The analysis of the past and present history of science can be accomplished in two manners: a simplistic style or a critical and complex style. The first stores dates and authors across time, without any method of analysis. The second traces the history of science using conceptual and methodological frameworks. We have had these strategies and tools available for over a century in the disciplines of philosophy of science and epistemology, and these constitute the repository to which we should appeal when engaging with the history of science using complex methods. Which are the big questions posed by philosophy of science and epistemology? In short, they ask what science is and how it is done. Two scholarly traditions provide answers to these questions: the French historicist tradition (e.g., Bachelard) and the Anglo-Saxon logicist tradition (e.g., Popper and Khun). The philosopher of the 20th century Michel Foucault occupies space apart from these: in the 1960s, he set up a new approach to the analysis of knowledge, science and practices.