Fashioning the Discipline: History of Science in the European Intellectual Tradition

This paper offers personal reflections on the fashioning of the history of science in Europe. It presents the history of science as a discipline emerging in the twentieth century from an intellectual and political context of great complexity, and concludes with a plea for tolerance and pluralism in historiographical methods and approaches.Robert Fox held the chair of the history of science at Oxford University between 1988 and 2006. He has been active in a number of international organizations, including the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, of which he is a past president, and the European Society for the History of Science, whose founding president he became in 2004.