This volume is written from a hermenutico-phenomenological point of view. The essays cover a spectrum of relevant issues: the essential interpretation of science; the possibility of a strong hermeneutics of science that takes into consideration science's cognitive structure; the implications of existential-ontological interpretations of science for the post-metaphysical dialogue between hermeneutics and epistomology; the place of rhetorical tools in the human sciences; and the strategies of overcoming the legitimation crisis of the human sciences.

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. (shrink)