As scientific objects and practices acquired a privileged status within the history of science, the field's relationship with the neighbouring disciplines of history of ideas and intellectual history has become more strained. In recent years, several of its most prominent practitioners have encouraged their fellow historians of science to engage with "big thoughts" (S. Shapin) again. To what extent has the methodological emphasis on material practices foreclosed, but perhaps also potentially reinvigorated, fruitful exchange with text-based approaches to the history of knowledge?
This roundtable gathers scholars working at the intersection of both fields to discuss whether and to what extent approaches drawn from intellectual history traditions can coalesce with and flourish alongside approaches drawn from history of science. We seek to explore a set of overlapping epistemological and methodological questions, such as:
Can the history of ideas and the history of science find common ground in histories of knowledge? How do we navigate between contextualization and interpretation? What is the epistemic status of scientific research as an archive of human knowledge? What styles of reading have different disciplines developed, and how have they applied these styles to scientific texts and discourses in particular? The roundtable's aim is to highlight a shared interested, beyond apparent methodological differences between historians of material practices and historians of ideas, in developing a level of theoretical rigor necessary to historicize and explore the epistemological complexities of knowledge production, both within and beyond the sciences.
