Abstract
In his historical works, Agazzi explicitly examines some methodological perspectives. As a matter of fact, according to him, the history of science needs methodological perspectives in order to clarify its own contents.
Similarly, epistemology needs the history of science to find realistically itself. These are, respectively, a top-down and a bottom-up aspect of the relationship between history and epistemology. Thus, history of science can be used not as a mere erudition exercise, and epistemology can concretely improve any reasoning about science. As a consequence of these considerations of Agazzi’s, at least two different ways to practice history of science are determined. On the one hand, a historic history of science; on the other hand, an epistemological history of science. But as is well known, the methodology of history is a delicate question: historical events are contingent and often unique; they have causes, which allow to study them scientifically, but they cannot be predicted either deterministically or statistically, for their causes are too many and complex. Many philosophical questions are opened: for instance, whether the history of science reports just a gallery of images about science and about reality, or it reports some knowledge about the ontology of scientific objects. This paper supports the latter point of view, by inquiring in which sense even history can be considered to have an ontic space.1
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