[The idea of the universality of science and its philosophical and historical critics].

The question of the universality of science is considered, in contemporary debates, under the most varied and opposed positions depending whether one is sharing the point of view of an "ideal science" or that of a "social production of science". In the first case, science is conceived as the "hard core" of its statements and results at the period under consideration, and its supposed universality ignores factors that relativize its contents of knowledge, and which can be of a conceptual as well as social nature. Conversely, an exclusive focalization on the social aspects of the production of scientific knowledge ignores the objective character of these knowledge contents, be they either thought objects such as mathematical ones, or phenomena of the real, physico-biological as well as human and social, world. These two extreme positions, although caricatural, are shared by many. They illustrate the absence or ignorance of interdisciplinary analysis between philosophy, the various sciences, history of sciences and general history...