Abstract

Departing from Nietzsche’s considerations on the relationship between the unwillingness of forgetting and the willingness of memory, this text proposes a new approach to the history and philosophy of sciences through the re-interpretation of the historical relation between sciences and arts. It first examines the emergence of visual studies as a discipline intended to study the impact of new forms of visualization and expression in cultural processes. Then, it advocates a new writing of the history the science studies from the recent developments in the so-called “historical epistemology”. Historical epistemology implied shift of focus from scientific theories to epistemic categories, which enabled the analysis of sciences from new historized categories, embedded into cultural niches. This viewpoint is similar to those developed in visual culture studies and the structuralism of the 1970s. In this line, pioneering centres such as the Max Planck Institute in Berlin have already incorporated artists to their scientific community. Therefore, this text claims that, in order to look forward, we should look back at the history of different disciplines. The result of this re-interpretation is a polyphonic history, a hybrid that stands for the necessity of multidisciplinary research.