Abstract
Hermeneutics in the traditional sense which I call methodological or weak hermeneutics is a way—the way—of interpreting textual material. Beginning with the problem of interpreting the Bible, methodological hermeneutics later became the method characteristic of historians and then of (what the Germans call) the Geisteswissenschaften—a term hard to translate which designates both the humanities and the humanistic study of culture. In contrast, science, according to this tradition, dealt with facts rather than texts and sought for explanations (in terms of other facts) rather than in terms of what they signified for human life and history. Science according to this understanding is not, and need not be, hermeneutically involved.
I wish to thank Joseph Kockelmans, Bernard Dauenhauer and Babette Babich for their help and comments on early versions of this paper.
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Notes
Knorr-cetina, Karin, and Amman, Klaus, “Image Dissection in Natural Scientific Inquiry,” Science, Technology and Human Values 15 (1990), pp. 259–283.
Galilei, Galileo, “The Assayer” (1623), from the translation of Stillman Drake in Drake, S. Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), pp. 237–238.
At crucial times in the history of Western philosophy, e.g., with Descartes, Hume, Carnap, Husserl, Heidegger, the rejuvenation of thinking was sought through a return to the evidence of some basic set of givens, i.e., to a phenomenology. Such phenomenologies seen in hindsight always turn out to be led by some guiding universal method or metaphor, project or purpose which converts the return to evident beginnings into a progressive method of philosophical inquiry. With Descartes and Husserl, it was the geometric or mathematical (in the largest sense) invariant structure of given human intentions; with Hume and Carnap, it was the spatio-temporal atomicity of the basic givens of experience. Every radical return to the “natural attitude,” such as Arthur Fine’s “natural ontological attitude,” invokes some universal progressive principle usually in disguise; without this there would be no sense of a new beginning, no phenomenology to ground truth claims.
Galilei, Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, trans. by Henry Crew (New York: Dover, 1914), pp. 178–179.
H-G Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 113–138.
The term “flesh” is borrowed from M. Merleau-Ponty’s later works, cf. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 127.
H-G Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. 99. The context of discussion is the constitution of a work of art. A similar constitution takes place in the search for a hitherto imperceptible entity such as scientific research aims at discovering. In this latter case, data become transformed into profiles of a new (or newly constituted) scientific phenomenon or entity, and scientific theory undergoes a transformation by taking on the character of being descriptive of this phenomenon. As a score is to a musical work, so scientific theory is to the scientific phenomenon, and as performances is to a musical work, so data are to the scientific phenomenon; see my “Experiment as Fulfillment of Theory,” in Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy, ed. by D.P. Chattapadhyaya, L. Embree, and J.N. Mohanty (New Delhi and Washington: University Press of America and CARP, 1990), pp. 313–328.
Heidegger’s phenomenology only applies to “ready-to-hands,” i.e., to objects actually involved in human actions, e.g., a hammer within a hammering, because only such objects show how they participate in the ontological horizon of Being. In contrast, to be merely “present-at-hand”, is to have merely the status of possibly becoming connected with ontological Being in a specific way—they do not exhibit (ontological) Being, only the possibility of (ontic) beings. All abstract and theoretical accounts for Heidegger fall into this second category.
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Heelan, P.A. (1994). Galileo, Luther, and the Hermeneutics of Natural Science. In: Stapleton, T.J. (eds) The Question of Hermeneutics. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1160-7_15
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