Personal and Impersonal in the Scholarly Endeavor
The paper considers the role of individual in science. Three patterns are analyzed: 1) the time of lonely geniuses has gone; 2) science as well as history is created by unique and irreplaceable individualities; 3) history of any academic discipline is not just history of ideas, but also history of unique individualities creating disciplinary array of knowledge, and this individuality and uniqueness in many respects has the same disciplinary nature. The author shows preference to the third pattern which he calls disciplinary-cumulative.