Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science

Una breve analisi di alcuni saggi scritti da Hans George Gadamer uno dei più eminenti allievi di Martin Heidegger e filosofo della disciplina ermeneutica. L'autore analizza in quest'opera il percorso filosofico che conduce il giovane Heidegger di Essere e Tempo all'ultima fase del suo intrigante filosofare che è quella che segue il momento della 'svolta' in cui il significato dell'orizzonte di Tempo ed Essere assumono nuovi significati nell'orizzonte umano.

Abstract: Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact foregrounds claims traditionally excluded from reception, often regarded as opposed to fact, scientific claims that are increasingly seldom discussed in connection with philosophy of science save as examples of pseudo-science. I am especially concerned with scientists, like Peter Duesberg, who question the epidemiological link between HIV and AIDS and who are thereby discounted—no matter their credentials, no matter the cogency of their arguments, no matter the sobriety of their statistics—but also with other classic examples of so-called pseudo-science including homeopathy and other sciences, such as cold fusion. The pseudo-science version of the demarcation problem turns out to include some of the details that Latour articulates multifariously under a variety of species or kinds in his essay/interactive research project/monograph, ‘Biography of an Investigation’. Given the economic constraints of the current day, especially in the academy, the growing trend in almost all disciplines is that of suppression by threat: say what everyone else says or you won’t be hired (tenured/published/cited). In this way, non-citation of outlier views generates what Kuhn called normal science. Finally, a review of Lewontin’s discussion of biology shows the continuing role of ideology by bringing in some of the complex issues associated with the resistant bacteria (tuberculosis, Lyme disease, syphilis) and AIDS.

Heidegger and Gadamer are typically read by different scholars of religion. Heidegger tends to be read by philosophers of religion examining his contribution to matters of doubt, existential finitude, and atheism. Gadamer tends to be read by those with an interest in interpreting the Bible, especially by those with more confessional or epistemically optimistic sensibilities. In both cases, Heidegger and Gadamer have well-established associations with specific theological positions.

Sacred Language, Sacred World challenges this arrangement by re-reading the primary texts as theological resources; the book defends an alternative theological appropriation of their philosophical work through a close engagement with portions of their argument.

What emerges is an account of the unity of tradition, reason, and scriptural language. This account goes beyond claims of their relatedness, which are uncontroversial, and advances the stronger argument that they name the very same thing. Although initially counterintuitive, the central task set by both Heidegger and Gadamer is the investigation of that one phenomenon. This argument challenges the pervasive image in which Christians rely on ‘tradition’ to ‘reason’ about the meaning of ‘scripture’. It puts into question the injunction that theologians should balance the resources of scripture, tradition, and reason.

Sacred Language, Sacred World offers an account of Christian life as more fundamental than certain entities which are distilled out of it, namely: scripture, tradition and reason.

http://bloomsbury.com/uk/sacred-language-sacred-world-9780567664884/

Diversity in the Structure of Christian Reasoning examines the effect of Christian commitments on rationality. When Christians read scripture, traditions supply concepts that shape what counts as normal, good, and true. This book offers an account of how different communities produce divergent readings of the Bible. It considers two examples from World Christianity, first a Bakongo community in central Africa, and then a Tamil bishop in southern India. Each case displays a relation between tradition and reason that reconfigures the hermeneutical picture developed by Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. To see what transpires when readers decide about a correct interpretation, this book offers theologians and scholars of religion a fresh strategy that keeps in view the global character of modern Christianity.
http://www.brill.com/products/book/diversity-structure-christian-reasoning

Starting from the most important conquests of contemporary post-positivistic epistemology and from its authors such as Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Edgar Morin and going through Gadamer's hermeneutics or Wittgenstein and de Mandeville's approaches to scientific and social paradigms, this article focuses on the limits of scientific dogmas and on the overbearing rationalism that claims to explain everything, marginalizing many aspects of human life which cannot be rationalized. The scientific approach cannot be just conceptual. It must be opened to images and unusual connections. The scientist must concentrate his or her attention on limit-matters that are often unpredictable and go beyond the logical-philosophical field toward the metaphysical one. “I did not know I did not know” realized von Foerster, and aware of that, the scientist should become the specialist of the unknown, moving along the border-figures of science and philosophy.

This paper was written in response to Jodi Latremouille's paper My Treasured Relation (http://jah.journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/jah/index.php/jah/article/view/62/pdf), a brilliant piece on the death of her cousin and the nature of living relations. I wrote it because it is sometimes difficult to see the deeply rigorous and scholarly demand that comes from attending to the life world and its ways. See also https://www.academia.edu/5997872/My_Treasured_Relation

This paper explores how hermeneutics views the relationship between themes/ideas/concepts/rules and the arising of the individual case. The individual case does not just "fall under" a theme or category. The cases that are of interest in hermeneutics are ones that call the theme or category to account for itself. This "calling to account" is why hermeneutics is deeply pedagogical.

The phenomenological question of consciousness usually associated with Husserl (although there are echoes of this in Augustine as in Marcus Aurelius, Kant and Schopenhauer), is the consciousness of the now, the present moment. I explore this consciousness for Erwin Schrödinger, which for him included reference to the Upanishads together with Nietzsche’s central teaching or “thinking” of the eternal recurrence of the same.

Published as

Babette Babich, “Schrödinger and Nietzsche and Life: Eternal Recurrence and the Conscious Now,” in: Christopher Key Chapple, ed., Antonio T. de Nicolas: Poet of Eternal Return (Ahmedabad, India: Ntyalanda International 2014), pp. 157-206,

"ABSTRACT:
    This study assumes the subject's pursuit of meaning is generally incapacitating and should be suspended. It aims to demonstrate how such a suspension is theoretically accomplished by utilizing Lacan's formulae of sexuation integrated with his work in discourse theory and topology.
    Part I places this study into context by examining scholarship from the established fields of hermeneutics, phenomenology, (post)structuralism, aesthetic theory and psychoanalysis in order to extract out their respective theory of meaning. These theories reveal that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation and reaches near crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand this crisis is mollified by the rise of Heideggerian-Gadamerian hermeneutical phenomenology which questions traditional epistemological approaches to the text using a new ontological conceptualization of meaning and a conscious rejection of methodology. On the other hand this crisis is exacerbated when the ubiquitous nature of meaning is itself challenged by (post)structuralism's discovery of the signifier which inscribes a limit to meaning, and by the domains of sense and nonsense newly opened up by aesthetic theory. These historical developments culminate in the field of psychoanalysis which most consequentially delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity.
    Part II extends these findings by rigorously constructing out of the Lacanian sexuated formulae a decidedly non-hermeneutical phenomenological approach useful in demonstrating the sexual nature of meaning. Explicated in their static state by way of an account of their original derivation from the Aristotelian logical square, it is argued that these four formulae are relevant to basic concerns of textual theory inclusive of the hermeneutical circle of meaning. These formulae are then set into motion by integrating them with Lacan's four discourses to demonstrate the breakdown of meaning. Finally, the cuts and sutures of two-dimensional space that is topology as set down in L'étourdit are performed to confirm how the very field of meaning is ultimately suspended from a nonsensical singular point known in Lacanian psychoanalysis as objet a. The contention is that by occupying this point the subject frees himself from the debilitating grip of meaning."

Continental philosophy of science has developed alongside mainstream analytic philosophy of science. But where continental approaches are inclusive, analytic philosophies of science are not– and they exclude not merely Nietzsche’s philosophy of science but Gödel’s philosophy of
physics. As a radicalization of Kant, Nietzsche’s critical philosophy of science puts science in question and Nietzsche’s critique of the methodological foundations of classical philology
bears on science, particularly evolution as well as style (in art and science). In addition to the critical (in Mach, Nietzsche, Heidegger but also Husserl just to the extent that continental
philosophy of science tends to depart from a reflection on the crisis of foundations), other continental philosophies of science include phenomenology (Husserl, Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, etc.) and hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, Heelan, etc.), especially incorporating history of science (Nietzsche, Mach, Duhem, Butterfield, Feyerabend, etc.). Examples are drawn from the philosophy of sciences (chemistry, geology, and biology) other than physics.