In his touching reminiscence of Ernan McMullin (1924-2011), Michael Ruse writes: "from the first I admired him greatly for trying (what seems to have been much more common back then) to integrate philosophy and history of science into one whole. (Today, my sense is that the philosophers of science have returned to the analytic fold and historians have gone over to sociology and the gap is bigger than ever.)" (Thank you Brian Leiter for the pointer.)
I have made similar noises here; there I blamed the cult of contingency that has overtaken the historians (under the influence of Quentin Skinner's linguistic turn and Foucault's genealogical approach). Of course, on the philosophical side much needs to be done, too, to resuscitate the patient unless one already buys into various Neo-Kantian projects (historical epistemology, relativized a priori, etc). I don't.
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