As with many other movements within twentieth century philosophy of science – e.g. logical positivism, new experimentalism, integrated history and philosophy of science – historical epistemology has recently become a subject of interest for historians of philosophy. However, currently, there is no consensus how to understand the philosophical position that 20th century historical epistemologists, like Cassirer, Meyerson, Foucault or Canguillhem shared, beyond the very broad and philosophically uninteresting idea that knowledge practices have a history. This paper aims to distinguish historical epistemology as a philosophical position from a broad range of naturalist and historicist approaches that contextualize a knowledge practice. In doing so, we aim to cast a unity into the divergent scholars and theories that have been labeled “historical epistemology”.
We will distinguish three philosophical principles that are shared by historical epistemologists: (A) an asymmetry condition about epistemic principles, (B) a universalist commitment to understand asymmetries inherent in epistemic principles and (C) a progressivist ideal about human rationality and its dynamics. We will show that these principles can be found in the work of Cassirer, Meyerson, Canguillhem, Foucault, Koyré, Friedman and van Fraassen, but fail to find ground in other scholars who have been typically labeled as historical epistemologists, such the SSK of Barnes and Bloor, Latour, Duhem or Mach.