Introduction: History of Science or History of Knowledge?

Abstract

Is there a future for the history of science? And if there is, what will it look like? These questions stood at the outset of the last special issue of Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, published in December 2018 under the auspices of the previous editorship. Many people accepted the challenge and formulated answers from their particular perspectives. One of the topics that repeatedly came up, as a question that especially, although by no means exclusively, concerns the field in Germany, was that of the relationship between the “history of science” and the more recent notion of a “history of knowledge.” For the first issue of this journal under the new editorship, we decided to pursue this question further and invited a number of colleagues within and without Germany to share their thoughts on this topic with us. The responses were eager and vivid—the question had obviously touched a nerve. The present special issue documents the diversity of opinions that we received—although it necessarily is only a fraction of the perspectives that should have been included. Since all contributors from the German-speaking community decided to write in English, the issue became more homogeneous in terms of language than anticipated, and we thus also decided in favor of an English introduction. We wish to emphasize, however, that this by no means should be taken as a sign of our disregard of German as a language of this journal or of our field in general. Over the past decades, the history of science—or rather: the history of the sciences, as Suzanne Marchand in her contribution to this issue suggests we call it—has become a well-established element of the academic landscape, both in terms of intellectual endeavors and institutional base. Its questions, themes, theories, and methodologies have been and are widely received and inspire debates well beyond the field’s disciplinary confines, notably in many other branches of history, in literature and media studies, in the social sciences, and in philosophy. This inspiration went both ways, and in effect, the history of the sciences has become a field that no longer has to seek or provide justifications for its prolonged existence. Or so it seemed, since more recently the field and its denomination have become a matter of debate, and it has repeatedly been suggested that it should be replaced by (or become part of) a new and different discipline: the “history of knowledge” or, in German, “Wissensgeschichte.” To be sure, there is no single definition of “history of knowledge.” To some the term does in English what “Wissenschaftsgeschichte” already is doing in German: widen the field so as to also include the history of the humanities and of the social sciences. According to