Abstract

The author discusses the concept of social philosophy of sci­ence by Friedrich Shleiermacher. He argues that the purpose of Schleiermacher’s project was to transform the old-fashioned structure of German university as Middle Ages guilds into a mod­ern corporation that fits the political conditions of modernity and the needs of Prussian state. This project was closely connected with the Prussian foreign policy ambitions – i.e., widespread­ing the German Geist in the cultural, educational and scientific spheres. The key point of this project was the idea of the herme­neutic circle. The author claims that Schleiermacher worked with­in the borders of externalism, while Kant preferred the internalist point of view in his “The Conflicts of the Faculties”.