When is a phenomenologist being hermeneutical?

AI and Society:1-15 (2020)
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Abstract

Many philosophers of science and technology who see themselves as coming “after” Husserl also claim that their phenomenology is hermeneutical. Yet they neither practice the same sort of phenomenology, nor do they all have the same understanding of hermeneutics. Moreover, their differences often seem to be more a function of different pre-selected substantive commitments—say, to take a “material” turn or to be resolutely “empirical”—than the product of any serious effort to clarify what it is be hermeneutical. In this essay, after some discussion of Dilthey’s reception among post-Husserlians (especially Patrick Heelan and Don Ihde), I consider how aspiring hermeneuts might make their own pre-possession of substantive and methodological commitments a hermeneutical topic. This is, of course, is not just a scholarly question of how post-Husserlian phenomenologists might make themselves more phenomenological. Without thoughtful self-awareness of these commitments, one’s assumptions about the use of technology, design, the place of science in the larger culture and in relation to conceptions of human flourishing—all of these assumptions are likely to pass through into technoscientific practice with insufficient critical consideration.

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reprint Scharff, Robert C. (2023) "When is a phenomenologist being hermeneutical?". AI and Society 38(6):2279-2293

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References found in this work

The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes.Maurice Merleau-Ponty - 1968 - Evanston [Ill.]: Northwestern University Press. Edited by Claude Lefort.
Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science.Don Ihde - 1998 - Northwestern University Press.
Philosophical Hermeneutics.Hans-Georg Gadamer - 1978 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 11 (3):191-195.

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