There has since the early twentieth century been a distinct difference between French philosophy of science and its Anglo-American counterpart. Anglo-American, analytic philosophy evolved out of the logical positivism of the Vienna circle. At the same time that philosophy, by embracing formal methods, was to be made over in the image of science, initial studies in logic tended to lead to prescriptions for scientific method as a basis for distinguishing science from pseudoscience (as, for example, in the work of Karl Popper). In France, however, and particularly in the case of the two figures with whom the French tradition has become identified, Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, philosophy's role was to seek to understand the dynamics of the sciences by studying their historical development.

Bachelard and Canguilhem successively occupied the chair in the history and philosophy of the sciences at the Sorbonne and thus influenced the education of several generations of French philosophy students. In Writing the History of the Mind, Christina Chimisso sets out to portray the academic, social and political milieu from which their distinctive, essentially historical, approach to the philosophy of science arose. She shows that the history of philosophy was particularly important at the Sorbonne, and that it was thanks to this institution's central role in French intellectual life that studies in and debates about the history of philosophy became prominent.

Chimisso pays considerable attention to the lives and philosophical positioning of two crucial influences on Bachelard – Abel Rey and Léon Brunschvicg. Bachelard studied under Brunschvicg, who was himself a historian of philosophy. She explores the social and political background of the group of philosophers around these figures, who did not have the profile typical of many other French philosophers of the period. Secularism and republicanism – as opposed, for example, to Catholicism or a class-based exclusivity – were important forces in the lives of many of them. They were innovators who, through attending the right elite educational institutions, managed to accumulate sufficient cultural capital (to borrow a term from Bourdieu) to occupy influential academic positions. She argues that one cannot explain the emergence of historical epistemology unless one includes scholars who were not themselves philosophers of science but who were relevant to reflection on science. Here she highlights in particular the role played by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who, along with Brunschvicg, focused on reading scientific or ethnological texts in search of the mentalities that produced them. In other words, there was a wider context within which attention was being given to ‘mentalities’ and to the history of the development of human minds.

So Chimisso's history, as announced in the title of the book, is a history of a set of projects whose underlying assumptions were that the mind could not be studied a priori and that ways of thinking were different in different civilizations. She is not claiming that the projects were unified under a single agenda, merely that there were various projects that shared these assumptions and were at least agreed that history was an essential component of inquiry. Thus past science, as a product of past periods of civilization, would be expected to be grounded in world views and methods that differ from current ones. This led Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault, each in his own way, to seek to characterize the epistemological standards of past scientific practices and distinguish them from those of current science. But since science claims to have made progress over its own earlier periods, they were also compelled to offer some account of the dynamics that led to changes in epistemological standards.

As Chimisso shows, such an insistence on the inseparability of history from the philosophy of science is not a position that could have gained influence in isolation. It needed to be part of a broader movement concerned with the relationship between history and philosophy. The history of this broader movement is a story that is little known, and is one that certainly deserves attention. Too often philosophers assume that a philosophical text can, or even should, be read out of context. When context is added sometimes it is only philosophical context. But this presumes that the philosopher's role is solely to contemplate philosophical puzzles, not to be engaged with and reflect on the broader context in which they find themselves. Chimisso's work is a reminder of the flaws in this assumption.

However, her book almost goes too far in the other direction: we have lots of historical details, many of which appear as somewhat disconnected historical facts (who was where when, who was talking to whom about what, and so on). These are interwoven with the specific nuances of the philosophical positions of the various parties, but this prevents any sense of narrative unity – the kind of sense of unity that would allow one to say, now I understand what was going on much better than I did before. I certainly came away from the book knowing more about the context from which Bachelard and Canguilhem emerged, but not really feeling that my understanding of their philosophical writings had been enriched by the exercise. It is this latter feeling that would fully justify the claim that learning about the social context of philosophers really contributes to understanding their work.