Abstract
The History of Science was born as a literary genre in the eighteenth century as the ultimate expression of modern thought, embodied in the doctrine of the perfectibility of reason and in the progress of the sciences. Quite different is the idea of the history of sciences, in the plural, which emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century, as a result of a movement known as the historicization of epistemology, found in various European philosophical traditions. Our aim here is to show how in France the possibility of the idea of the history of sciences relates to the surpassing, by Gaston Bachelard, of certain aspects of Kant’s philosophy, especially those concerning the historical formation of the criteria of rationality of the different sciences.
Keywords
history of sciences; historicization of epistemology; epistemological history