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One of the most creative transitions in twentieth-century philosophy is explicitly recorded only in a footnote to an appendix to a translation into English of Hans-Georg Gadamer's book, Wahrheit und Methode. The obscurity of this reference conceals the fact that this transition was the work of Patrick Heelan. It was he who succeeded in showing Gadamer, against the widespread academic opinion, that the intellectual operations of the natural sciences embody indispensable elements of interpretation that make them effectively "hermeneutic." To this day, scholars of the Frankfurt School — I have in mind particularly Karl Otto Apel and Albrecht Wellmer, with whom I have debated this point at the New School of Social Research — assume the essential rightness of a naïve positivism in the philosophy of natural science, and use it to support a hard line opposition between Physics on the one hand, and History, or Sociology, on the other. Patrick Heelan has always been careful to avoid that oversimplification, and my aim in this paper is to ask why, despite his good example, so many of our colleagues are still tempted to go down this cul-de-sac.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_2

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