Ginev, D. (2019). Scientific Conceptualization and Ontological Difference . Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter 2019, pp. 2
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BOOK REVIEW
Ginev, D. (2019). Scientific Conceptualization and Ontological Difference. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter 2019, pp. 280 + x. ISBN 978‑3‑11‑060373‑6 Emil Lensky1 Received: 16 July 2020 / Accepted: 4 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
This book tries to bridge the gap between the tradition of the hermeneutic philosophy of science and the tradition of interpretive human studies. Its main point is that in a wide range of cases the empirical basis of scientific conceptualization should be regarded not as a static factuality, but as a contextualizing (and contextualized) facticity. According to hermeneutic phenomenology, facticity is that phenomenal state of affairs in which understanding and interpretation play a constitutive role. Understanding and interpretation are not external procedures, but ingredients of facticity. Facticity is inherently uncertain, and can only be conceptualized in its potentiality-for-being. Conceptualizing facticity in this way cannot avoid the implementation of the ontological difference (in the sense of hermeneutic phenomenology). The author’s starting proposition is to integrate the ontological difference in various forms of scientific conceptualization. With respect to this proposition, the ontological difference is between the inner-worldly procedurally identifiable entities as actual or possible objects of inquiry and the world as ever transcending horizon in which these entities are embedded (p. 7). In tackling this task, Dimitri Ginev follows the lead of Heidegger who in Being and Time argues that mathematics is not more rigorous but only narrower than historical science, because the existential foundations relevant for it lie within a narrower range. Any scientific discipline roots in certain existential-ontological presuppositions that in the course of inquiry may reflexively become a point to be taken into consideration. Consequently, reflexive scientific inquiry gets engaged not only with a strategy for “ontic objectification”, but with the treatment of ontological issues as well. Ginev calls the balance between the procedures of objectification and reflexivity about existential-ontological * Emil Lensky [email protected] 1
Institute for Critical Philosophy “Documenta”, Sofia 1011, Bulgaria
presuppositions—a balance that remains stable in the course of inquiry—a “characteristic hermeneutic situation” (p. 15). The ontological difference becomes integrated in scientific conceptualization via this situation. (Roughly, the balance consists in the following “proportion”: The stronger the rational-epistemological codification of ontic objectification, the narrower the existential-ontological foundations of the constitution of research objects.) The formulation of the task of integrating the difference with scientific inquiry at the very outset of the study promises a book that should situate “portions” of hermeneutic phenomenology in the context of philosophy of science. However, several surprising twists and turns in the cour
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