The International School of the History of Science aims to complement the Centre’s Science Schools and Institutes. It seeks to understand the paths of scientific thought, the objects of investigation and the theoretical problems raised by experimental research. This provides the stimulus for its work. Work that consists of the careful reconstruction of a past that, enlivened by the current demand for knowledge, becomes part of an evolutionary and creative dialectic. As part of the study programme, historical research developments, from a broad and comprehensive perspective, will be called upon to reveal the connections between the various social sciences, between science and culture and between science and society, which demonstrate the unity of thought and life. A particularly important relationship, which cannot be ignored from a historical perspective, is that between the natural sciences and the humanities. The existence of this relationship is essential for understanding contemporary culture. The history of science also provides us with the most reliable associations of scientific knowledge by understanding its current meaning (logical-formal disciplines, biological disciplines, non-biological disciplines, humanities) and its traditional background of philosophical knowledge from a clearly demonstrative and deductive form. Problems of classification can thus be tackled without the prejudicial misunderstandings in which the history of culture is replete. Science can follow its own path of investigation into the structure of the world. Envisaged by Bacon in the ‘Progress of Learning’ as the third form of civil historiography (alongside ecclesiastical and political historiography). The historiography of science is a new (18th century) branch of the historiographical tree, the growth of which has been rapid in the last two decades. Since the end of the 17th century, technological development and scientific vision have changed the world. The study of the history of science today has an interdisciplinary programme, although it has its own methodological autonomy. The school, in cordial collaboration with the School of the History of Physics, takes on its task in the Italian cultural sphere at an opportune moment, together with the Domus Galileiana of Pisa (promoter of studies and research in the national sphere) and university departments. It will be a venue for meetings and debates for scholars from all over the world, in harmonious balance with the Domus Galileiana.