Introduction

In the first chapter of his latest book, Scientific Objectivity and Its Contexts, Agazzi examines the substitution of the notion of truth by that of objectivity in modern science through a deep (historical) analysis of the philosophical sources.

F. Marcacci (*)

Department of Basic Sciences and Foundations, University of Urbino ‘Carlo Bo’, Urbino, Italy e-mail: flaviamarcacci@gmail.com

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 231

M. Alai et al. (eds.), Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16369-7_17

this substitution, the historical development of modern philosophy was characterized by a dualistic epistemological approach. Thus, science was conceived as a “cognitive” enterprise, but phenomenalistic epistemology was unable to explain how science could relate to the real world.

The radical crisis of contemporary science, which occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century, revealed that this belief was deceptive. These masterly pages by Agazzi skillfully and harmoniously integrate the historical-critical and epis­temological instances in a way useful for both the history and the philosophy of science.

Historical analysis is in fact used to show the frequent confusion, even of the terms themselves, between the epistemological and the ontological approach. However, Agazzi insists on one point in particular: the passage from Galileo to Kant was a shift from a conception of science based on careful observation of phe­nomena—without however falling into dualism—to a conception of science and knowledge based on phenomena in a way that radically excludes what lies behind the phenomena. Kant’s intention was to promote a positive conception of “appear­ance” (the “affections” of Galileo) in contrast to the negative Greek conception. However, from then on—according to Agazzi—science had either to defend its ability to describe reality, or to take refuge in conventionalist or instrumentalist positions and use a phenomenalistic epistemology. Therefore, science is consid­ered by some as «knowledge without truth, yet still deserving to be considered knowledge» (Agazzi 2014: 9).

If Agazzi is right, as I believe he is, then the instrumentalist and phenomenalistic philosophy of science has produced a history of science that is simply a gallery of representations of reality that has nothing to do with reality itself. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the history of science ought proceed to integrate the phi­losophy of science and clarify which philosophical claims it is able to respond to.

To accomplish this, we must begin with Agazzi’s work as a historian of sci­ence: his prestigious edition of the two-volumes Storia delle scienze, published by Citta Nuova in 1984, and the important critical edition of James C. Maxwell’s Trattato di elettricita e magnetismo (Maxwell 1973). References to history and its problems have never been lacking in his writings and reflections, augmenting their weight and providing concrete examples to the more purely theoretical dimen­sion of the philosophical speculation for which he is so well known and respected. Perhaps for this reason alone it would not be enough to speak of Agazzi as a ‘his­torian’ of science, but rather as an epistemologist of the history of science. In an explicit (at times also implicit) way Agazzi allows history to be oriented towards speculative reasoning and viceversa. This is currently a very relevant attitude, if we consider that on the international scene we are still largely pondering the relation­ship between the history and the philosophy of science, to the point that there are organized philosophical paradigms such as historical epistemology and historical ontology.

We will return to this important aspect at the end. We will begin now with a digression guided by Agazzi’s own works.

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