It's Only A Theory

A novelist, Kevin van Duuglas, has been doing lovely work on Spinoza's optics in his very attractively designed blog.
Along the way, he has been advertising and commenting on aspects of my (contrarian) views on Spinoza's relationship with both the mechanical science of his day and his attitude toward mathematics. Leaving aside the larger issue of Spinoza's attitude toward the mechanical philosophy, on my view Spinoza is very skeptical about the application of mathematical tools to nature (in measuring or describing nature). (Letter on the Infinite provides best evidence for this claim, but it shows up elsewhere.) This can never lead to stable/secure/highest form of knowledge, it remains in the ___domain of imaginary (first kind of knowledge). At best he thinks mathematics plays a useful calculating role in study of nature. (On my view Spinoza is also extremely skeptical about our very ability to have knowledge of nature; Della Rocca defends a similar position but on different grounds.)
This is not to deny that Spinoza values mathematics as a topic of investigation in its own right, and finds more geometrico a useful way to present his views (although it is by no means as straightforward as folks believe). Nor is it to deny that Spinoza's views on different kinds of infinite may have inspired later mathematicians (Cantor).

A few months ago, I reported that HPS is dead. (See here http://itisonlyatheory.blogspot.com/2009/04/cult-of-contingency-and-future-of.html and here http://itisonlyatheory.blogspot.com/2009/05/obviously-plenty-of-philosophers-use.html) In exchanges, I recanted a bit.
But having just been at BSPS 2009 and looking over EPSA 2009's program, the situation is more dire than I imagined.
The hard numbers: at BSPS 2009, 3 (two on Newton, one on Darwin and Darwinism) out of 45 parallel sessions had a historical orientation. The situation is actually dire because none of these presenters are current or recent PhD students (whereas much of the excitement at BSPS comes from learning about fresh work), and two of these were educated at and influenced by Howard Stein of The University of Chicago in 1990s. Conclusion: British HPS has no discernible influence on British contemporary philosophy of science. Simon Saunders' plenary talk had a bit of a HPSy feel, but it was by no means a historical talk.
At upcoming EPSA, at most 15 out of 107 contributed papers have a historical slant (and several of these are 'meta' talks about the role history of science plays in contemporary debates about scientific realism); if it weren't for an abiding interest in Vienna Circle, the numbers would be much smaller. 2 out of 20 contributed symposia have, perhaps, a historical component (I recognized a few names, including a few papers by folks who appear to be double-dipping in the regular program).
Now, these numbers largely reflects the state of play in British philosophy (a major source of training of many of the best European philosophers of science); it has an alarming lack of interest/competence in pre-Fregean/Wittgensteinian philosophy in the analytic mainstream. This lack of interest carries over in lack of interest in HPS (history of philosophy and history of science overlaps a lot prior to 1900) Given that funding agencies in mainlaind Europe want European philosophers to emulate UK practices I expect this situation to accelerate.
At BSPS 2009 I enjoyed listening in on a conversation among folks from and trained at Leeds, LSE, and Oxbridge. The debates were good-natured and serious. Yet, if we leave aside concerns with so-called meta-induction argument, historical sensibility seems entirely absent. The community-wide narrow focus has many virtues, but the losses are also apparent to an outsider: there is a nearly complete lack of interest in issues concerning normativity of science and the politics of science (despite fact that medicine, psychology, and biology are major focus of case studies); feminist and pragmatist orientations are nowhere to be discerned. (I gave Anjan Chakravartty a hard time over his treatment of Arthur Fine in his keynote at BSPS.)
The worst aspect of the demise of HPS (in conjunction with broader sociological trends) is, I fear, that the 'cult of progress' will get an even tighter grip on philosophers' imagination. Accelerated and more specialized PhDs and specialist faculty in PhD granting programs will remove from the discipline any semblance of historical self-awareness and much needed skeptical self-criticism.
I regret not being able to change this tide by joining the department at Aberdeen, where next to a stellar analytic ML&E program a potentially terrific HPS program is being assembled with recent hires (Gaukroger, Catherine Wilson, Guido BacciaGaluppi, Mogens Laerke, and Ulrich Steegman). But more about that some other time.

But that does not mean HPS is alive and kicking. Let's distinguish between soft HPS, in which philosophers use history as 'data' or case studies for claims within philosophy of science, e.g. the standard uses of history in realism vs anti-realism debates. [Let's allow, for the sake of argument, that such uses of history are genuinely historical and not pseudo-history.]
Let's contrast this with hard HPS in which there is i) a historical way of knowing (think Lakatos, who was not much concerned with historical accuracy, or George Smith, who is very much concerned with historical accuracy); ii) a trans-historical way of knowing (think Kuhn, who privileged the historian's stance over that of the puzzle-solving scientist, or Foucault, who claimed to detect hidden epistemes unknown to the historical agents); iii) a genuinely historicist stance (sometimes associated with Laudan, but probably better associated with members of the Edinburgh School). Of course, there are/were blended versions of these three.
No doubt there are genuine HPS projects (Hasok Chang comes to mind) that don't fit this too neat division. My claim is that HPS has it source and animating drive in the varieties and debates of hard HPS (Hanson, Polanyi, Bachelard, etc). My claim in my previous post should have been that hard HPS is (almost?) dead.

History and philosophy of science (HPS) is dead. On the whole historians have turned their backs on philosophy and celebrate the ideology of contingency. Meanwhile philosophers have become focused on narrow patches of science, especially physics, biology, and (I hope) economics. There are some patches in the history of science that attract healthy philosophic interest (Aristotle, Newton, Kant's reaction to Newton, and Darwin), but they are increasingly as specialized as these other narrow patches as Max Weber has predicted. While there is some general philosophy of science left, it is becoming increasingly formal with technique dominating insight. I am still hoping that philosophers of science reconnect with metaphysics in competition with the Lewis-style program dominating contemporary metaphysics. But that's for another time.
Now when I attacked the cult of contingency among historians at a recent conference, the eminent philosophical historian, Lorraine Daston (Max Planck), reacted forcefully. She thought it was high time that philosophers accept real thick history, and use it as a building block for new kind of philosophy. After we made nice, she sent me a recent paper of hers: "Toward a history of reason," in *Aurora Torealis* Beretta, Marco et al [eds.]. - Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2008, p. 165-180. The paper shares my diagnosis above of the current situation, although it adds to it that from the history of science side its new (historicist and cultural anthropological) approach has caused it to be without a wide audience. (One could say that the 'science wars' of the 80s ended because scientists have told historians of science to drop dead.)
Daston's response to this situation is to promote an agenda to chart the growth and transmutation of reason and the accompanying techniques and epistemic virtues through the ages. (One sees some of this in her book with Gallison on objectivity.) While this (Foucault-lite genealogy) is certainly a philosophic project in so far as philosophy is the science that also reflects on itself and its (historical) presuppositions (one can say that reason is partial without historical self-understanding), the philosophy to be found here is skin-deep. Its results will provide a lot of information, and, perhaps, a healthy skepticism about the nature and sources of science's self-image.
But it lacks philosophic ambition because it has fully embraced the cult of contingency. It can't even bring itself to use this historical knowledge to ask what the necessary conceptual, social, mathematical or technical pre-conditions are or may be for the way (scientific) reason develops in society. That project, first hinted at by David Hume (in his treatment of justice) and widened by Adam Smith, Hegel, and Marx, was revived and transformed by the early Foucault in *The Order of Things* (original title: Les Mots et les choses), while Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, and Lakatos were having their epic debates during the 1960s. The problem with Foucault's archeology is that he never appears to have seriously engaged with the citadel of science: physics. Now a half century later there appear to be few ambitious historically informed projects left. In future postings I'll engage and discuss a few of these, but I have gone on long enough now.