Abstract

This paper is an assessment of the key debates on Heidegger’s existential conception of science. It relates the topics to contemporary problems in the philosophy of the natural sciences, providing the reader with a framework to evaluate various versions of hermeneutic phenomenology of scientific research as alternatives to both, naturalistic and normativeepistemological conceptions of scientific research. The paper delineates a context of constitution that is irreducible to the context-distinction between discovery and justification. In this context, the tenets of the doctrine of cognitive existentialism are formulated.