Izydora Dąmbska 2. on the MEANING of the HISTORY of SCIENCE for PHILOSOPHY O Znaczeniu Historii Nauki Dla Filozofii

Izydora Dąmbska

2. ON THE MEANING OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE FOR PHILOSOPHY

O znaczeniu historii nauki dla filozofii (Dąmbska 1974e)

The history of science, meant not as the history of achievements made in particular disciplines of science, but as the history of science as a whole, its internal development, its structure and methods, various circumstances and connections with other branches of culture, is a relatively young disci- pline. It arose from the idea of historicism, so characteristic for 19th century thought . A specific concept of philosophy represented by the French positivism of the first half of the 19th century played a significant role in outlining its problems and program . If the task of philosophy was to generalize and synthesize the achievements of particular sciences as well as to classify and integrate these sciences, as Comte claimed, then under- standing the laws governing the development of science, which requires some knowledge of its history, would also be among the essential tasks of positivist philosophy . Even at the beginning of the 20th century prom- inent originators and organizers of research in the scope of philosophy of science, that is: Henri Berr and George Sarton, intentionally referenced Comte’s thought and tradition. Henri Berr, whose doctoral dissertation was entitled La synthèse des connaissances et l’histoire. Essai sur l’avenir de la philosophie1 – as the founder of Centre International de Synthèse in Paris, the chief editor of the series Bibliothèque de Synthèse Historique, the founder and chief editor of Revue de Synthèse Historique and the or- ganizer of many Semaines de Synthèse, during his vastly extensive and

1 Cf. (Berr 1898).

In: Izydora Dąmbska, Knowledge, Language and Silence (Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 105), pp. 17–30. Leiden: Brill|Rodopi, 2016. 18 Izydora Dąmbska over half-a-century-long activity put a lot of effort into accomplishing the task consisting in:

[ . . ] promouvoir cette synthèse, qui devait donner l’authentique explication des cho- ses, et de suivre, dans une histoire scientifique synthétique, elle-même, la pensée de la vie, l’évolution de la mentalité humaine, la montée de l’esprit.2 Sarton wrote in 1913 in his programmatic article printed in the mag- azine entitled Isis devoted to the history of science, which is still issued nowadays: Nos efforts tendent […] au point de vue philosophique: à refaire, sur des bases scien- tifiques et historiques, plus profondes et plus solides, l’œuvre de Comte. He added in another fragment: L’histoire n’est pour nous qu’un moyen, un instrument indispensable – dont nous nous proposons de faire ressortir sans cesse toute l’efficacité – mais non pas un but. Le but, c’est la philosophie des sciences; le but c’est d’acquérir une connaissance plus parfaite de la nature et de l’homme.3 Thus, the history of science would have to be an auxiliary science for philosophy interpreted in the spirit of Comte’s views. Although it is not at all hard to demonstrate that the concept of philosophy represented by Comte is not correct and that it could not withstand critique, as it denies the specificity of philosophical research on the one hand and sets philosophy a scientifically impracticable task on the other,4 the question itself of the significance of history of science for philosophy seems reasonable and interesting from the point of view of the theory of science, and it begs closer examination. The aim of the present work is to attempt to formulate, at least partly, an answer to the question and to consider potential consequences of this answer for issues connected with practicing philosophy . Given the notorious ambiguity of the term “philosophy” and the as- sociated changeability of the scope of fields of knowledge labeled with this term, in order to avoid misunderstanding I shall hereby approach the question of interest as a question about the meaning of the history of science for particular, in a certain sense determined philosophical sciences. Thus, I shall in turn discuss the meaning of the history of science for (1) the history of philosophy, (2) the logic of knowledge and epistemology,

2 Cf. (Berr 1955, p. 138). 3 Cf. (Sarton 1913, p. 45), and Sarton’s “Discours préliminaire” sent to the potential subscrib- ers of Isis and reprinted in (Sarton 1963, p. 7). 4 A detailed critique of this concept in philosophy was presented by Roman Ingarden, among others, in his dissertation (Ingarden 1936b, p. 352 ff.).