Abstract

The authors’ aim in this book is “to understand—from a philosophical standpoint—the social and historical nature of science, more precisely, its sociability and historicity”. “This book was created within a dialogue” between the two authors, and between our “friends”—those who supported a hermeneutic stance toward the natural sciences—and our “antagonists”—those belonging to the analytic philosophy of science. The dialogue took place at the University of Pittsburgh where McGuire is a Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Tuchanska was a visitor from the University of Lodz in Poland. They describe their task as “overcoming the limits of analytic philosophy of science with respect to conceptions of the scientist, scientific cognition, and the objects of science.” Expanding on this, the authors say that the task “requires going beyond the subject/object dichotomy that underlies scientific cognition and most modern philosophy. Certainly the subject/object opposition has been problematized. The names of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dewey, Husserl, Heidegger, or Gadamer come readily to mind. Their aim was purely philosophical: to reveal elements underlying both the subject and the object of cognition predominantly from the point of view of the individual cognizer. However, apart from the work of Hegel, Heidegger, Cassirer, Collingwood, and Gadamer, few attempts have been made to situate human cognition ontologically within the social, the cultural, and the historical. Our aim is to address these dimensions of cognition, especially in regard to scientific cognition”.