It is the aim of this text to understand how the concepts of formation, common sense, judgment and taste, rehabilitated by H.-G. Gadamer, are essential beacons of the human sciences and of Humanism, today so much demanded by some sectors of the harsh sciences, such as medicine. Humanizing services and behaviors is a contemporary complaint that needs conductive categories and of real hermeneutics testimonies. Philosophy must therefore indicate the ways.

This paper explores Mikel Dufrenne’s approach to phenomenological aesthetics, and assesses its relevance for understanding today’s art.

A dialogue between three contemporary philosophers is fictionalized on the crisis of the Humanities and the birth of a new epistemological paradigm: Martha Nussbaum from an American liberal position, Victoria Camps from an European social democratic position and Rosi Braidotti from a global post-Humanism perspective. It serves as introduction to the text included in this monograph: “Cuando las humanidades se hacen digitales: filosofía y algoritmo (When the Humanities become Digital: Philosophy and Algorithm)” by Mª de Lourdes Pérez González.

I began work on this project in 1975, when I became a research student at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. The study was completed with the assistance of a research bye-fellowship at Girton College and a research fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge. I wish to thank the fellows of these Colleges for the generous support which I have received.

In the preceding chapters, I have explored the contributions to the philosophy of social science which may be found in the writings of authors belonging to different intellectual traditions. This comparative analysis is invited and facilitated by a remarkable feature of twentieth-century thought: its convergence on the phenomenon of language. Like philosophers in the Anglo-Saxon world, both Ricoeur and Habermas emphasise the centrality and importance of language. Yet unlike many of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, neither Ricoeur nor Habermas regards the analysis of this phenomenon as an activity divorced from broader philosophical and theoretical concerns. Thus Ricoeur views language as a medium of objectification and assigns hermeneutics the task of unfolding the dimensions of being which are expressed in, and disclosed by, the semantic structure of symbols and texts. Habermas conceives of language as the locus of ideology, suggesting that the distortions effected by the exercise of power can be criticised through a reconstruction of the presuppositions of speech. So for authors within widely differing traditions, language has become a common field of analysis, a common intersection for divergent aims. However, whereas ordinary language philosophers tend to treat this field as the ultimate ground of inquiry, both Ricoeur and Habermas view it as a region through which interpretation must proceed, but which in the end it must surpass.

Hermeneutic phenomenology may be regarded as a philosophical tradition created by the synthesis of two Continental orientations. One of these orientations, that of hermeneutics, has a long and distinguished history which includes the work of authors such as Schleiermacher and Dilthey. The other orientation, that of phenomenology, stems largely from the investigations of Husserl, who clothed its contents in a transcendental guise. The key figures in the synthesis of these orientations are Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. In recent years, an outstanding contribution to this tradition has been made by Paul Ricoeur. However, the nature of Ricoeur's contribution can be fully appreciated only if it is placed within the wider context of his voluminous work. My aim in this chapter, therefore, is to present some key ideas of hermeneutic phenomenology by tracing the evolution of the philosophy of Ricoeur. This approach necessarily underplays the contributions of other authors within this tradition, as well as those writings of Ricoeur which are not immediately relevant to the topic concerned. Nevertheless, and in spite of these limitations, I assume that a short and selective exposition of Ricoeur's philosophy will provide a clear and coherent image of hermeneutic phenomenology.

The following study is concerned with the philosophy of social science. This sphere of philosophical inquiry remains an arena of deep-rooted dispute. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, many authors have argued that the methods of the social sciences are identical in essential respects with those of the natural sciences. The latter disciplines provide, by virtue of their very success, an exemplar of what all knowledge should be: empirically grounded, universally binding, value-free. However, during the same period, many writers have rejected this view, maintaining that there is a radical discontinuity between the natural and the social domain. For the social world consists of speaking and acting subjects who constantly make sense of themselves and others, and whose meaningful and wilful activities cannot be comprehended by the methods of the natural sciences. The study of the social world requires, these writers contend, a fundamentally different approach.