The human sciences and the crisis of epistemology: The road to Heidegger's critique of modern science (Martin Heidegger)

This dissertation studies modern European philosophy's reflection the historical appearance of the human sciences, under the spell of either positivist ideology or historicism, while also making their scientific character a philosophical issue. The work thus hopes to situate the human sciences in an historical context out of which they become unintelligible: the philosophical reflection that, throughout late modernity, has registered their progressive appearance as disciplines of an uncertain and often questioned degree of scientificity. In this way, it challenges a standard practice of 20th c. philosophy of science—to start with the tradition inherited from logical positivism, as though the genre began ex-nihilo around the time, or with, Popper's Logik der Forschung.; The historical itinerary reconstructed begins with the antinomy nature/freedom in modern philosophy, particularly as it appears in the Kantian corpus. This is followed by an analysis of the dissolution of system philosophy against the background of the movements that constitute the historical matrix of the human sciences: positivism and historicism. Then the work considers the “return to Kant” in Dilthey and the neo-Kantians, which is a conscious attempt to reenact philosophical theories that may serve as scientific meta-language. Finally, the dissertation traces the reception of this Fragestellung in the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger, particularly in the latter's turn from a destruction of metaphysics to a critique of science and technology.; At the same time, the historical appearance of the sciences of man is considered together with the crisis of philosophy as epistemology or general theory of knowledge. This is done without disregard to the irreversible character of the epochal differend between science and philosophy, evidenced by the crisis of epistemology as scientific meta-language and the rise of an autonomous self-reflection of sciences that constitutes their own “philosophy of science.” Thus the work's conclusion attempts to find the epistemological site of a reflection on man that may go beyond the empirical in the discursive space that opens up between natural science and the retreat of philosophy as theory of knowledge.