Essay between analytical epistemology and philosophical hermeneutics

Abstract

The present essay aims at exploring an approximation of epistemological coherentism, in Keith Lehrer’s theory with hermeneutic philosophy, especially in the formulations made by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time. Such an approach, although unusual and suspicious for someone, was pointed out as a possible path by Johnatan Dancy and Merold Westphal, to solve impasses in epistemology that go back to its first formulations and accompany contemporary epistemology. In the first section, we discuss the strangeness of this approach. In the second section, we retrieved the central points of the history of epistemology up to Westphal’s suggestion of treating Heideggerian hermeneutics as the basis for a coherentist epistemology. In section three, we present Lehrer’s coherentist theory. In the last section, by way of conclusion, we retrieve Heidegger’s central understandings of knowledge and outline, what caveats should the epistemologist take to assume a hermeneutical position.