Abstract

Human knowledge seems clearly to be situated and conditioned by history and tradition, culture and value, language and meaning, and the contingent faculties of the human body and mind. This fact is often thought to undermine of itself the possibility of the human achievement of rigorous, "scientific" knowledge---the certainty of truth and, in particular, the certainty of objectively relevant truth and of the truth of what counts as a universal essence. Such is the thinking of many who depart from Edmund Husserl's vision of achieving rigorous science on the basis of his phenomenology. Against this line of thinking, this dissertation seeks to show that situatedness and science are compatible. This compatibility is defended by clarifying how a possibly, if not certainly, situated science can be successfully conducted on the basis of phenomenology---a phenomenology that is faithful in the main to the thought of its founder. ;Chapter one of the dissertation clarifies the nature of science and the problem of situatedness. Chapter two defends the genuine possibility of achieving the act of certainty basic to rigorous science, and it highlights phenomenology's relevance to this achievement. With reference to Martin Heidegger, it also explores the problem that semblances pose for science. Drawing upon the findings thus far achieved, the dissertation then shows the objective relevance of a science based upon phenomenology in chapter three, and it defends the genuine possibility of science's laying hold of truths of universals and universally valid truths in chapter four. The fifth and final chapter proposes a "refiguration" of the inherited, philosophical traditions of modernity and post-modernity in light of the genuine possibility of science in situation