Палеоэстетика Д. Тернера в контексте герменевтики и философии истории

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The article discusses a new book by Derek Turner, Paleoaesthetics and the Practice of Paleontology, which is the first outline on the given topic with a fairly wide coverage of current research literature. In a sense, Turner’s work can be viewed as an invitation to a dialogue between researchers who are interested in the philosophical and methodological problems of geology in general and paleontology in particular. The presented application of Turner for the construction of the theory of aesthetic values in the earth sciences requires a comprehensive consideration and study by different researchers. The aim of this article is to determine the place of Turner’s concept of paleoaesthetics in the general field of Western European philosophy. The article proves that Turner, like the classic of hermeneutics Gadamer, points to a close relationship between epistemic (historical) and aesthetic values in cognition. The dependence of our aesthetic perception of a fossil on the knowledge of its history, which Turner points out, can be described without distortion of meaning in terms of hermeneutics, namely, through the concept of the hermeneutic circle and the role of prior knowledge in historical knowledge. Also, Turner’s appeal to reflection on metaphors in paleontology, as on the poetic dimension of knowledge, also correlates with the idea of Hayden White, a classic of the philosophy of history of the 20th century, about the need to reflect on the poetic dimension of historical knowledge, as well as the fundamental role of the poetic in the construction of historical works. In addition, in his desire to make paleontology more exploratory and to move away from the descriptive nature of studies of the history of the Earth, Turner conducts the same operation as R. J. Collingwood, who strictly separated the descriptive history of “scissors and glue” from scientific history. In the author’s opinion, Turner’s replacement of the “textual record” metaphor in relation to fossils with the “investigative tool” metaphor is similar in meaning to the replacement of the “source” metaphor by the “evidence” metaphor that Collingwood produced in relation to historical initial data. Based on this, it is concluded that the similarity of the ideas of Turner and the classics of hermeneutics and the philosophy of history gives reason to believe that paleoaesthetics in the form proposed by Turner should be considered as one of the sections of hermeneutics and philosophy of history. Such an understanding of the place of paleoaesthetics in the world philosophical tradition, on the one hand, will contribute to the use of the achievements of the main trends in philosophy for the development of philosophical paleoaesthetics; on the other hand, turning to classical philosophical works will help to avoid doubling the meanings and building similar classical philosophical concepts about geological (paleontological) knowledge.