„Știința în context”. Antecedente internaliste ale tezei Merton
„Science in Context”. Internalist antecedents of Merton’s thesis

Summary/Abstract: Towards the end of his work “Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England” published in 1938, Robert K. Merton offers a theoretical justification of his historical research and defines science as a social activity that takes place in a certain socio-historical context that influences it in various ways and aspects. Merton comes with this perspective at a time when philosophers of science are beginning to open up to dialogue with historians of science and the concern for a social history of science is doubled by intellectual histories of science in the manner practiced by Alexandre Koyré in his Études galiléennes published in 1939. My goal in the present study is to provide a historical reconstruction so that to identify in the cultural space of philosophy and history of science the way in which the concern for the contextual analysis of science took shape immediately after the First World War. before the consecration offered by Merton. The strongest influences towards an externalist approach were those induced by a study of Newtonian physics by Hessen and by the radical group called the „Visible College.” Thus, the idea of context, as developed by Merton, is easy to find in any history of ideas.

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