Abstract
This paper distinguishes the human sciences from the natural sciences in terms of a difference between an ‘inside-out’ and an ‘outside-in’ approach to hermeneutics, the former rendering us empirical geniuses and transcendental dopes and the latter transcendental geniuses and empirical dopes. The social sciences have been the historic testing ground for these two approaches. However, the postmodern condition has blown open this dialectic by challenging the shared assumption that the ‘human’ is a member of Homo sapiens, which had been in place from the second half of the 18th century to the second half of the 20th century. The paper ends by questioning whether hermeneutics is possible in a world where the ‘human’ is so ontologically indeterminate.
