Hermeneutics and Historicism: Reflections on Winch, Apel and Vico

Abstract

For nearly three centuries, Vico's name remained virtually unknown outside narrow philosophical and literary circles; indications are, however, that he is beginning to emerge from this obscurity.1 His resurgence, it seems to me, is by no means fortuitous or the result of mere antiquarian interests. In a striking manner philosophical developments in our time have revived central themes of the Neapolitan thinker; his preoccupation with practical-historical experience and its exegesis reverberates in many facets of contemporary thought—even bypassing the barrier between Continental and Anglo-Saxon perspectives. On the Continent, Vico's legacy had been preserved to some extent in Dilthey's “life-philosophy”; in a more rigorous fashion, the implications of this legacy were exploredby existential phenomenology and hermeneutics with their focus on the human “life-world” and on the significance of prereflective understanding for cognitive operations. Comparable concerns havesurfaced in analytical philosophy. Abandoning (or at least modifying) the quest for an artificial symbolism capturing the structure of the empirical universe, linguistic analysis during recent decades has shifted attention increasingly to ordinary language as the underlying matrix of practical and theoretical endeavors. In a similar vein, philosophers of science have tended to turn from logical calculation and empirical verification to the concrete “context of discovery”—the paradigmatic frameworks in terms of which investigative procedures are sanctioned and research goals formulated.