Histories of Knowledge

• Department of History

The history of science and the history of the social sciences have been traditionally kept distinct.

The former is a well-established field, with its literature, its institutions, and its principled divisions. The former has been a fragmented and uneven development, mostly written by representatives of the disciplines under scrutiny. Of late, however, historians have increasingly questioned this separation, often under the banner of the history of knowledge (or knowledges).

By exploring the history of knowledge broadly conceived, this seminar will address the principles of periodisation and classification that have structured our understanding of science. It will examine hybrid scientific or epistemic practices that fall somewhere between the natural and the social sciences, such as medicine, psychology, epidemiology or astrology, as well as the construction of distinctions between science, pseudo-science and charlatanism. It will attend to how the construction of information, archives and data inflect the histories we write. It will also address the boundary work that goes into maintaining a distinction between nature and society at a time when their imbrication seems to require an overhaul of our cognitive, social and political models.