Forgetting Past Science—Reconstructing Past Science: Oblique Perspectives on the Once Familiar, Now Half Forgotten

The starting point of this essay is an “oblique” reading of Thomas Kuhn ideas concerning “paradigms” and the importance of training and values in the practice of science, often overlooked when Kuhn first wrote about the topic and forgotten by himself 30 years later; it also widens the field under discussion from natural sciences to Wissenschaften broadly. This is used as the basis for a discussion of the roles of forgetting and remembering past approaches in practised science and of those of the history of science in this connection. The final section takes up the particular situation of mathematics and mathematics education, assessing the “genetic method” and alternative uses of history in mathematics didactics.