“Was ist historische Epistemologie?“

This essay attempts to answer the question: What is historical epistemology? The essay does this in a number of steps, each building on the next. In the first step, the article provides a historical landscape of issues and challenges into which historical epistemology has been and will be assessed. These include the formulations of such challenges as the genetic fallacy and the naturalistic fallacy, and the problems posed by the relationship between philosophy and history. In the second step, the author explores the French background to historical epistemology. The third step will provide a concrete and well-accepted example: the emergence of probability. In the last and final section, a conclusion is drawn by laying out the general characteristics of historical epistemology, how it differs from the history of ideas and the history of epistemology, and how we might address the genetic and naturalistic fallacies given what we have learnt about the general characteristics of historical epistemology.