Continental Philosophy of Science

Abstract

Continental philosophies of science tend to exemplify holistic themes connecting order and contingency, questions and answers, writers and readers, speakers and hearers.Such philosophies of science also tend to feature a fundamental emphasis on the historical and cultural situatedness of discourse as significant; relevance of mutual attunement of speaker and hearer; necessity of pre-linguistic cognition based in human engagement with a common socio-cultural historical world; role of narrative and metaphor as explanatory; sustained emphasis on understanding questioning; truth seen as horizonal, aletheic, or perspectival; and a tolerance for paradoxical and complex forms of expression.Philosophy of science in the Continental tradition is thus more comprehensive than philosophy of science in the analytic tradition, including (and as analytic philosophy of science does not tend to include) perspectives on the history ofscience as well as the social and practical dimensions of scientific discovery.Where analytic philosophy is about reducing or, indeed, eliminating the perennial problems of philosophy, Continental philosophy is all about thinking and that will mean, as both Heidegger and Nietzsche emphasize, making such problems more not less problematic.Continental philosophy of science engages not only the world of the scientist (Heelan 1965: 4; see contributions to Babich 2002 as well as Knorr-Cetina 1999) but the scientists themselves: '1 cannot conceive myself,' Merleau-Ponty writes in his Phenomenology ofPerception, 'as nothing but a bit of the world, a mere object of biological, psychological or sociological investigation' (Merleau-Ponty 1962: viii).For Merleau-Ponty, the scientist-in-the-world is the condition, sine qua non, of scientific inquiry.Continuing in this deliberately first person voice, he writes, '1 cannot shut myself up within the realm of science.All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point ofview,or from some experience ofthe world, without which the symbols ofscience would be meaningless.'(

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