In: Divinatio, Vol. 50 (autumn–winter 2021): 9-24.
IN MEMORIAM
Babette Babich
DIMITRI GINEV, IN MEMORIAM
(3 July 1956 – 5 June 2021)
Dimitri Ginev, 30 November 2013, Zürich.
Photograph: Babette Babich
Dimitri Ginev was so energetically creative that a book was already
ready – in line to be published as it was, posthumously, Practices and Agency,1 along with other texts when he died, early this past summer, 2021.
In my preface for his forthcoming article in the journal, Social Science
Information, I wrote that Dimitri was
an elegant man, gifted with a rare rigor and, still more exceptionally, of a
systematic scope that kept his work at the highest level. That high level could
(and often did) mean that colleagues did not always know his work or were, at
best, challenged to understand it.2
As Tracy B. Strong is fond of reflecting, and you can see him in the
photo above, behind Dimitri on the left: ‘death always comes from outside
the frame.’
Babette Babich
DIVINATIO, volume 50, autumn-winter 2021
10
I wrote a different memorial for the rock star – and stage and film actor – Meat Loaf (1947-2022) who held views contra the currently received,
i.e., government-decreed ‘health’ mandates: ‘Dionysus in Music,’3 less to
explain his award winning single, I Would Do Anything for Love (trending,
non-hermeneutically, on Twitter) than to counter calumny.
There’s no calumny in Dimitri’s case but there is complexity. And, by
the same token, there is also a great legacy, his texts, that can be revisited.
Hermeneutics is about right reading and right parsing, interpretation and
thus the metonymic association with Meat Loaf, love. Philosophy is the love
of wisdom and the ars interpretandi, as we know, is hermeneutics. ‘Two out
of Three,’ Meat Loaf tells us, ‘Ain’t Bad,’ which leaves science, a fairly nonwordish affair. Hermeneutic philosophy of science thus needs the doubling
nuances Dimitri added, and for a triple hermeneutics, I’d supplement what I
have named a material hermeneutics.4
In my editor’s contribution to Hermeneutic Philosophies of Social
Science,5 I opted to render the plural in the title not, Rickert-style, by adverting to the various Geisteswissenschaften because, and this is also culturology in part, in all their diversity (Rickert takes care to foreground
history for obvious reasons having to do with his own formation along
with psychology crucial then and crucial today to then-positivist and today’s analytic trends in philosophy, now rebranded as cognitive science or
neuroscience, depending on whether one’s affinities run to information or
life sciences) what was at stake for me was the various kinds of philosophy
of science. Aligning, this is an editor’s task, the table of contents, like a
dinner party list, after Steve Shapin, who judiciously avoids even the word
hermeneutics in his “The Sciences of Subjectivity,”6 I set Dimitri’s “Studies of Empirical Ontology and Ontological Difference,”7 followed by my
editor’s contribution, “Hermeneutics and Its Discontents in Philosophy of
Science,”8 in which I revisited themes including Alan Sokal’s feigned hoax
back in the mid-1990s,9 on the very idea of hermeneutics in science discourse. I highlighted an interpretive ambiguity that is the legacy of literary
scholarship and criticism, infused as this is with theological sensibilities
or (sometimes) Marxist ideology. The problem is not a matter of politics
per se, though it can be, as much as it is the text as such. This is the sola
scriptura that sets ‘hermeneutics’ as the most durable legacy of the protestant revolution in texts, a revolution that was as successful as it was not
least because it told everyman that nothing need come between himself
and his reading – whatever he was reading, be it the Bible or Hobbes or
Nietzsche or Heidegger, or indeed Galileo. As Bruno Latour (1947–) puts
Dimitri Ginev, in memoriam
it in his 2013 book, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, using a certain
amount of rhetorical polish:
didn’t Galileo triumph all by himself over institutions, against the Church,
against religion, against the scientific bureaucracy of the period?10
Galileo is his own problem and I will come back to this below. There,
I argued that the problem of hermeneutics had been under attack for some
time, positivism being what it is but also in the wake of György Márkus’
contribution to the first issue of Science in Context in 1987, using the rhetorically simplistic tactic of assuming one’s conclusion in advance, petitio
principiii already in his title: “Why is There No Hermeneutics of Natural
Sciences?”11 I pointed out that Márkus spared himself the trouble of reading
those who had actually written on the topic, skipping over to a traditionally
historical understanding of interpretation as opposed to hermeneutic philosophy of science as such. We know the tactic today as what social media
names ‘cancel culture.’
I argued that by arguing in his own closed circle, Márkus used his
literary critical prejudice as prejudice works best to automatic effect. Thus,
repeating the canard of supposed hostility to the natural sciences, Márkus
made only passing reference to a single article by the physicist and philosopher, Patrick Aidan Heelan (1926–2014), a name he manages to misspell
throughout and to reduce (rather than to expand as Heelan would) to Polanyi, and thus without noting Heelan’s published legacy of arguments for
a hermeneutic philosophy of physics, specifically advanced with reference
to nothing less crucial for the natural sciences than quantum mechanics.12
Márkus also made no reference to Joseph J. Kockelmans (1923–2008), if he
does note Theodore Kisiel (1930–2021) from whom he seems to have gotten
the reference to Heelan but not Thomas Seebohm (1934–2014) or Gerard
Radnitzky (1921–2006) – in fact there are quite a few names he skipped
over, though he does mention Manfred Riedel (1936–2009). When Heelan
wrote a detailed response to Márkus’ first article,13 which Márkus had subtitled as if inviting discussion, ‘A Few Preliminary Remarks,’ Márkus would
offer no response.
To mistakenly limit hermeneutics as a literary critic, Lukács-style as
Márkus was, is to limit hermeneutics to what he called the ‘interpretive encounter of a reader with a text’ thereby missing the text as existentially active as Ginev would argue, or as working ‘otherwise,’ as Gadamer would
argue14 but not less as experimental setup or instrumental context articulated
in and through Heelan’s language of ‘readable technologies.’ I.e., and in
11
Babette Babich
DIVINATIO, volume 50, autumn-winter 2021
12
terms of Heelan’s ‘objectivity,’ this augments and complements Dimitri’s
double hermeneutics on the level of the subject, and is thus, as noted above,
specifically material.15
Now Heelan himself, who was absolutely charmed and delighted by
Dimitri, was concerned with mathematics and measurement which he read
as laboratory observation which he expressed in Husserlian and Heideggerian terms of the scientist’s perception and of the ‘world’ of the laboratory
for the sake of what Heelan called, speaking as a physicist, “objectivity” and
“meaning making.” The active engagement of the scientist as a researcher
is indispensable, requiring what Heidegger for his own part unpacks as the
logic of questioning. The critical logic of questioning is, as I seek to unpack
this, the method of experimental, critical, juridical science, quite as Kant
specifies for his own part in The Critique of Pure Reason. As Heelan writes
in his first book, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity, “Of itself, the instrument is ‘dumb’ it waits to be questioned by the scientist and the form of the
question structures its response.”16 In my own work I argue, and Heelan
remains useful here, that it is essential to raise the question of models in
today’s age of ‘pandemic science.’17
I was born in 1956, placing me in the same Jahrgang as the Germans
say. As a peer in this sense, I knew Dimitri as colleague and friend. But that
should be qualified as although we saw one another with some frequency
over the years, I never visited him at his own university nor was I able to
find students interested in hermeneutic philosophy of science such that I
might invite him to mine (as if I might compete with the many prestigious
fellowships and invitations he already enjoyed). Thus I knew, and I do believe this recognition mutual, that I was far from knowing him as well as I
might have known him.
The common projects we worked on were related, centrally so, to the
names I have mentioned above on the topic of hermeneutic philosophy of
science which resulted in a 2014 book collection, co-edited and inspired by
(and in memory of) Kockelmans: The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic
Phenomenology.18
This was by no means an after-thought, a posthumous Festschrift for
a man who never had a Festschrift (the honor is not extended to all scholars and publishers give you grief, as I know having edited two of these, if
you propose one). Kockelmans although today increasingly forgotten, even
among Heideggerians (a bit unfair as he was a founding member of the
American Heidegger Circle), was well known across the board: quite to the
mainstream peak of being elected president of the Eastern APA, the fore-
Dimitri Ginev, in memoriam
most American philosophical society. The 1994 volume in his honor, The
Question of Hermeneutics,19 covered mostly non-science themes limited to
four essays on philosophy of science, including a contribution from Heelan
and from Bas van Fraassen, who had been Kockelmans’ student.
The association of hermeneutics and philosophy of science remains
fraught despite efforts to integrate these perspectives. By addressing this
multifarious character head on, Dimitri had hoped (I was and remain less
sanguine) that by highlighting ‘multidimensionality’ and including phenomenology the general vision of hermeneutic philosophy of science might be
taken a little further. One might have wished, in a world of contrary-to-fact
druthers, that Ted Kisiel would have been the man to celebrate Kockelmans
at greater length – although Ted did offer us an essay on hermeneutic instrumentality attending to the working dynamics of GPS20 – but Kisiel’s
own life’s work, coupled with the obstacles to hermeneutic philosophy of
science, took Kisiel to vastly greater reception on the theme of the life work
of Martin Heidegger).
To say that the volume we edited together was inspired by Kockelmans
hardly means (indeed, it almost never means) that the contributors engaged
Kockelmans. In fact, some of the authors of some of the chapters had never
read a word Kockelmans wrote and, arguably, would not have known what
to make of it if they had. This is ordinary, ordinal life in the academy and
it is complicated, rife with fiefdoms and boundaries, all for the sakes of, as
is often pointed out, tiny and increasingly tinier stakes: owing to the same
pandemic that deftly reduces resources, automatically achieving, without
debate, what university and other public administrators had long desired.
Ginev in Discussion. Photograph: Babette Babich
13
Babette Babich
DIVINATIO, volume 50, autumn-winter 2021
14
Dimitri generously wrote to thank me for broadening those stakes a
bit in the essay I contributed to the beautifully produced Festschrift in his
honor, a gloriously substantive book, edited by Paula Angelova, Jassen
Andreev, and Emil Lensky: Das Interpretative Universum: Dimitri Ginev
zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet.21 The breadth of this collection, the luminary voices who contributed to it, testifies to Ginev’s life and work. Again:
the editors’ articulation of these contributions is instructive: beginning with
Gadamer’s outstanding biographer, Jean Grondin, reflecting on the hermeneutic circle,22 but also Scholtz on Boeckh and Droysen,23 several essays on
Dilthey,24 textual voices include Renato Cristin on Husserl.25 There is also
an important reflection by Dean Komel on questioning,26 this festschrift is
as a Festschrift should be and as the graphic design on its cover suggests:
a treasure trove. Science is there, including my own reflections on Ginev’s
‘Double Hermeneutics’ and the conflicting fortunes of designating collegial
contributions ‘good’ or ‘bad,’27 sometimes rightly, often owing to other lessthan-pure motivations (thus peer cartels are probably a greater ‘elephant’ in
the room of contemporary history and philosophy of science than any other
hobby horse du jour), but also Nick Rescher on pragmatism28 and Hans-Jörg
Rheinberger,29 about whom more below, among others – and, on political
‘science’ and Europe on the crucial theme of ‘Gastlichkeit,’ Burkhard Liebsch,30 in addition to Pierre Kerszberg, on music,31 and the late Peter Janich
(1942-2016) on technology, nature and culture,32 and so on.
I have not named every name but I am taking care to name more names
than is typically done because one of the automatic ways of refusing scholarship is via non-mention, inattention, silencing – Todtschweigerei. This is
intellectual ‘ghosting’ or banning, called ‘cancel culture’ today in a world
where calls for censorship have a good conscience, not that this is new if the
blatant character of such calls can seem to be.
If Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) continues to be both unreceived and
admired in mainstream meaning analytic philosophy of science, a great part
of the reason has to do with the complexity of his own writerly style, thus
the need for hermeneutics which in his case includes the fact that as Feyerabend would explain, he had never studied philosophy as such. This did not
mean that he lacked a broad formation: far from it.
Going beyond Popperian conventionalities with respect to the contexts
of discovery and justification, Feyerabend reminds us in his Farewell to
Reason, that contextualization is constituted quite by way of an ‘unwritten’
doctrine, as Cornford speaks of this,33 as Hans Joachim Krämer speaks of
this in his reading (with Konrad Gaier), of Plato via Schleiermacher articu-
Dimitri Ginev, in memoriam
lating the relation between artistic morphology and philosophical content, as
articulated by way of an ‘oral culture.’34 Reading Feyerabend here requires
reference to “the ‘living discourse’ Plato regarded as the only true form of
knowledge” equating it with high level mathematics and for Feyerabend this
extends to advanced physics:
The ‘hermeneutic’ school in philosophy … tries to show that even the most
‘objective’ written presentation is comprehended only by a process of instruction that conditions the reader to interpret standard phrases in standard ways
in this manner: there is no escape from history and personal contact, though
there exist powerful mechanisms creating the illusion of such an escape.35
As we may read here in Jassen Andreev’s essay, ‘Jimmy’ as Jassen called
him, admired Feyerabend and I corresponded with Feyerabend when I was
in Germany and met him when I was teaching in Tübingen, when he was in
Zürich, and thus, locative, I was put in mind of him when I last met Dimitri in the company of one of Feyerabend’s students, Paul Hoyningen-Huene
(1946–).
Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Zürich, November 2013.
Photograph: Babette Babich
Photographs are hermeneutic objects to be read, an insight I develop
in an ekphrasis of the iconic photograph of Heidegger and Gadamer, signed
by Heidegger in 1975, and which waited more than 50 years after it was
taken of the 23 year old Gadamer to be sent to Gadamer (1900–2002) which
he then featured in his Lehrjahre.36 Gadamer was my teacher and when I
read his philosophical autobiography, this photograph was revelatory for my
reading of technology and so I paid for the rights to reproduce it in the text
I contributed to our collective volume, reading between Heidegger’s Gefahr
and Ge-Stell.37
15
Babette Babich
DIVINATIO, volume 50, autumn-winter 2021
16
Feyerabend was more radical than Dimitri and he was certainly more
radical than his students tend to be. He referred to Galileo throughout his work
and in his letters and he also sent me a draft of his The Conquest of Abundance
and I did not take the hint – I didn’t realize that was the reason, even though
he wrote this quite explicitly in his letters to me, that I might edit it. I was
consumed with respect and my approach to hermeneutics typically leads me
to leave all the words of an author unchanged in context and to add more.
Now as I have written elsewhere, and in spite of Feyerabend’s best
efforts, Galileo remains the Teflon saint of science: no matter how many
times the complexities of the discoveries that, as Feyerabend shows, were
not quite Galileo’s discoveries (or observational data or calculations that
were not quite his data or his calculations, or instruments that were not quite
or could not have been as they were said to have been are spelled out in detail to Galileo’s detriment, Galileo, one should perhaps attempt to sing this
Freddy Mercury style), Galileo escapes unscathed.
A scientist by formation, Feyerabend was, like Bob Cohen, another
friend Dimitri and I had in common, an open-minded spirit in the philosophy
of science and both lacked today’s limitedly analytic formation in philosophy (this does not make one ‘continental’). Like Heelan, both were trained
in physics not philosophy (though Heelan, being a Jesuit, promptly took a
second PhD in philosophy).
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Zürich, November 2013. Photograph: Babette Babich
Kockelmans articulated the theme of the constitution of modern science, in its technological and mathematizable (meaning measurable, calculable, model-oriented) expressions, as just this constitution was for Ginev
highly significant. For my own part, embodied in the instrument as such, be
Dimitri Ginev, in memoriam
it a telescope, think of Feyerabend’s Galileo or a tablet today, I tended to
follow Heelan’s attention to the making dimension of meaning-making, in
terms otherwise more reflected in the mainstream and highly visible work
of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1946–). Thus highlighting the standardized manufacture of specifically institutional and standardizing technologies (from
Geiger counters, an example of which Heelan was fond, to microscopes as
Ian Hacking spoke of these to electron microscopes as Heelan also varied
the metaphoric profile in ways inspiring for Rheinberger in turn and which,
in another direction again, may also be found in Latour).
It is hard to trace connections of this kind and at this level. Elsewhere
I attempt (one needs the provisional language of an attempt, the German
‘Versuch’ is better as such indications are only effective if noted, footnoted,
etc.) to point to the work of Louis Basso quite where Heelan emphasized
Bachelard and scholars today, inspired by Latour and others, privilege Gilbert Simondon.
The photographs in this essay were taken during a November 2013
conference: Ludwik Fleck and Hermeneutic Studies of Science, organized
by Dimitri Ginev at the Ludwik Fleck Center in Zürich. I spoke, on Dimitri’s
invitation, as did everyone there, in my case, because I have long worked
on Fleck, on things medical and hermeneutic, titled, “Fleck’s The Genesis
and Development of a Scientific Fact and the Pseudo-Sciences – Or How to
talk about AIDS, Homeopathy, and Other Damned Things.”38 The Ludwik
Fleck Center maintains the lectures as research resource, archival access
which gives us the opportunity to hear Ginev in his own voice, including the
dynamism of his presentation, on “Ludwik Fleck’s Implicit Hermeneutics of
Trans-Subjectivity.”39
Prof. Dr. Ginev with Dr. Rainer Egloff. 30-11-2013, Zürich.
17
Babette Babich
DIVINATIO, volume 50, autumn-winter 2021
18
Years ago, and there I failed him, Dimitri invited me to contribute to a
project on feminist philosophy of science. Being a rigorous scholar, I knew
that what he meant by that was what mainstream or analytic voices in philosophy and history of science meant by that: dedicated to bringing out and
setting in contemporary scholarly relief the unjustly neglected contributions
of women. Traditionally in analytic philosophy of science, and Dimitri had
many sympathies with this approach, the idea was to highlight otherwise
unadverted to scholars, a reasonable undertaking as prejudice silences reception, along with, although absent hermeneutics this works less well, attending to the influence of masculinist assumptions – for example, in palaeontology pointing to the tendency to ‘read’ artifacts as weapons (axes and
the like) rather than as other tools (for cultivation, for example) although
and of course specific identification as a specific anything may tell us more
about the researchers’ assumptions than anything else. More significant, and
here the historian David Noble’s work deserves attention, is the absence of
women in general, typically or traditionally explained away by pointing out
that women’s gifts would be found in other fields. Andrea Nye, whose work
was poorly received until she shifted to the approach acknowledged by the
mainstream (this is a sine qua non if one wants any colleagues to engage
one’s work) wrote an early book that irritated scholars (she cannot be accused of a continental approach and the history of philosophy is an analytic
rubric rather than hermeneutic or phenomenological) with her book, Words
of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic.40
My reading is integrated into my take on the politics of professional
philosophy.41 I invited Dimitri to contribute to a Festschrift for Heelan, a
collection that remains somewhat unusual in the genre, dedicated to the triad
of hermeneutic concerns reflected in Heelan’s work, from science to perceptual aesthetics and theology: Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van
Gogh’s Eyes, and God. It is unusual in that many of the essays reflect the
multidimensionality of Heelan’s work. Ginev’s essay, which I set among the
first chapters in the volume, remains insightful: “The Hermeneutic Context
of Constitution.”42
I already mentioned the collective volume I edited, Hermeneutic Philosophies of Social Science, a challenging undertaking just to the extent that
hermeneutics tends to be misunderstood, and this is surprising, precisely by
social theorists. Ginev’s contribution was key to the collection 43 and Steve
Fuller’s popularly explosive contribution,44 if it does not quite illuminate the
ongoing problem of hermeneutic philosophies of social science as such, is
worth reading between Weber and Husserl and what is conventionally read,
Dimitri Ginev, in memoriam
analytically speaking, as the much maligned ‘postmodern.’ Dimitri’s own
monograph would appear a year later, with its affinities clearly articulated in
the title: Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of Social Practices: Between Existential Analytic and Social Theory.45
Ginev wrote on the Dilthey scholar (and expert in positivism), Georg
Misch,46 cognitive existentialism, a variety as Dimitri pioneered this to a
great extent, of analytic existentialism as this may be compared with newer
trends in philosophy, as Dimitri also worked on the most recondite but also
mainstream and systematic accounts of social theory. His recent, Scientific
Conceptualization and Ontological Difference shows the nuances of both.47
But Dimitri’s contributions are not to be ranged on the margins and if
anyone can be said to truly work between the analytic-continental divide,
which context has its own limitations complete with inviolate dominion (thus
most German research institutes are open, typically, exclusively to analytic
scholars), Ginev did so, though sometimes he wrote to me about the strain.
To this extent, the best person to write an encomium of hermeneutic
philosophy of science valorising analytic approaches would be the British
born, Canadian philosopher, Patricia Glazebrook as she wrote an insightful
review of Ginev’s 2016, Hermeneutic Realism: Reality Within Scientific Inquiry but who discovered his work only late as all of us must now discover
and rediscover his works, in print. Ginev published Trish’s work and I believe that in future he would have hoped for more collaboration as they were
of affine sensibilities.
Here I recommend her review, recalling the first line:
When Dimitri Ginev left a career in pharmacobiochemistry to avoid experimenting on animals, he was not at all happy with the state of philosophy of
science that had displaced “mirror of nature” approaches by means of structuralist tendencies that make reality “a prisoner of formal semantics.” (xi)48
Trish could have been writing about me as Dimitri’s reasons for leaving his initial plans for work in the life sciences were my reasons for abandoning university studies in biology, complete with years of lab work, for
philosophy.
The affinity between Glazebrook’s pro-analytic style and Ginev is patent and both thinkers find that hermeneutics may be read for its contributions to mainstream philosophy of science, that is significantly also a matter
of what analytic philosophy calls realism.
For my part, I find rather more occasion for diffidence and even antagonism as analytic philosophy refuses both regard and interest, so much
19
Babette Babich
DIVINATIO, volume 50, autumn-winter 2021
20
so that sometimes scholars opt to speak of ‘interpretation’ in place of ‘hermeneutics’ to avoid upsetting conventional, analytic philosophers and historians of science.
Where I agree with Dimitri has everything to do with history and constitution and rigor and where I want to be wrong and I want him to be right
is in his optimism concerning the openness of traditional philosophy of science to his approach.
Between philosophers and scientists, as the examples of Heelan and
of Feyerabend already suggest, one finds sometimes more sympathetic alliances than between philosophers and philosophers. (The latter being the
‘internecine’ battles of which Kant warned and Derrida mused latterly for
his own part, only to suffer from them in turn, now resolved as analytic
philosophy has since coopted his thinking having long ago coopted both
Nietzsche and Heidegger).
On models, and I already noted that these are decisive in our lives today,
I had already drawn attention to the reflections of mathematicians drawing
on hermeneutics in addition to coastal scientists concerned with models, like
Orrin Pilkey who took up the question of real-life feedback as it turns out that
data is rarely used to modify models and thus he writes on the persistence of
incorrect models over decades and decades as the received view turns out,
very mathematically so, to be embedded in the allure of such models.49
My approach to philosophy of science dovetailed with Dimitri’s even
as I pushed a bit more radically, arguing that it was to be thought and rethought in careful ways, as I sought beyond Ginev’s doubling reflex, a hermeneutic of prejudices along with practices, conventions or givens, and
words. In this spirit, I countered Alan Sokal who dedicated a astonishing
proportion of his own life-energies and time to calumniating not Meat Loaf
but Bruno Latour.50 Latour to be sure moves above the fray and in his own
anthropological field, neatly doubled, social science of science, including
the natural sciences, he began, after Azerbaijan, with field work at the Salk
Institute in San Diego, thus with ethnographic studies of science and society,
having left the concerns and objections of others, to be read on the merit,
as is fitting, of his own work as this is not only rigorous but, and this is
important in science as a matter of research projects, in terms of the further
research programmes his work has inspired.
One last informal word, necessary in homage: Dimitri was an ailurophile, perhaps the quintessential trait for a hermeneutic thinker having that
along with other things in common with Gadamer and with Heelan and myself.
Dimitri Ginev, in memoriam
I have included other names in this memorial refl ection as tributes and
owing to a certain astonishment, as Eliot wrote repeating Dante who was
himself repeating the 2nd Century Lucian: I had not thought death had undone so many. It is our mortality that compels us to note those around us and
not only the young to the extent that in academia, as in most of life, we tend
to be future-oriented, ahead of ourselves. Thus we celebrate only the latest
thing on the music horizon, the fi lm horizon, the philosophical horizon.
Dimitri Ginev left us a great legacy. Even if we cannot hope to read adequately those contributions like Dimitri’s that are, as noted at the start, ‘too
much’ for us, there remains a great deal to discover, a great deal to learn.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Dimitri Ginev, Practices and Agency (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann,
2021).
Babette Babich, “Dimitri Ginev (1956-2021),” Social Science Information,
61 (2022): 5-7.
Babich, “Dionysus in Music: On the ‘God of Sex and Drums and Rock and
Roll,’” Los Angeles Review of Books. The Philosophical Salon, 31 January
2022. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/dionysus-in-music-on-the-god-of-sexand-drums-and-rock-and-roll/?fbclid=IwAR25nqhKZKIRKk_ciDGaxkrFIazal8QdYF9ZMtW9YilRuG0Yyozq1C690HA. See for a version including images:
https://babettebabich.uk/2022/01/31/dionysus-in-music-on-the-god-of-sex-anddrums-and-rock-and-roll/?fbclid=IwAR3m4Ss1fYIGrIZQwRoRFBU4UCLFYeMzFfrYW1uVeW4JDwSI78_o_AOTns
Babich, “Material Hermeneutics and Heelan’s Philosophy of Technoscience,”
AI & Society, Vol. 35 (14 Apr. 2020). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/
s00146-020-00963-7.
Babich, ed., Hermeneutic Philosophies of Social Science (Berlin: de Gruyter,
2017).
Steve Shapin, “The Sciences of Subjectivity,” in Babich, ed., Hermeneutic Philosophies of Social Science, 123–143.
Ginev, “Studies of Empirical Ontology and Ontological Difference” in Babich,
ed., Hermeneutic Philosophies of Social Science, 143–163.
Babich, “Hermeneutics and Its Discontents in Philosophy of Science: On Bruno
Latour, the “Science Wars”, Mockery, and Immortal Models: in Hermeneutic
Philosophies of Social Science, 163–188.
Babich, “Sokal’s Hermeneutic Hoax: Physics and the New Inquisition” in:
Babich, ed., Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God:
Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 67–78
and cf., too, my “Paradigms and Thoughtstyles: Incommensurability and its Cold
21
Babette Babich
22
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
DIVINATIO, volume 50, autumn-winter 2021
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
War Discontents from Kuhn’s Harvard to Fleck’s Unsung Lvov,” Social Epistemology, 17 (2003): 97–107.
Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 5.
György Márkus, “Why is There No Hermeneutics of Natural Sciences?” Science
in Context, 1/1, (March 1987): 5–51.
Patrick Aidan Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity (The Hague: Nijhoff,
1965).
Heelan, “Comments and Critique: Yes! There Is a Hermeneutics of Natural Science: A Rejoinder to Markus,” Science in Context, 3, 2 (1989): 477–488.
See on this Babich, “Understanding Gadamer, Understanding Otherwise,” International Institute for Hermeneutics. Online first and archived: https://www.
academia.edu/66050431/Understanding_Gadamer_Understanding_Otherwise.
Babich, “Material Hermeneutics and Heelan’s Philosophy of Technoscience.”
Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity, 174.
Babich, “Pseudo-Science and ‘Fake’ News: ‘Inventing’ Epidemics and the Police
State” in: Irene Strasser and Martin Dege, eds., The Psychology of Global Crises
and Crisis Politics Intervention, Resistance, Decolonization. Palgrave Studies in
the Theory and History of Psychology (London: Springer, 2021), 241–272.
Babich and Ginev, eds., The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2014).
Timothy Stapleton, ed., The Question of Hermeneutics (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1994).
Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger and Our Twenty-First Century Experience of Gestell,” in: Babich and Ginev, eds., The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 137–152.
Paula Angelova, Jassen Andreev, and Emil Lensky, eds., Das Interpretative Universum: Dimitri Ginev zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet (Würzburg: Königshausen
& Neumann, 2017).
Jean Grondin, “Entering the Hermeneutical Circle Also Means that One Wants
to Get Out Of It” in: Angelova, Andreev, and Lensky, eds., Das Interpretative
Universum, 17–26.
Gunter Scholtz, “Interpretation und Tratsache. Überlegungen im Ausgang von
Boeckh und Droysen“ in: Angelova, Andreev, and Lensky, eds., Das Interpretative Universum, 27–46.
Gudrun Kühne-Bertram, „Wilhelm Dilthey’s Begriff der Philosophie“ and Helmuth Vetter, „Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger und Heideggers Anti-Semitismus“ in: Angelova, Andreev, and Lensky, eds., Das Interpretative Universum,
respectively, 47–66 and 67–119.
Cristin, „Tradition in Husserl’s Phenomenological Thoguht,“ in: Angelova, Andreev, and Lensky, eds., Das Interpretative Universum, 121–130.
Komel, „Kontemporität als Fragehorizont der Philosophie,“ in: Angelova, Andreev, and Lensky, eds., Das Interpretative Universum, 471–484.
Dimitri Ginev, in memoriam
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
Babich, “Are They Good? Are They Bad? Double Hermeneutics and Citation in
Philosophy, Asphodel and Alan Rickman, Bruno Latour and the Science Wars,” in:
Angelova, Andreev, and Lensky, eds., Das Interpretative Universum, 239–270.
Rescher, “Prismatic Pragmatism,” in: Angelova, Andreev, and Lensky, eds., Das
Interpretative Universum, 131–150.
Rheinberger, “Über die Sprache der Wissenschaftsgeschichte“ in Angelova, Andreev, and Lensky, eds., Das Interpretative Universum, 283–292.
Liebsch „Angefeindet von innen und außen: Europa im Zeichen der Gästlichkeit“ in: Angelova, Andreev, and Lensky, eds., Das Interpretative Universum,
441–470.
Kerszberg, „Les trajets intérieurs de la musique“ in: Angelova, Andreev, and
Lensky, eds., Das Interpretative Universum, 377–390.
Janich, „Technik im Spannungsverhältnis von Natur und Kultur“ in: Angelova,
Andreev, and Lensky, eds., Das Interpretative Universum, 271–283.
F.M. Cornford, The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950).
Hans Joachim Krämer, Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics: A Work on
the Theory of the Principles and Unwritten Doctrines of Plato with a Collection
of the Fundamental Documents, trans. John Catan (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1990).
Paul Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason (London: Verso, 1987), 111.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophische Lehrjahre (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann, 1977), 33.
Babich, “Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr / The Danger,” 160.
https://video.ethz.ch/speakers/collegium-helveticum/fleck/hermeneutics/
1fa09d91-edf4-4b6f-a898-715c92d68272.html?fbclid=IwAR327WEE7cS05yB
WJNeG4XH917QgOs-dp6Y_mEfM-yNF939Z9eN6C5VTaOc.
https://video.ethz.ch/speakers/collegium-helveticum/fleck/hermeneutics/
1310b9ca-1895-4648-ae3f-d611b1590b49.html.
Andrea Nye, Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic (London: Routledge, 1990). Full text here: https://archive.org/details/wordsofpowerfemi0000nyea.
The text of my 2009 New School lecture is archived on Fordham’s digital repository and Academia: “Great Men, Little Black Dresses, The Virtues of Keeping
One’s Feet on the Ground: On the Status of Women in Philosophy.” https://www.
academia.edu/67767126/On_the_Status_of_Women_in_Philosophy
Ginev, “The Hermeneutic Context of Constitution” in Babich, ed., Hermeneutic
Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God, 43–52.
See, again, Ginev, “Studies of Empirical Ontology and Ontological Difference.”
Fuller, “Hermeneutics from the Inside-Out and the Outside-In – And How Postmodernism Blew it All Wode Open,” Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of Social
Practices: Between Existential Analytic and Social Theory (London: Routledge
2018).
23
Babette Babich
24
45
46
47
48
49
DIVINATIO, volume 50, autumn-winter 2021
50
Ginev, Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of Social Practices: Between Existential
Analytic and Social Theory (London: Routledge 2018).
Ginev, Das hermeneutische projekt Georg Mischs (Vienna: Passagen Verlag
2011).
Ginev, Scientific Conceptualization and Ontological Difference (Berlin: de
Gruyter 2019).
Patricia Glazebrook, “Dimitri Ginev, Hermeneutic Realism: Reality Within Scientific Inquiry,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2018.08.44. https://ndpr.
nd.edu/reviews/dimitri-ginev-hermeneutic-realism-reality-within-scientific-inquiry/.
See the latter part of Babich, “Hermeneutics and Its Discontents in Philosophy of
Science,” here 180ff on the challenges of deploying (and interpreting) mathematic models quite in the context of real or life-world application. It hardly needs to
be said that we are living our lives today in the current and ongoing ‘pandemic’
on the terms of such models.
See on this a section of one of my several studies dedicated to the so-called ‘science’ wars, entitled “‘Les Pseudos’: Science vs. Pseudo-Science.” Ibid., 165ff.
Dimitri Ginev, Jeff Kochan, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Zürich, November 2013.
Photograph: Babette Babich
Main Topic :
NEW STUDIES
IN PHENOMENOLOGY
BABETTE BABICH
JASSEN ANDREEV
EMIL LENSKY
GUY VAN KERCKHOVEN
HERNÁN G. INVERSO
KOLYO KOEV
PAULA LORELLE
IGNACIO QUEPONS
KRISTYAN ENCHEV
VALENTIN KALINOV
autumn–winter 2021
50