8 - Implications for the human sciences and a human science of geography

Summary

[The] scientific structure [of the human sciences] (not, indeed, the ‘scientific attitude’ of those who work to advance them) is today thoroughly questionable and needs to be attacked in new ways which must have their source in ontological problematics.

(Heidegger, 1927, 45)

The goal is to attain a fundamental illumination – using phenomenology – of the basic problems of [geography] as human positive science by bringing out its inner systematic relations.

(Adapted from Heidegger, 1982, xvii)

Phenomenology

Phenomenology seeks to ground the relationship between the scientific and the pre-scientific, the theoretical and the everyday, ontologically.

[It] does not subscribe to a ‘standpoint’ or represent any special ‘direction’; for phenomenology is nothing of either sort, nor can it become so as long as it understands itself. The expression ‘phenomenology’ signifies primarily a methodological conception. The expression does not characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research as subject matter, but rather the how of that research. The more genuinely a methodological concept is worked out and the more comprehensively it determines the principles on which a science is to be conducted, all the more primordially is it rooted in the way we come to terms with the things themselves, and the farther is it removed from what we call ‘technical devices’ though there are many such devices even in the theoretical disciplines.

(Heidegger, 1927, 27)