Chapter 13 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and History and Philosophy of Science in Historical Perspective Theodore Arabatzis Introduction My late teacher Gerry Geison used to say that The Structure of Scientific Rev- olutions is a book worth rereading once a year. With each new reading, one is bound to discover a new insight about science, and, I would add, one is also bound to raise new questions about the character of this revolutionary book. More than fifty years after its publication, Structure remains as intriguing and hard to catego- rize as it was when it first appeared. No less an authority on the book’s character than its own author, even Kuhn himself had trouble classifying itμ “Asked what field it [Structure] dealt with, I was often at a loss for response” (Kuhn 1993, xii). Recently, Ian Hacking again raised the question “is the book history or philoso- phy?” without addressing it directly (Hacking 2012, x). So, what kind of intel- lectual work is Structure, given that its ideas “are drawn from a variety of fields not normally treated together”? 1 Clarifying the book’s interdisciplinary character may help us better understand and hopefully strengthen the troubled relationship between history and philosophy of science (HPS). HPS as an integrated discipline goes back to the nineteenth century, when major philosophers and historians of science, from Comte and Whewell to Mach and Duhem, amalgamated historical study and philosophical reflection, imposing a “shape” on the scientific past. 2 During the first half of the twentieth century, however, as philosophy of history on a grand scale became suspect and philoso- phy of science focused on science as a static body of knowledge, issues about the pattern of scientific development receded into the margins of philosophical dis- cussion. Kuhn’s work brought those issues back to the forefront of philosophy of science, thereby reviving a nineteenth-century tradition of viewing science from a historical-cum-philosophical perspective. Since Structure offered a grand narra- 1 The quotation is from Kuhn’s application for a Guggenheim fellowship, dated 22 October 1953. See Hufbauer (2012, 459). 2 I borrow the term from Graham (1997). In A. Blum, K. Gavroglu, C. Joas, and J. Renn (eds.), Shifting Paradigms: Thomas S. Kuhn and the History of Science. Berlin: Edition Open Access, 2016.