Dyskurs historii nauki
Discourse of the History of Science

Author(s): Tomasz Falkowski
Subject(s): History, Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, French Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza
Keywords: history of science; history of discourse; historiography; French history of science
Summary/Abstract: The monograph can be regarded as an attempt to answer the following question: How is the history of science written? By putting French-language works produced from the eighteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century (within such fields as historical epistemology, hermeneutics, studies of science and technology, archaeology of knowledge, history of mentality, ecology of practices, structuralism, historical anthropology, etc.), the author presents the most significant and nodal points in which the discourse on the history of scientific ideas and achievements faced numerous specific difficulties, problems, aporias or challenges. The analyses presented in the book show: how historians are confronted with the various visions that scientists themselves have had and still have of the historicity of science; that historians are faced with scientific disputes whose image was later imposed by their ‘winners’; that the same method used to describe both early and modern science appreciates scientific achievements and yet denigrates them; that historians writing about science and its history are never in a distant (neutral) position, for they are themselves part of a crucial event, the emergence of modern science; and that not every historical description of scientific phenomena corresponds to that of those who shape science.

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