“In this book the author has brought together his long-standing interests in theory of scientific rationality and hermeneutic ontology by developing a hermeneutic alternative to analytic (and naturalist) epistemology of science.

The “hermeneutic philosophy of science” is less the name of a new field of philosophical than a demand for a “repetition of the basic philosophical questions of science” from hermeneutic point of view. The book addresses chiefly two subjects: (I) The hermeneutic response to the models of rational reconstruction of scientific knowledge; (II) The specificity of hermeneutico-ontological approach to the cognitive pluralism in science.”(Editorial Review)

Hermeneutics was elaborated as a specific art of understanding in humanities. The discovered paradigmatic, historical characteristics of scientific knowledge, and the role of rhetoric, interpretation and contextuality enabled us to use similar arguments in natural sciences too. In this way a new research field, the hermeneutics of science emerged based upon the works of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Gadamer.
A dialogue between philosophers and scientists begins in this volume on hermeneutic approaches to physics, biology, ethology, mathematics and cognitive science. Scientific principles, methodologies, discourse, language, and metaphors are analyzed, as well as the role of the lay public and the legitimation of science. Different hermeneutical-phenomenological approaches to perception, experiments, methods, discovery and justification and the genesis of science are presented. Hermeneutics shed a new light on the incommensurability of paradigms, the possibility of translation and the historical understanding of science.

(Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science)

Editorial Review:

“This richly textured book bridges analytic and hermeneutic and phenomenological philosophy of science, featuring unique resources for students of the philosophy and history of quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen Interpretation, cognitive theory and the psychology of perception, the history and philosophy of art, and the pragmatic and historical relationships between religion and science. Of special interest is the new technology of variational graphic representations with the insights (and mathematical apparatus) of Patrick Heelan’s work on the perception of space and the history of art, particularly the work of Cézanne and Van Gogh.
This book will interest students of the scientific philosophies of Heisenberg and Bohr, Wittgenstein (on science - Hertz - and on religion - Rush Rhees), as well as the social histories of Thomas Kuhn and Ludwig Fleck, and the philosophical insights of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Foucault, and including pragmatism and the contemporary Thomism of Bernard Longeran.”

“Professor Heelan’s book may well be the most substantial contribution yet made by the phenomenological/hermeneutical tradition to the understanding of science. Its primary aim is to show how, starting in the fifteenth century, certain artifacts were introduced to the European lifeworld which gradually restructured spatial perception so as to make the emergence of the scientific world view in the seventeenth century a natural outcome. Its secondary aim is to serve as an exemplar for systematic research in the philosophy of science that stands clearly outside the purview of the dominant analytical/positivist schools.”

Steve Fuller, Philosophy of the Social Sciences