Robert C. Scharff

Becoming a philosopher: What Heidegger learned from Dilthey, 1919–25

Wilhelm Dilthey is, famously, an epistemological pioneer for a second, ‘human’ kind of science that ‘understands’ life as we live it, instead of ‘explaining’ things as we observe them. Even today, he is usually cited for his role in the Erklären–Verstehen debate. My article, however, follows Heideggers suggestion that we make the existence of the debate itself the problem. Whether there are different sorts of entity, different reasons for studying them and different means for doing so – such issues raise questions about science itself, not just about how to do it better. Moreover, what sort of philosopher is competent to address such questions? Heidegger argues that Diltheys later writings intimate that it must be one who thinks from the ‘standpoint of (historical) life itself.’ This issue, says Heidegger, is ‘alive’ in Dilthey but is continually short-circuited by his very traditional plan for a ‘Critique of Historical Reason.’ Diltheys unsuccessful struggles to produce this Critique are his gift to us, however. They encourage us to explicitly reconsider, as Heidegger does not only in Being and Time but throughout his life, what Dilthey cannot: If philosophy, like all human practices, is historical to the core, what is it to ‘be’ philosophical, about science or anything else?

Comte and the Possibility of a Hermeneutics of Science

One surprising feature of Comte’s positivism is that it does not support the sort of “rational reconstruction” of the scientific method promoted by 20th Century positivism. Still more surprising is what one might call the “pragmatist” character of his arguments against such reconstructions. Of course later positivists, too, sometimes claim to be heirs to pragmatism; but Comte’s pragmatism is of a different order. Later positivists speak of pragmatism within their context of a purely internalist, epistemic analysis of scientific reasoning — a task they sharply distinguish from what they see as the “extraneous” and non-philosophical study of the psychological, social, political, and historical factors that impinge upon actual scientific practice. In contrast, Comte’s pragmatism does not yet even recognize such a distinction. Indeed, in this respect, and certainly most surprising of all, his treatment of science has less in common with later positivism than with the views of some contemporary postpositivists. For in both Comte and postpositivism, philosophy is charged with thinking about science — i.e., with reflecting on scientific practice understood as one human activity among others, not just analyzing and/or idealizing its cognitive structure from within.

On Failing to be Cartesian: Reconsidering the ‘Impurity’ of Descartes’s Meditation

Abstract This paper begins from the observation that in the Meditations, Descartes never achieves the ‘pure’, thoroughly decontextualized kind of thinking he famously promoted. Some commentators have used this observation to promote pure inquiry more diligently and to criticize Descartes for failing to achieve it. Other commentators have simply called for greater historical fairness and urged that we renew our efforts to understand how Descartes’s inquiry actually does operate. This paper, although sympathetic with this second group of commentators, argues that in revisiting the tensions between what Descartes actually accomplished and what he said he was trying to accomplish, we should see a contemporary lesson, not just better historical understanding. It is argued that in spite of the strong presence in his writings of the imagery of the ‘Cartesian’ ideal of a perfectly presuppositionless philosophical standpoint, not only does Descartes himself never become a Cartesian, but his own practice provides perhaps the best evidence against the very possibility of the Cartesian ‘project of pure inquiry’ to which he aspired.