Abstract
According to a generally accepted thesis, science and metaphysics are separate intellectual activities. The thesis is new and not generally accepted in the philosophical systems of Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the first centuries in the development of the modern philosophy. The thesis presupposes the existence of sciences and their methodologies. Natural sciences in the modern sense exist since the sixteenth century, human sciences since the first half of the nineteenth century, and formal sciences since the end of the nineteenth century. Only the relation between the natural and the human sciences as empirical sciences are of interest for this investigation. Systematic reflections on the methodologies of the natural sciences emerge in the first half of the nineteenth and of the human and the formal sciences since the second half of the nineteenth century. Before proceeding, two key concepts need preliminary clarification, namely (a) methodology and (b) ontology.
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- 1.
Geist could be also translated as spirit and this would be closer to the connotations of the German term Geist. Already Fichte’s slogan of the understanding following the letter and not the spirit of Kant’s philosophy reveals the theological origin of the term. It is an adaptation of the distinction between the understanding according to the spirit and not to the letter of the holy scriptures of the church fathers. Hegel’s absolute spirit is for him a synonym of the theological divine spirit. Thus subjective and objective spirit are manifestation of the absolute spirit.
- 2.
See Th. Seebohm, Method and Methodology, Contributions to Phenomenology 50, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004, (hereafter HMM), pp. 56f.
- 3.
See HMM, pp. 79f.
- 4.
Only analysts defended a unified methodology for all sciences that can be recognized as real sciences.
- 5.
In Kant’s transcendental philosophy “transcendental” refers to conditions of the possibility of experience that transcend all experience and belong to a supersensible realm of things in themselves. This dimension does not exist within the residuum of the phenomenological reduction.
- 6.
It would be desirable but is not possible to say more about the history of the methodology of the natural sciences. Only two of the outstanding methodologists can be mentioned. Most influential for the development of the methodology of the natural sciences in the nineteenth century was John Stewart Mill, System of Logic, Raciocinative and Inductive, 1843. Among others one of the leading methodologist of the twentieth century was Sir Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, New York: Basic Books, 1959 (original German version Vienna 1935).
- 7.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, II. Transcendental Doctrine of Methods, B 819.
- 8.
Popper, l.c. esp. Chapter IV.
- 9.
I. Lakatos: “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in: Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos AND Alan Musgrave, Cambridge University Press, 1970, pp. 91–196.
- 10.
The structures of inner time consciousness are implied by the temporal structures of the lifeworld. But the lifeworld implies in addition the givenness of Others. Its temporal structures are, therefore, intersubjective and objective.
- 11.
Schutz, Phenomenology of the Social World. Trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967, Section (E) “The World of Predecessors and the Problem of History.”
- 12.
More material about elementary and higher understanding can be found in HMM §§ 12–14.
- 13.
An old principle of the jurists says quod non est in actis non est in mundo, “what is not in the records is not in the world.” Economics would be lost without written documents, e.g., of bookkeeping, records of financial transactions, etc.
- 14.
So called historical facts are not the immediately given facts for the historian in the present. See below § 4, 2.c.
- 15.
The reconstruction itself might be of interest for the present, but this is a second question. See below Section 6.
- 16.
Causa in Latin meant originally “guilty of,” “responsible for.”
- 17.
The term will be used in this essay without answering the question, whether “ideal” ought to be understood in the neo-Kantian or in the phenomenological sense or only as complex empirical abstraction.
- 18.
Psychoanalytical interpretations, deconstructions of texts, etc. Common to all of them is that they presuppose viewpoints known to the interpreter but foreign to the contemporary context of the text. It is, therefore, impossible to falsify them, anything goes, if they presuppose not (yet) falsified philological interpretations of the text.
- 19.
For an extensive, approximately complete account see HMM Part III, Chapters 7 and 8.
- 20.
A stemma has the form of branching roots. See HMM § 35.
- 21.
See HMM § 23, § 36; see also Section 5 about the emergence of the problems with the unity of interpretation and application in the age of reformation and humanism.
- 22.
For instance the guilds of the masons and the millers in the Middle Ages.
- 23.
“Caesar went over the Rubicon with his legions and became dictator of Rome.” – “Caesar became dictator of Rome because he went over the Rubicon with his legions.” This as well as the following example is trivial just because as examples they are immediately plausible.
- 24.
“Caesar broke a Roman law going over the Rubicon because the purpose of this law was precisely to keep Roman war leaders from forcing the Senate with their legions to grant them the dictatorship.”
- 25.
See Th. M. Seebohm, “Historische Kausalerklärung”; Kausalität, Neue Texte, ed. Günter Posch, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981, 260–289.
- 26.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, The University of Chicago Press, 1970.
- 27.
Kuhn’s history of science, for example, has been criticized because of its historical relativism. It can serve indeed as a good example of historism and its paradoxes. Obviously Kuhn fell into this ontological trap without noticing it.
- 28.
H.M. Emrich, Psychiatrische Anthropologie, München, 1990, Kap. VI.
- 29.
See HMM, p. 125, 148.
- 30.
Buddhism has no troubles with the worldview of the natural sciences. Fundamentalists in prophetic book religions with books written by prophets listening to their God have serious problems.
- 31.
- 32.
The first influential methodological criticique of the claim that psychoanalysis is a science was Ernest Nagel: “Methodological Issues in Psychoanalytic Theory,” in Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and Philosophy, ed. Sidney Hook, New York University Press, 1959, pp. 38–56. For Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: an Essay on Interpretation, transl. Denis Savage, Yale University Press, 1970. esp. Book III, Chapter 1, this critique is an accepted background for his interpretation of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutics of suspicion.
- 33.
Psychiatrists are supposed to have also some training in psychological treatments and psychologists ought to be capable to recognize whether and how far the suffering of the patient has physiological causes and can only be treated with the aid of medications or not.
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Seebohm, T.M. (2010). Naturalism, Historism, and Phenomenology. In: Nenon, T., Blosser, P. (eds) Advancing Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9286-1_2
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