Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

method’ was a thoroughly moral activity. Unlikeprevious Biblical scholars who had regarded, say,the Apostles’ testimony of Christ’s Resurrection assimply a statement of fact in which the Apostles’personal histories were of no relevance, theEnlightenment critics took seriously the Apostles’role in constructing the event as significant – andthe long-term epistemic cost that heightenedawareness may have incurred, even for those whotake the general truth of Christianity as uncontroversial.The history of Biblical criticism, then,has been one long exercise in unpacking theuniversal dimension of Christ’s message from itshistorical baggage.By the time Popper followed Ernst Mach’s lead,and generalised the critical-historical method as thescientific attitude, the process of unpacking theuniversal from the particular had been recast asthe transformation of the context of discovery by thecontext of justification. Like the Bible, an historicalaccount of a scientist’s discovery is an alloy ofblindness and insight whose ‘rational reconstruction’must precede its evaluation as a knowledgeclaim. The two centuries that separated Popper’smethodology from the theology of Spinoza andPierre Bayle witnessed the migration of the criticalhistoricalmethod from the free-thinking churchesand salons to the university, where in the hands of128