rather to create a dialogue between different philosophical studies on the history of knowledge that pay particular attention to the conditions of emergence of scientific disciplines and their objects.

Each edition of the Workshop focuses on a specific theme. The previous edition, held in Dijon, was dedicated to the philosophy of environmental sciences. The former ones focused on the following themes: “Arts and Sciences, Historicizing Boundaries” (2022), “Historical Epistemology and Epistemology of History” (2020), “The Philosophy of Life Sciences: historical epistemology of biology and medicine” (2019), “Historical epistemology and the disunity of science” (2018), “For an historical epistemology of technological transformations” (2017), “A history of the present” (2016); “Historical epistemology: beginnings and current issues” (2015). The programs and arguments of the previous editions can be found at episthist.hypotheses.org.

Presentation of the 2024 edition on scientific styles

The 2024 edition of the workshop will also be the closing event of the EPISTYLE project “Style Matters: Scientific Pluralism and its Early-Modern Sources”, led by Matteo Vagelli under the supervision of Hasok Chang, Peter Galison and Marco Sgarbi since 2021. It will invite network members to contribute to the reflections on the key questions of the EPISTYLE project: “what happened to the traditional concept of style when it was migrated from rhetoric and the arts to the fields of history and philosophy of science? Where does the idea of different ‘styles’ of knowing come from, and how did the idea of an historically evolving plurality of standards of scientific inquiry emerge? To what extent do the objects of the sciences owe their existence to the styles that have enabled them to emerge and rendered them thinkable?”. For a presentation of the EPISTYLE project and its past activities see epistyle.

At different times and in different contexts, the notion of ‘style’ has been linked to knowledge and science (e.g. Fleck 1935, Daston-Otte 1991; Crombie 1994; Hacking 1982, 1992; Davidson 2001; Bredekamp-Schneider-Dünkel 2015; see Vicedo 1995, Gayon 1999, Sciortino 2023). Philosophers, historians, sociologists and scientists have made appeal to this notion generally in order to highlight the plurality and historicity of scientific ‘ways of thinking’. Since the 1970s, ‘style’ became involved in the so-called ‘pluralist turn’ in history and philosophy of science. (e.g. Ruphy 2017; see Vagelli 2024)

In contrast with the contemporary prevalence of empirically oriented micro-histories, styles of reasoning have been recognized as part of attempts at thinking up new forms of ‘big picture’ histories of science: “not as grand linear narratives, but as multi-levelled accounts of the conditions that made different kinds of science possible.” (Elwick 2012) In this light, a comparative anthropology of non-Western ‘styles of inquiry’ (e.g. Lloyd 2004) and an ‘ecological history’ of human reason have also been undertaken. (e.g. Hacking 2012)

This workshop is motivated by the question of whether ‘scientific styles’, variously defined, can be an object for historical epistemology. We will start by investigating the relation that a history of ‘scientific styles’ entertains with ‘classical’ historical epistemologies by Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, for instance, or with Michel Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical models of historiography. Do these different approaches resonate with one another and to what extent? For example, Gilles-Gaston Granger’s use of the concept of style could be compared with later uses of the concept by Hacking. (Granger 1968)

The historical and epistemological underpinnings as well as the historiographic consequences of the notion of “style” will be at the center of the 9th Workshop on Historical Epistemology. We hope the discussion will be a moment for philosophers, historians and sociologists of science to encounter scholars with different methodological approaches. In particular, we expect contributions falling along one or more of the following five axes:

  1. Rediscovering ‘styles’: Who (why, when, and where) contributed to the idea of science and knowledge being characterized by one or more styles of thinking and doing? The workshop encourages further study of both better known as well as relatively neglected or uncharted sources for the idea of ‘styles’ in science. These can be found, especially, but not exclusively, in the work of philosophers, historians, sociologists, as well as in that by scientists themselves.
  2. A history of scientific ‘styles’: Is ‘style’ equally apt to account for continuity and discontinuity in the history of science and knowledge? Is it only meant to highlight the relativity of ‘styles of thinking’ or can it also be constructed in order to be able to account for progress in science? To what extent does the style-concept allow the mapping and refined analysis of emerging forms of science, such as those underpinning, for instance, artificial intelligence and the environmental sciences?
  3. ‘Styles’ from within/from without: What is the relation between ‘styles’ and their exteriority? Can the demarcation problem be rephrased through the notion of ‘style’? What makes a style of reasoning ‘scientific’ and what is the relation between scientific and ‘non-scientific’ styles (i.e. both literary, artistic, religious and ordinary or common-sense styles)? Can forms of knowledge ‘from below’, ‘citizen science’ or ‘community science’ be conceived of as ‘research styles’ in their own terms? What does the adoption of a given ‘style’ of inquiry imply on the level of the shaping of the scientific-selves? Can not only a history of forms of objectivity, but also of forms of subjectivities be told from the perspective of scientific styles?
  4. Social epistemology of ‘styles’: Since Fleck (1935), sociological analyses of scientific styles have played an important role in science studies. (e.g. Harwood 1993; Hunger-Seebacher-Holzer 2010) Moving from this background, and taking stock of the more recent acquisitions of STS approaches, we would like to raise the question as to what role does the intersubjective and collective dimension of ‘style’ play in the establishment, success and/or failure of given forms of investigation? What are the social conditions and larger implications of scientific ‘styles’? Is the talk of ‘national styles’ in science still relevant today? Is a ‘stylistic’ inquiry of science capable of capturing the institutional aspects and the power-dynamics at stake in the production of knowledge?
  5. Alternative concepts to styles: What is the added value (if any) of an analysis of knowledge and science conducted in ‘stylistic’ terms? What does the word and the concept of “style” add (if anything) to concepts such as ‘methods’, ‘ways of knowing’, or ‘research programmes’? What are the blind spots and presuppositions of the concept of style? What objections can be addressed to approaches that use this concept, from the perspective of philosophy, history and sociology of science?

Proposals (500 words plus a short presentation of the candidate) must be sent by April 15, 2024 (notification of acceptance or refusal will be sent by April 31), in .doc format, to epistemologiehistorique@gmail.com. The workshop will be conducted in English.

References

Bredekamp H., Schneider B. and Dünkel, V. eds. 2015. The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Crombie, A. C. 1994. Styles of scientific thinking in the European tradition: The history of argument and explanation especially in the mathematical and biomedical sciences and arts (Vol. 3). London: Duckworth.

Daston, L. and Otte, M. eds. 1991. Style in Science, special issue of Science in Context, vol. 4, no 2.

Davidson, A. 2001. The emergence of sexuality: Historical epistemology and the formation of concepts. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Elwick, J. 2012. Layered History: Styles of Reasoning as Stratified Conditions of Possibility. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, Part Special Issue: Styles of Thinking, 43, no. 4 (December 1, 2012): 619–27.

Fleck, L. 1935 [1979]. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.                          

Gayon, J. 1999, On the uses of the category of style in the history of science. Philosophy & Rhetoric 32/3: 233-246.                                                 

Granger, G.-G. 1968. Essai d’une philosophie du style. Philosophies pour l’âge de la science. Paris: A. Colin.

Hacking, I. 1982. Language, truth and reason. In M. Hollis & S. Lukes (Eds.), Rationality and relativism (pp. 48–66). Oxford: Blackwell.

Hacking, I. 1992. ‘Style’ for historians and for philosophers. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 23(1), 1–20.

Hacking, I. 2012. Language, truth and reason thirty years later. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 43: 599–609.

Harwood, J. 1993. Styles of Thought. The German Genetics Community 1900-1933. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hunger, H., Seebacher, F. and Holzer, G. eds. 2010. Styles of Thinking in Science and Technology. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, Vienna, VÖAW Verlag. Lloyd, G. 2004. Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture. Oxford University Press.

Ruphy, S. 2017. Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered. A New Approach to the (Dis)unity of Science. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Sciortino, L. 2023. History of Rationalities. Ways of Thinking from Vico to Hacking and Beyond. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan.

Vagelli, M. 2024. Styles of Science and the Pluralist Turn: Between Inclusion and Exclusion. Revue de synthèse 145(7), 3/4: DOI: 10.1163/19552343-14234053

Vicedo, M. 1995. Scientific Styles: Toward Some Common Ground in the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science. Perspectives on Science 3/2: 231-5.

This workshop is organized by:

Épistémologie Historique. Research Network on the History and the Methods of Historical Epistemology

With the support of:

  • Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage;
  • European Commission (This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101030646, “EPISTYLE”);
  • IHPST (UMR 8590, Paris 1/CNRS);
  • LIR3S (Laboratoire interdisciplinaire de recherche Sociétés, Sensibilité, Soin, UMR7366 CNRS-université de Bourgogne);
  • IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck.

Organizing committee:

Caroline Angleraux (iBrain U1253, INSERM de Tours)
Lucie Fabry (Université de Bourgogne, LIR3S)
Iván Moya-Diez (IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck)
Perceval Pillon (IHPST, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Matteo Vagelli (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia)

Call for abstracts: Styles of Thinking & Doing in the Ecological History of Scientific Knowledge and Practices (Symposium at the 11th ESHS Conference, Barcelona 4-7 September 2024)

Dear colleagues,

Please find below a call for contributions to the 11th ESHS Conference (Barcelona, September 2024), on the symposium Styles of Thinking & Doing in the Ecological History of Scientific Knowledge and Practices.

Interested scholars are invited to send a paper proposal by November 18th, 2023 to Matteo Vagelli (matteo.vagelli@unive.it) and Joseba Pascual-Alba (joseba.pascual@ehu.eus).

Proposals should include a file of two pages with the following information:

    – (Page 1): Name, affiliation and a short bio (max 150 words).

    – (Page 2): Title and abstract (max 250 words).

Best wishes,

Matteo, Joseba

——–

Call for contributions:

Proposal for a Symposium at the 11th ESHS Conference, Barcelona 4-7 September 2024. Science, Technology, Humanity and the Earth.

Symposium: Styles of Thinking & Doing in the Ecological History of Scientific Knowledge and Practices

Ian Hacking (1982) initiated the project of exploring ‘styles of scientific reasoning’ by drawing from Alistair C. Crombie’s (1994) historical investigation on ‘styles of scientific thinking in the European tradition.’ Through this project, Hacking emphasized that ‘reason has a history’ and how standards of rationality emerge and evolve historically. Recognized as a valuable historical and philosophical tool for analysis (Hacking 1992), various historians and philosophers of science began incorporating this concept into their research (e.g., Davidson 1987; Gavroglu 1990; Schweber 1997; Radick 2000; Reck 2009; Elwick 2007; Winther 2012, 2013, 2015).

In later installments of his style project, Hacking (2012) related what he came to call ‘styles of thinking & doing’ to a cognitive and an ‘ecological’ history of reason (Atran 1990; Netz 1999). The aim of this symposium is to provide a reassessment of Hacking’s project, by engaging closely and critically with Hacking’s arguments on scientific styles. In this respect, some of the questions that this symposium will discuss are: What are the implications of Hacking’s theory of scientific styles at the level of language, truth, and understanding? What roles have styles played throughout the history of the sciences? How effective are styles as a historical-philosophical tool for comprehending scientific knowledge and practices? In what philosophical and historical ways could this project be further developed, especially within the context of an ecological history? 

Appel à contributions pour le Cahier Bachelard n° 18 : Suzanne Bachelard

Les propositions d’articles, d’une longueur de 30 000 à 50 000 signes, espaces et bibliographie comprises, doivent être envoyées par mail à l’adresse cahiers.bachelard@u-bourgogne.fr d’ici le 20 décembre.

Les propositions retenues par le comité éditorial seront ensuite soumises à une évaluation en double-aveugle par des pairs. Voir le Guide pour la préparation des manuscrits.

De Suzanne Bachelard, née en 1919 et décédée en 2007, on retient souvent les photos de Suzanne enfant, fille unique de Gaston Bachelard, élevée par son père qui l’a initiée dès son plus jeune âge aux congrès de philosophie. Au-delà de cette image, l’œuvre et la carrière de cette historienne et philosophe des sciences ont jusqu’à présent été peu étudiées. Ce numéro des Cahiers Bachelard cherche à y remédier en invitant à analyser différents aspects de la vie et de l’œuvre de Suzanne Bachelard.

Licenciée de mathématiques et agrégée de philosophie en 1946, Suzanne Bachelard commence sa carrière comme agrégée-répétitrice à l’École normale supérieure de Sèvres, et soutient ses thèses de doctorat d’État en 1957. Sa thèse principale de doctorat d’État a pour titre La conscience de rationalité : étude phénoménologique sur la physique mathématique (Suzanne Bachelard 1958a; Russo 1959) ; sa thèse complémentaire consiste en une traduction et un commentaire de Logique formelle et logique transcendantale de Husserl (Husserl 1957; Suzanne Bachelard 1958b; Lacroix 1958; Piatier 1957). Suzanne Bachelard obtient d’abord un poste de professeure à l’université de Lille, avant de devenir professeure à la Sorbonne en 1963 et directrice de l’Institut d’histoire des sciences et des techniques de 1971 à 1984 (Mosconi 2007; Pariente 2007; Gayon 2016).

Nous mettons en avant trois axes dans l’étude de son œuvre, tout en accueillant toute autre proposition qui entrerait dans le thème de ce numéro.

Axe 1 : Une réception de la phénoménologie husserlienne

Un premier axe d’étude de l’œuvre de Suzanne Bachelard consiste à étudier son rôle dans l’histoire de la phénoménologie française et, plus spécialement, dans l’histoire des réceptions françaises de la phénoménologie husserlienne. On pourra lire, dans cette perspective, le commentaire que Suzanne Bachelard a proposé de la logique de Husserl (Suzanne Bachelard 1958b; Benoist 1997), mais également l’effort proposé dans La conscience de rationalité pour appréhender la spécificité de la démarche scientifique en mobilisant les ressources conjointes de l’épistémologie bachelardienne et de la phénoménologie husserlienne.

Dans l’étude de ces textes, on pourra notamment se demander si Suzanne Bachelard reconnaît la pertinence de l’opposition entre une « philosophie du sujet » et une « philosophie du concept » dont Foucault (1994) a soutenu qu’elle était structurante dans l’histoire de la philosophie française du XXe siècle, ou si elle contribue à la remettre en cause. Foucault trouvait cette distinction formulée dans l’œuvre de Jean Cavaillès (1947), qui avait élaboré sa propre conception de l’activité scientifique dans une critique serrée de la logique transcendantale husserlienne (Vissio 2019). On pourra ainsi se demander ce qui singularise l’approche de Suzanne Bachelard parmi ces lectures épistémologiques de Husserl, en la comparant à celles qui ont été proposées par Cavaillès ou par des auteurs comme Gilles-Gaston Granger ou Jean-Toussaint Desanti.

Axe 2 : Suzanne Bachelard historienne des sciences

L’autre axe mis en avant dans ce numéro porte sur la pratique de l’histoire des sciences portée par Suzanne Bachelard. Nous accorderons une place importante à l’article « Épistémologie et histoire des sciences » (Suzanne Bachelard 1970), où elle définit ses propres orientations historiographiques en prenant position par rapport à celles de Gaston Bachelard (1972), mais aussi d’Alexandre Koyré (1966), Georges Canguilhem (1955) ou Michel Serres (1967). Selon Suzanne Bachelard, les principes historiographiques défendus dans « L’actualité de l’histoire des sciences » (Gaston Bachelard 1972) fondent une historiographie où « l’intérêt pour l’histoire est subordonné à l’intérêt pour la science » (Suzanne Bachelard 1970, p. 44). Soulignant les limites de cette dernière approche, elle cherche à ouvrir la possibilité d’une étude des sciences qui, tout en continuant à se présenter comme une « histoire épistémologique » (p. 46) et à assumer un caractère rétrospectif et normatif, propose une mise en œuvre plus prudente de l’histoire récurrente, qui se concentre sur « la micro-histoire » (p. 49) plutôt que sur les grands récits, et qui met en question les découpages spontanés du savoir. On pourra ainsi chercher à situer les positions de Suzanne Bachelard dans les débats sur la spécificité de l’histoire des sciences (Grimoult 2003), en les comparant notamment aux textes de Canguilhem (1975; 2009) ou Foucault (2008) qui reprennent également de l’œuvre de Gaston Bachelard cette question de la spécificité de l’histoire des sciences.

Un autre texte qui pourra retenir l’attention est « Quelques aspects historiques des notions de modèle et de justification des modèles » (Suzanne Bachelard 1979), où Suzanne Bachelard apporte une contribution à une épistémologie des modèles (Perru 2004; Varenne 2014), en formulant notamment une critique des thèses de Pierre Duhem (2016). Pour voir ces partis pris épistémologiques et historiographiques à l’œuvre dans l’étude de l’histoire des sciences, il serait particulièrement précieux de proposer une lecture des études historiques qui nourrissent La conscience de rationalité, prolongés par les travaux en histoire de la mécanique que Suzanne Bachelard a consacrés à Maupertuis et au principe de moindre action (Suzanne Bachelard 1958c; Suzanne Bachelard 1961), et par ses travaux en histoire de l’algèbre (Suzanne Bachelard 1967).

Axe 3 : Suzanne héritière et éditrice de Gaston

Un troisième axe consisterait à approfondir l’étude de ce qu’a impliqué, pour Suzanne Bachelard, d’être la fille de Gaston. Nous avons déjà mis en avant, dans la présentation des deux axes précédents, l’importance que le dialogue avec l’œuvre de Gaston Bachelard avait prise dans son propre itinéraire d’historienne et de philosophe des sciences. Mais parallèlement à cette comparaison des œuvres des deux Bachelard qui cherche à y déceler des formes d’héritage intellectuel, d’autres ressources pourraient être mobilisées pour interroger ce statut d’héritière d’un point de vue sociologique. On pourrait par exemple se proposer d’éclairer la trajectoire de Suzanne Bachelard par une étude sociologique des carrières féminines (Fauvel, Coffin et Trochu 2019), qui interroge les formes et les effets qu’a eu sur cette carrière le fait d’être immédiatement identifiée comme étant la fille de Gaston Bachelard. Une telle étude pourrait ainsi contribuer à montrer quelles possibilités et quelles impossibilités caractérisent les carrières féminines placées sous le signe de l’héritage du père, Suzanne Bachelard offrant une étude de cas remarquable dans la mesure où elle a occupé, à la fin de sa carrière, exactement les mêmes fonctions que celles qu’avait son père.

Il est également possible d’aborder cette question de l’héritage en un sens plus littéral, pour souligner que Suzanne Bachelard a eu un rôle d’exécutrice testamentaire. On pourra notamment étudier, dans cette perspective, le travail éditorial effectué par Suzanne Bachelard dans la publication posthume des *Fragments d’une poétique du feu* de Gaston Bachelard, en se demandant quels ont été les choix effectués dans l’établissement du texte, et quelle lecture Suzanne Bachelard y a donné de l’œuvre de son père.

Bibliographie indicative

Bachelard Gaston, 1972, « L’Actualité de l’histoire des sciences » dans L’engagement rationaliste, Paris, Presses universitaires de France (coll. « Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine »), p. 137‑152.

Bachelard Suzanne, 1979, « Quelques aspects historiques des notions de modèles et de justification de modèles » dans Élaboration et justification des modèles, Paris, Maloine, vol. 2/1, p. 3‑19.

Bachelard Suzanne, 1970, « Épistémologie et histoire des sciences » dans Actes du XIIe congrès international d’histoire des sciences, 1. A : Colloques, textes des rapports, Paris, A. Blanchard, p. 39‑51.

Bachelard Suzanne, 1967, La représentation géométrique des quantités imaginaires au début du XIXe siècle, Paris, Palais de la Découverte (coll. « Les conférences du Palais de la Découverte Histoire des sciences »).

Bachelard Suzanne, 1961, Les polémiques concernant le principe de moindre action au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Palais de la Découverte (coll. « Les conférences du Palais de la Découverte – Histoire des sciences »).

Bachelard Suzanne, 1958a, La Conscience de rationalité, étude phénoménologique sur la physique mathématique, Paris, Presses universitaires de France.

Bachelard Suzanne, 1958b, « La Logique de Husserl », Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1958, vol. 19, no 1, p. 126‑127.

Bachelard Suzanne, 1958c, « Maupertuis et le principe de la moindre action », Thalès, 1958, vol. 9, p. 3‑36.

Benoist Jocelyn, 1997, Phénoménologie, sémantique, ontologie : Husserl et la tradition logique autrichienne, Paris, France, Presses universitaires de France.

Canguilhem Georges, 2009, « Le rôle de l’épistémologie dans l’historiographie scientifique contemporaine » dans Idéologie et rationalité dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie : nouvelles études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences, Paris, J. Vrin, p. 11‑36.

Canguilhem Georges, 1975, « L’objet de l’histoire des sciences » dans Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences, Paris, J. Vrin, p. 9‑23.

Canguilhem Georges, 1955, « La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles ».

Cavaillès Jean, 1947, Sur la logique et la théorie de la science, Paris, Presses universitaires de France.

Duhem Pierre, 2016, La théorie physique. Son objet, sa structure, Lyon, ENS Éditions (coll. « Bibliothèque idéale des sciences sociales »).

Fauvel Aude, Coffin Jean-Christophe et Trochu Thibaud, 2019, « Les carrières de femmes dans les sciences humaines et sociales (xixe-xxe siècles) : une histoire invisible ? », Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines15 décembre 2019, no 35, p. 11‑24.

Foucault Michel, 2008, L’archéologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard (coll. « Tel »).

Foucault Michel, 1994, « Dits et Écrits n°219, Introduction à la traduction anglaise du Normal et du pathologique de Georges Canguilhem, trad. ang. par Carolyn R. Fawcett et Robert S. Cohen, Boston, D. Reidel, 1978 » dans Dits et écrits, III, Paris, Gallimard, p. 429 sq.

Gayon Jean, 2016, « L’institut d’histoire des sciences », Cahiers Gaston Bachelard, Cahier N° 14, <halshs-01286480>.

Grimoult Cédric, 2003, Histoire de l’histoire des sciences : historiographie de l’évolutionnisme dans le monde francophone, Genève, Librairie Droz.

Husserl Edmund, 1957, Logique formelle et logique transcendantale : essai d’une critique de la raison logique, traduit par Suzanne Bachelard, Paris, France, Presses universitaires de France.

Koyré Alexandre, 1966, Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique, Paris, Presses universitaires de France.

Lacroix Jean, 1958, « Logique et Phénoménologie », Le Monde, 25 janv. 1958.

Mosconi Jean, 2007, « Éloge de Suzanne Bachelard », https://www.cnfhpst.org/sites/default/files/documents/eloge_Suzanne_Bachelard.pdf.

Pariente Jean-Claude, 2007, Retour à Bar-sur-Aubehttps://www.liberation.fr/livres/2007/12/06/retour-a-bar-sur-aube_107936/ , 6 décembre 2007.

Perru Olivier, 2004, « Le modèle, le vivant et la complexité », Revue des questions scientifiques1 avril 2004, vol. 175, p. 113‑132.

Piatier J., 1957, « Quand les femmes se mêlent de logique… », Le Monde, 1 juill. 1957 p.

Russo F., 1959, « Recension de La conscience de la rationalité. Etude phénoménologique sur la physique mathématique », Archives de Philosophie, 1959, vol. 22, no 2, p. 312‑314.

Serres Michel, 1967, « Les anamnèses mathématiques », Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences, 1967, no 78‑79.

Varenne Franck, 2014, « Épistémologie des modèles et des simulations : tour d’horizon et tendances » dans Les modèles, possibilités et limites, Paris, Éditions Matériologiques (coll. « Modélisations, simulations, systèmes complexes »), p. 13‑46.

Vissio Gabriele, 2019, « Jean Cavaillès, de la logique de Husserl à la dialectique du concept » dans Jean-François Braunstein, Matteo Vagelli et Iván Moya Diez (eds.), L’épistémologie historique : Histoire et méthodes, Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne (coll. « Philosophie »), p. 59‑71.

Annonce parution : Ian Hacking. Anthropologie et raison scientifique

 

Ian Hacking 

Anthropologie philosophique et raison scientifique

Textes réunis par M. Vagelli et traduits par A. Bandini, V. Guillin, M. Kirsch, L. Quéré et M. Vagelli.

Présentation de l’ouvrage:

Des calculs de probabilité aux troubles de la personnalité, des électrons à la maltraitance des enfants, de la logique de l’induction aux fous voyageurs, l’éventail des objets abordés par Ian Hacking peut sembler déroutant. Cependant, dans toutes ses recherches, à l’intersection de la philosophie et de l’histoire des sciences, il s’attache à examiner, en toutes leurs nuances et variétés, le rôle joué par l’expérimentation dans les sciences de la nature et la spécificité des « espèces humaines » comme objets des sciences humaines et sociales. Les textes réunis dans ce volume – dont certains publiés pour la première fois ici en français – montrent que les différents aspects de la production philosophique de Ian Hacking s’entre-répondent et dessinent ensemble un portrait complexe et articulé de la raison scientifique. Son approche originale, au croisement (entre autres) de l’analyse conceptuelle, de la philosophie du langage ordinaire, de l’archéologie foucaldienne et de l’histoire des sciences, a contribué à ouvrir de nouveaux chantiers de réflexion, faisant de Ian Hacking l’une des figures les plus dynamiques et influentes non seulement dans le domaine de l’épistémologie philosophique, mais aussi en sociologie, en anthropologie et en histoire.

Table des matières:

Prolégomènes à une anthropologie philosophique, par Matteo VAGELLI

Philosophie et histoire

Leçon inaugurale
« Style » pour historiens et philosophes
L’ontologie historique

Philosophie du laboratoire et technosciences

Est-ce que l’on voit à travers un microscope ?
La philosophie de l’expérience : illustrations de l’ultra-froid
L’importance de la classification chez le dernier Kuhn

Statistique, effets de boucle et sciences humaines

La statistique du suicide au XIXe siècle
Façonner les gens : le seuil de pauvreté
La maltraitance des enfants, entre fabrication et façonnement
Façonner les gens

Entretien

Ian Hacking. Le philosophe du présent

Origine des textes

Index des noms

Index des notions

Vrin, « Philosophie du présent », 2023, 386 p., 978-2-7116-3029-5, 24 €

Publication: Luca Sciortino (2023) History of Rationalities. Ways of Thinking from Vico to Hacking and Beyond

A new book from a member of our research network has been published:

Sciortino, Luca (2023). History of Rationalities. Ways of Thinking from Vico to Hacking and Beyond, Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24004-1, Number of Pages XXIII, 337

About the book: Over time, philosophers and historians of science have introduced different notions of ‘ways of thinking’. This book presents, compares, and contrasts these different notions. It focuses primarily on Ian Hacking’s idea of ‘style of reasoning’ in order to assess and develop it into a more systematic theory of scientific thought, arguing that Hacking’s theory implies epistemic relativism. Luca Sciortino also discusses the implications of Hacking’s ideas for the study of the problem of contingency and inevitability in the development of scientific knowledge.

The author: Luca Sciortino teaches history and philosophy of science at eCampus University (www.uniecampus.it/en) and at Unitreedu Milan. His research focuses primarily on historical epistemology.

Table of contents (9 chapters)

  • A Brief History of the Concept of ‘Ways of Thinking’: Introduction and Plan of Work
  • Notions of the Concept of ‘Ways of Thinking’: From Classical Historical Epistemology to Kuhn
  • Notions of the Concept of ‘Ways of Thinking’: From Hacking to Daston and Galison
  • Taxonomy of the Notions of ‘Ways of Thinking’
  • Developing the ‘Styles Project’: Towards a ‘Theory of Styles of Reasoning’
  • Styles of Reasoning and Relativism
  • The Incommensurability of Styles of Reasoning: The Case of the Existence of Theoretical Entities
  • Styles of Reasoning, Contingency and the Evolution of Science
  • Epilogue

More about: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-24004-1

8es Journées d’étude sur l’épistémologie historique: Les sciences de l’environnement (Dijon, 8-9 mai 2023)


8es journées d’étude sur l’épistémologie historique

Les sciences de l’environnement

8-9 juin 2023
Amphithéâtre de la MSH Dijon, 6 esplanade Érasme


Organisation
Caroline Angleraux (INSERM / IHPST), Lucie Fabry (Université de Bourgogne, LIR3S), Iván Moya-Diez (Universidad Alberto Hurtado), Matteo Vagelli (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia). 

Avec le financement de Université de Bourgogne, LIR3S (UMR 7366), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, IHPST (UMR 8590).

Contact : epistemologiehistorique@gmail.com

Les journées d’études peuvent également être suivies en ligne sur Teams en cliquant ici

Programme

8 JUIN 2023

9h. Accueil des participants

Session 1 (prés. Lucie Fabry)

9h15. Julien Vincent, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
La « terre » de l’économie politique : une genèse

10h. Victor Béguin, ENS de Lyon.
La chose sans le mot ? La formation d’un programme de recherche écologique à l’interface entre sciences sociales et sciences naturelles dans les cahiers sur l’agriculture de Marx

11h. Wolf Feuerhahn, CNRS, Centre Alexandre Koyré.
Milieu, Umwelt, environment : comment historiciser des catégories contemporaines ?

Session 2 (prés. Matteo Vagelli)

14h. Florian Moullard, Université Bordeaux-Montaigne.
L’écologie politique de Jakob von Uexküll : épistémologie et politique de l’Umwelt

14h45. Victor Lefèvre, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Une archéologie de l’écologie des écosystèmes

15h30. Judith Bastie, Université Paris-Cité.
Le végétal dans l’épistémologie historique française : pourquoi les Plant studies reliraient-elles Foucault, Canguilhem, Dagognet et leurs élèves ?

Session 3 (prés. Marco Dal Pozzolo)

16h30. Andrea Angelini, Université Paris 8.
Normativités biogéographiques. L’écologie de Canguilhem et l’écologie par Canguilhem

17h15. Iván Moya Diez, Université Alberto Hurtado.
Dérégulations de l’organisme et dérèglements du milieu chez Canguilhem

9 JUIN 2023

9h30. Accueil des participants

Session 4 (prés. Iván Moya Diez)

9h45. Maria Helena Soares, Université de l’État de Rio de Janeiro.
Le développement historique du concept de nature dans l’épistémologie historique de Lorraine Daston

10h30. Caroline Angleraux, INSERM.
Haeckel a-t-il fondé l’écologie ?

11h15. Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Bruno Latour, la trajectoire d’une pensée

Session 5 (prés. Caroline Angleraux)

14h. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Michel Serres, une vision très personnelle de l’Anthropocène

15h. Massimiliano Simons, Université de Maastricht.
From Information Theory to Ecology: Michel Serres and Bruno Latour

Session 6 (prés. Vincent Chambarlhac)

16h. Émilie Rouilly, Archives municipales de Beaune.
Présentation du fonds Bruno Latour

16h30. Table ronde autour du fonds Bruno Latour et de sa valorisation.
Avec Françoise Banat-Berger (service interministériel des archives de France), Édouard Bouyé (archives départementales de la Côte d’Or), Vincent Chambarlhac (Université de Bourgogne, LIR3S), Lucie Fabry (Université de Bourgogne, LIR3S) et Émilie Rouilly (archives municipales de Beaune)

AAC – CFP Journées 2023

[English below]

8e journées d’étude sur l’épistémologie historique

L’épistémologie historique des sciences de l’environnement

Université de Bourgogne, 8 et 9 juin 2023, Amphithéâtre de la MSH de Dijon

Nous vous invitons à transmettre vos propositions d’ici le lundi 20 mars en remplissant le formulaire suivant : https://forms.gle/drDce2tqbo8A3msp6

Les propositions de communications (500 mots) peuvent être rédigées en français ou en anglais, qui seront les deux langues des journées d’étude. Si vous n’êtes pas en mesure de venir à Dijon pour participer à la conférence, des propositions de communication à distance peuvent être envisagées.

Organisation : Caroline Angleraux (IHPST), Lucie Fabry (uB), Ivan Moya Diez (U. Alberto Hurtado), Matteo Vagelli (U. Ca’Foscari). Contact : epistemologiehistorique@gmail.com

Présentation du réseau de recherche

Ces journées d’étude constituent la 8e édition des journées annuelles du Réseau de recherche international sur l’histoire et les méthodes de l’épistémologie historique. Ce réseau fondé en 2015 réunit aujourd’hui 80 membres de différents pays, dont les travaux sont liés à l’épistémologie historique prise en un sens large. Il accueille ainsi des spécialistes de l’épistémologie française du xxe siècle aussi bien que des personnes qui ont contribué au renouveau de l’épistémologie historique sous l’impulsion de membres de l’Institut Max Planck en histoire des sciences. L’objectif des activités de ce réseau est moins de chercher à délimiter le pré carré de l’épistémologie historique en la distinguant radicalement d’autres études des sciences, que de créer un espace de dialogue pour différentes interrogations philosophiques sur l’histoire des savoirs qui ont pour point commun de porter une attention particulière aux conditions d’émergence des disciplines scientifiques et de leurs objets.

Chaque édition des Journées est centrée sur un thème spécifique. L’édition de 2023 succèdera ainsi à celle que nous avons consacrée à la relation entre les arts et les sciences, « Arts and Sciences, Historicizing Boundaries » (2022), qui a eu lieu à l’Université Ca’ Foscari de Venise. Les éditions des années antérieures, qui ont eu lieu à l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, portaient quant à elle sur les thèmes suivants : « Épistémologie historique et épistémologie de l’histoire » (2020), « La philosophie des sciences du vivant : biologie et médecine au prisme de l’épistémologie historique » (2019), « L’épistémologie historique et les désunités des sciences » (2018), « Pour une épistémologie historique des transformations techniques » (2017), « Une histoire du présent » (2016) ; « Épistémologie historique : commencements et enjeux actuels » (2015)[1].

Le thème de l’édition 2023 : l’épistémologie historique des sciences de l’environnement

Cet appel à contributions est ouvert à toutes et à tous, y compris et particulièrement aux personnes qui ne sont pas encore membres du réseau de recherche. Le thème de l’année 2023 sera l’épistémologie historique des sciences de l’environnement. Nous mettons en avant trois axes pour les réflexions, tout en accueillant avec intérêt les propositions qui ne s’inscrivent pas dans ces axes, si elles restent proches du thème de cette année.

Axe 1 : Place des sciences de l’environnement et de l’écologie dans les textes fondateurs de l’épistémologie historique

Le premier axe invite à se demander comment les sciences de l’environnement et les questions écologiques ont été appréhendées par les auteurs de l’épistémologie historique, ou comment ces auteurs pourraient être mobilisés dans l’étude de ces questions et de ces disciplines. On pourra ainsi étudier, par exemple, la conférence de Canguilhem « Qu’est-ce que l’écologie ? » (1974) et interroger la rupture ou la continuité qu’elle représente par rapport à ses travaux en histoire et philosophie de la biologie et de la médecine (Larrère 2011; Espinoza Lolas, Moya Diez, et Vilches Vilches 2018). Ces journées pourront également prolonger les travaux qui se sont demandés dans quelle mesure la conception foucaldienne de la biopolitique peut nourrir une réflexion écologique (Gesu 2022; Angelini 2021; Taylan 2013). On pourra encore interroger la place que les questions écologiques ont occupée dans l’œuvre de François Dagognet (Dagognet 1973; 1997; 2000; Bensaude Vincent, Braunstein, et Gayon 2019).

L’étude des travaux de ces auteurs et de leurs contemporains pourra notamment être structurée par les questions suivantes : les efforts pour penser les questions écologiques conduisent-ils à modifier la posture ou les thèses des épistémologues, la manière dont ils ou elles appréhendent la connaissance scientifique ? Peut-on identifier des impasses dans lesquelles les épistémologues se seraient trouvés lorsqu’ils ou elles ont souhaité se tourner vers l’étude de questions écologiques ? Et peut-on identifier, inversement, des ressources propres à l’épistémologie dans l’étude des questions écologiques ? Quel est l’apport de l’épistémologie historique dans l’étude du statut de scientificité de l’écologie? 

Axe 2 : Une archéologie des sciences de l’environnement

Le deuxième axe proposé pour ces journées d’étude consiste à se demander, en des termes foucaldiens, quelles ont été les conditions d’émergence d’une formation discursive qui prenne l’environnement comme objet, ce qu’on pourrait appeler une épistémè des sciences environnementales. L’écologie est absente des Mots et les choses (1966), ce qui est peut-être un indice du fait que c’est seulement à partir du début des années 1970 que les questions environnementales sont pleinement devenues des objets de discours politiques et scientifiques. Il semble cependant possible d’interroger, dans une discussion et un prolongement des Mots et les choses, les conditions de la formation d’une épistémè environnementale, en se demandant par exemple quelles sont les conditions d’émergence du concept d’environnement et en quoi son étude diffère, par exemple, de l’étude biologique ou de l’étude géographique des milieux (Feuerhahn 2009; 2022; Macherey 2016).

Il s’agirait ainsi d’étudier les reconfigurations de l’espace des savoirs qu’impliquent les questions écologiques, et de discerner les facteurs qui ont contribué à ces évolutions épistémiques, en interrogeant notamment les relations entre l’histoire des disciplines scientifiques, l’histoire du capitalisme et l’histoire de l’écologie politique. On pourra également demander si cette épistèmè des sciences environnementales est véritablement advenue, c’est-à-dire si nous disposons effectivement des outils qui nous permettent de prendre la mesure des dégradations environnementales d’origine anthropique et de trouver les moyens d’y remédier, ou si nos manières d’agir et de penser, notre organisation économique et sociale et nos formes de gouvernement entravent l’émergence d’une telle épistèmè qui semble pourtant requise par la situation actuelle.

Nous accueillerons avec intérêt les propositions qui développeront, dans cette perspective, une approche d’épistémologie comparative, en interrogeant les relations entre les différentes disciplines qui prennent l’environnement pour objet. On se demandera, en particulier, si les relations entre les sciences de la nature et les sciences humaines ont été modifiées par la volonté d’appréhender des phénomènes comme les dérèglements climatiques d’origine anthropique, et de quelle manière (Jollivet 2013). On se demandera ainsi dans quelle mesure la thèse selon laquelle la division entre nature et culture est dépassée ou doit être dépassée s’est effectivement traduite par des évolutions réelles des pratiques scientifiques, ou si la spécialisation des savoirs doit être considéré comme un obstacle dans l’élaboration de telles réflexions. On soulèvera la question de savoir si l’épistémologie historique peut contribuer à faciliter l’émergence d’études pluridisciplinaires de l’environnement.

Axe 3 : Bruno Latour en discussion

Une demi-journée de notre rencontre sera consacrée à Bruno Latour, décédé en octobre 2022. Le thème de ces journées nous conduira à mettre en avant deux questions dans l’étude de son œuvre. D’abord, celle des relations de Bruno Latour à l’épistémologie historique. Alors que Latour et Woolgar (1979) avaient mobilisé la notion bachelardienne de phénoménotechnique dans Laboratory Life, Latour a formulé à partir des années 1980 une critique de plus en plus sévère de l’épistémologie bachelardienne. En se présentant comme un des importateurs des méthodes de la Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, il voyait en ces dernières une manière de surmonter ce qui lui apparaissait comme des apories de l’histoire et la philosophie des sciences à la française, marquées par le rationalisme bachelardien (Bowker et Latour 1987). L’étude de ces thèses de Bruno Latour et de leur réception fournira ainsi l’occasion d’interroger les rapports entre l’épistémologie historique et la sociologie des sciences.

La deuxième question que nous mettrons au centre de cette étude de l’œuvre de Bruno Latour sera celle de sa contribution à l’étude des questions écologiques : on pourra par exemple interroger dans cette perspective la manière dont la théorie de l’acteur-réseau fournit de nouveaux outils pour appréhender les rapports des humains avec le non-humain (Akrich et al. 2006), ou la manière dont son anthropologie des modernes interroge les conditions d’émergence et les présupposés de la distinction entre nature et culture (Latour 1991). Mais on pourra également se tourner vers des textes qui sont plus directement consacrés à des questions d’écologie politique (Latour 1999), en formulant un appel à devenir pleinement terriens ou terrestres (Latour 2015; 2017; 2021; Aït-Touati et al. 2021).

Ces journées seront également l’occasion d’une présentation du fonds déposé par Bruno Latour aux archives municipales de Beaune, composé de plus de 12 000 documents qui couvrent l’ensemble de sa carrière et comprennent des pièces essentielles à la compréhension de son œuvre, comme les carnets de notes de ses enquêtes ethnographiques. L’archiviste en charge du fonds, Émilie Rouilly, viendra présenter celui-ci, et ces journées constitueront ainsi une occasion de faire émerger des projets de valorisation, en dialogue avec les membres du LIR3S (UMR 7366) et de la MSH de Dijon.

Photo  : Jakub Pabis sur Unsplash

8th workshop on historical epistemology

The historical epistemology of environmental sciences

University of Burgundy, June 8 and 9, 2023, Amphitheater of the MSH, Dijon

Submissions by March 20 on https://forms.gle/drDce2tqbo8A3msp6

Paper proposals (500 words) can be written in French or English, the two languages of the conference. If you are unable to come to Dijon to participate in the conference, you may submit a proposal for a virtual session delivered online.

Presentation of the research network

This Workshop is the 8th edition of the annual meeting of the International Research Network on the History and Methods of Historical Epistemology. This network, founded in 2015, currently brings together 80 members from different countries, whose work is related to historical epistemology in a broad sense. It thus welcomes specialists in French epistemology of the 20th century as well as people who have contributed to the renewal of historical epistemology under the impulse of members of the Max Planck Institute for the history of science. The objective of the activities of this network is not so much to separate historical epistemology radically from other studies of science, but rather to create a dialogue between different philosophical studies on the history of knowledge that pay particular attention to the conditions of emergence of scientific disciplines and their objects.

Each edition of the Workshop focuses on a specific theme. The previous edition was dedicated to the relationship between arts and sciences, “Arts and Sciences, Historicizing Boundaries” (2022) and took place at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. The former ones, which took place at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, focused on the following themes: “Historical Epistemology and Epistemology of History” (2020), “The Philosophy of Life Sciences: biologie et médecine au prisme de l’épistémologie historique” (2019), “Historical epistemology and the disunity of science” (2018), “For an historical epistemology of technological transformations” (2017), “A history of the present” (2016); “Historical epistemology: beginnings and current issues” (2015)[2] .

The theme of the 2023 edition: the historical epistemology of environmental sciences

This call for papers is open to all, including and especially to people who are not yet members of the research network. The theme of the year 2023 will be the historical epistemology of environmental sciences. We put forward three axes for the study of this theme, while welcoming proposals that do not fit into these axes, provided that they dwell on the history and philosophy of ecology and environmental sciences.

Axis 1: The place of environmental sciences and ecology in the founding texts of historical epistemology

The first axis studies how the environmental sciences and ecological questions have been apprehended by the authors of historical epistemology, or how the works of these authors could be used in the study of these questions and these disciplines. For example, one might study Canguilhem’s lecture “What is Ecology?” (1974) and question the rupture or continuity that it represents in relation to his work in the history and philosophy of biology and medicine (Larrère 2011; Espinoza Lolas, Moya Diez, and Vilches Vilches 2018). One could also question the extent to which the Foucaultian conception of biopolitics can nourish ecological thinking (Gesu 2022; Angelini 2021; Taylan 2013), or the place that ecological questions have occupied in the work of François Dagognet (Dagognet 1973; 1997; 2000; Bensaude Vincent, Braunstein, and Gayon 2019).

The study of the work of these authors and their contemporaries could be structured by the following questions: do efforts to think about ecological issues lead epistemologists to change their methods or of the way they apprehend scientific knowledge? Can we identify dead ends in which epistemologists have found themselves when they wanted to turn to the study of ecological issues? And can we identify, conversely, resources specific to epistemology in the study of ecological issues?

Axis 2: An archaeology of environmental sciences

The second axis proposed for this workshop consists in asking, in Foucaultian terms, what were the conditions for the emergence of a discursive formation that takes the environment as an object – something that we could call an episteme of environmental sciences. Ecology is absent from The Order of Things (1966), which is perhaps an indication of the fact that it is only from the beginning of the 1970s that environmental issues fully became objects of political and scientific discourse. However, it seems possible to question, in a discussion and extension of The Order of Things, the conditions of the formation of an environmental episteme, by asking, for example, what are the conditions of the emergence of the concept of environment and in what way its study differs, for example, from the biological study or the geographical study of milieux (Feuerhahn 2009; 2022; Macherey 2016).

This axis would study the reconfigurations of knowledge implied by ecological questions, and discern the factors that have contributed to these epistemic evolutions, by questioning in particular the relations between the history of scientific disciplines, the history of capitalism and the history of political ecology. We may also ask whether this episteme of environmental sciences already exists, that is to say whether we actually have the tools that allow us to take the measure of anthropogenic environmental degradation and to find the means to remedy it, or whether our ways of acting and thinking, our economic and social organization, and our forms of government hinder the emergence of such an episteme.

In that respect, this axis particularly welcomes proposals which develop an approach of comparative epistemology, by questioning the relations between the various disciplines that take the environment as their object. One could ask whether the relations between the natural sciences and the humanities have been modified by the desire to understand phenomena such as anthropogenic climate change, and in what way (Jollivet 2013). One could also wonder to what extent the thesis that the division between nature and culture has been overcome or must be overcome has actually led to real changes in scientific practices, or whether the specialization of knowledge should be considered as an obstacle in the development of such reflections. The question could be raised as to whether an “archaeological approach” can contribute to the emergence of multidisciplinary studies of the environment.

Axis 3: Bruno Latour in discussion

Half a day of our meeting will be devoted to Bruno Latour, who passed away in October 2022. The theme of the workshop will lead us to put forward two questions in the study of his work. First, the relationship of Bruno Latour to historical epistemology. While Latour and Woolgar (1979) had used the Bachelardian notion of phenomenotechnique in Laboratory Life, Latour formulated from the 1980s onwards a severe critique of Bachelardian epistemology. By presenting himself as among those who introduced the methods of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge in France, he presented this latter as a way of overcoming what appeared to him to be the aporias of French history and philosophy of science, marked by Bachelardian rationalism (Bowker and Latour 1987). The study of these theses of Bruno Latour and their reception will provide the opportunity to question the relationship between historical epistemology and the sociology of science.

The second question that we will put at the center of this study of Bruno Latour’s work will be that of his contribution to the study of ecological questions: one could study, for instance, the way in which the actor-network theory provides new tools for apprehending the relations between humans and non-humans (Akrich et al. 2006) or the way in which his anthropology of the Moderns questions the conditions of emergence of the distinction between nature and culture (Latour 1991). But one can also turn to texts that are more directly devoted to questions of political ecology (Latour 1999), where Bruno Latour enjoined humans to become fully terrestrial (Latour 2015; 2017; 2021; Aït-Touati et al. 2021).

This year’s gathering will also be the occasion for a presentation of the fonds deposited by Bruno Latour at the Beaune municipal archives, composed of more than 12,000 documents that cover his entire career and include pieces that are essential to the understanding of his work, such as the notebooks of his ethnographic investigations. The archivist in charge of the collection, Émilie Rouilly, will present the funds, and the workshop will provide an opportunity to develop research projects on this archival material, in dialogue with the members of the LIR3S laboratory and the MSH of Dijon.

Liste des œuvres citées / References

Aït-Touati, Frédérique, Emanuele Coccia, Sébastien Dutreuil, John Tresch, Baptiste Morizot, Nastassja Martin, Vinciane Despret, Stéphane Van Damme, Déborah Bucchi, et Patrice Maniglier. 2021. Le cri de Gaïa : penser la terre avec Bruno Latour. Paris, France: les Empêcheurs de penser en rond – Éditions la Découverte.

Akrich, Madeleine, Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, et Centre de sociologie de l’innovation. 2006. Sociologie de la traduction : textes fondateurs. Paris, France: Mines Paris, les Presses.

Angelini, Andrea. 2021. Biopolitica ed ecologia : l’epistemologia politica del discorso biologico tra Michel Foucault e Georges Canguilhem. Firenze University Press.

Bensaude Vincent, Bernadette, Jean-François Braunstein, et Jean Gayon. 2019. François Dagognet : philosophe, épistémologue. Sciences & philosophie. Paris: Éditions Matériologiques. https://www.cairn-sciences.info/francois-dagognet–9782373611946-page-255.htm.

Bowker, Geof, et Bruno Latour. 1987. « A Booming Discipline Short of Discipline: (Social) Studies of Science in France ». Social Studies of Science 17 (4): 715‑48.

Canguilhem, Georges. 1974. « La question de l’écologie. La technique ou la vie ». Dialogue, mars, 37‑44.

Dagognet, François. 1973. Des révolutions vertes : histoire et principes de l’agronomie. Paris, France: Hermann.

———. 1997. Des détritus, des déchets, de l’abject :  une philosophie écologique. Les empêcheurs de penser en rond. Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut Synthélabo.

———. 2000. Considérations sur l’idée de nature. 2e éd. rev. et augm. Pour demain. Paris: J. Vrin.

Espinoza Lolas, Ricardo, Iván Moya Diez, et Daniel Vilches Vilches. 2018. « On Technology And Life: Fundamental Concepts Of Georges Caguilhem And Xavier Zubiri’s Thought ». Ideas y Valores 67 (167): 127‑47. https://doi.org/10.15446/ideasyvalores.v67n167.59430.

Feuerhahn, Wolf. 2009. « From environment to Umwelt: The stakes of a change in terminology ». Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 134 (4): 419‑38.

———. 2022. « Les catégories de l’entendement écologique : milieu, Umwelt, environment, nature… ». In Humanités environnementales : Enquêtes et contre-enquêtes, édité par Guillaume Blanc et Élise Demeulenaere, 19‑41. Homme et société. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne. http://books.openedition.org/psorbonne/84325.

Gesu, Andrea Di. 2022. « Foucault entre Wuhan et l’Anthropocène ». Terrestres (blog). 12 juillet 2022. https://www.terrestres.org/2022/07/12/foucault-entre-wuhan-et-lanthropocene/.

Jollivet, Marcel. 2013. Sciences de la nature, sciences de la société : les passeurs de frontières. Hors collection. Paris: CNRS Éditions. http://books.openedition.org/editionscnrs/4154.

Larrère, Catherine. 2011. « La question de l’écologie. Ou la querelle des naturalismes ». Cahiers philosophiques 127 (4): 63‑79. https://doi.org/10.3917/caph.127.0063.

Latour, Bruno. 1991. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes : essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Paris, France: La Découverte, 1991.

———. 1999. Politiques de la nature : comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie. Paris: Éditions la Découverte.

———. 2015. Face à Gaïa : huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique. Paris, France: La Découverte.

———. 2017. Où atterrir ? Comment s’orienter en politique. Paris, France: la Découverte.

———. 2021. Où suis-je ? Leçons du confinement à l’usage des terrestres. Paris, France: Editions la Découverte.

Latour, Bruno, et Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: the Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Macherey, Pierre. 2016. « Canguilhem et l’idée de milieu ». Billet. La philosophie au sens large (blog). 2016. https://philolarge.hypotheses.org/1737.

Taylan, Ferhat. 2013. « L’interventionnisme environnemental, une stratégie néolibérale ». Raisons politiques 52 (4): 77‑87. https://doi.org/10.3917/rai.052.0077.

Avec le soutien de / with the support of :

IHPST (UMR 8590)
LIR3S (UMR 7366)
Universidad Alberto Hurtado
Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
European Commission
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101030646, “EPISTYLE”


[1] On trouvera les programmes et argumentaires des éditions précédentes sur https://episthist.hypotheses.org/.

[2] The programs and arguments of the previous editions can be found at https://episthist.hypotheses.org/.