Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42 (2011) 372–380

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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

Hermeneutical contributions to the history of science: Gadamer on ‘presentism’

Oscar Moro Abadía ⇑
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL, Canada A1C 5S7
Instituto de Filosofía-CSIC, Albasanz 26-28, 28037 Madrid, Spain

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: This article examines how Hans G. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics can contribute to contempo-
Presentism rary debates on the concept of ‘presentism’. In the field of the history of science, this term is usually
Whig history employed in two ways. First, ‘presentism’ refers to the kind of historiography which judges the past to
Philosophical hermeneutics
legitimate the present. Second, this concept designates the inevitable influence of the present in the
Gadamer
interpretation of the past. In this paper, I argue that both dimensions of the relationship between the
present and the past are explored by Hans G. Gadamer in Truth and Method and other texts. In the first
place, Gadamer’s critique of historicism calls into question the anti-presentist ideal of studying the past
for ‘its own sake’. In the second place, Gadamer’s thesis that all understanding inevitably involves some
prejudice poses the question of the inherent ‘‘present-centredness’’ of historical interpretations. By exam-
ining Gadamer’s hermeneutics, I seek to provide historians with new arguments and perspectives on the
question of ‘presentism’.
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When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

1. Introduction the first place, ‘presentism’ is a term generally employed to desig-

During the last fifty years, the concept of ‘presentism’ has been
extensively used by philosophers and historians of science. In the
case of the history of science, ‘presentism’ is a polysemous word
which can adopt different meanings depending on the context.
For instance, the notion of ‘whig history’, which is often equated
to that of ‘presentism’ (e.g. Mayr, 1990; Pickstone, 1995, p. 203,
pp. 301–302; Hull, 2000, p. 71; Jardine, 2003, p. 125), can refer
to ‘‘the distortion wrought by describing and evaluating past sci-
ence from the perspective of present science’’ (Hardcastle, 1991,
p. 323), to ‘‘the imposition of our categories on the deeds and
works of past agents who lacked such categories’’ (Jardine, 2003,
p. 126) and to ‘‘the belief that any historian who becomes profes-
sionally interested in current problems commits the sin of being
a ‘Whig historian’ ’’ (Graham, 1981, p. 5). While not seeking to deny
the polysemous nature of ‘presentism’, I have distinguished two
primary ways in which historians have used this concept: (A)
‘Presentism’ as a kind of historiography and (B) ‘Presentism’ as an
inherent trait of historical research (Moro Abadía, 2009, p. 55). In
nate and denigrate the kind of historiographical approach in which
past science and scientists are judged and evaluated in the light of
modern knowledge. In this setting, ‘presentism’, ‘whig history’ and
‘anachronistic history’ are frequently considered as synonymous
(e.g. Kragh, 1987, p. 93; Nickles, 1995, p. 151; Stocking, 1968
[1965], p. 4; Trout, 1994, p. 39). Furthermore, most historians agree
that the best way to counteract this kind of ‘presentism’ is studying
the past ‘in its own terms’. In the second place, ‘presentism’ also re-
fers to the many ways in which the present influences the interpre-
tation of the past, including the fact that historians are constricted
by the linguistic, conceptual and cultural codes of their time. In this
case, specialists also use the notions ‘present-centredness’ and
‘present-mindedness’ to refer to this condition of historical re-
search (Ashplant & Wilson, 1988, p. 253; Brush, 1995, p. 220;
Cunningham, 1988, p. 367; Wilson & Ashplant, 1988, p. 11).
In this paper I argue that the analysis of these two dimensions of
the relationship between the present and the past is at the heart of
Gadamer’s hermeneutical project. Hans G. Gadamer (1900–2002)
was a central figure in the development of philosophical

⇑ Address: Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL, Canada AIC 5S7.
E-mail address: oscar_moro_abadia@yahoo.es

0039-3681/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2010.12.003
 O.M. Abadía / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42 (2011) 372–380
hermeneutics, a version of hermeneutics also explored by authors
such as Paul Ricoeur and Gianni Vattimo. Professor of philosophy
at the universities of Leipzig and Heidelberg, Gadamer presented
his main ideas in Wahrheit und Methode, a book translated into Eng-
lish under the title Truth and Method in 1975 (Gadamer, 2006a
[1960]). He also devoted numerous papers, talks and interviews
to explain his views on hermeneutics. Most of these materials were
compiled in the second volume of Gesammelte Werke (Gadamer,
1986) and appeared in English scattered throughout many books
and readers1. While philosophical hermeneutics has been the object
of many remarkable analyses (e.g. Dostal, 2002; Figal, 2000; Figal,
Grondin, & Schmidt, 2000; Grondin, 1994 [1991], 2003 [1999];
Malpas, Arnswald & Kertsche, 2002; Palmer, 1969; Wachterhauser,
1985, 1994, 1999), there is little scholarship on Gadamer’s contribu-
tion to ‘presentism’. Furthermore, most papers on this topic do not
cite Gadamer (e.g. Ashplant & Wilson, 1988; Graham, 1981; Hall,
1983; Hardcastle, 1991; Hull, 1979; Mayr, 1990; Pearce Williams,
1975; Pickstone, 1995; Russell, 1984; Tosh, 2003; Wilson & Ashplant,
1988; see, however, Jardine, 2003, p.135; Moro Abadía, 2008, 2009).
This omission is surprising given some evident analogies between
Gadamer’s hermeneutics and contemporary debates on ‘presentism’.
A couple of examples can illustrate this point. During the same years
that Thomas Kuhn proclaimed that ‘‘insofar as possible the historian
should set aside the science that he knows; [he/she] should try to
think as they [past scientists] did’’ (Kuhn, 1977 [1968], p. 110),
Gadamer argued that ‘‘every historical moment must be understood
in itself and cannot be submitted to the measures of a present which
may be extrinsic to it’’ (Gadamer, 1979 [1963], p. 120). Similarly,
some of the arguments put forward by historians of science in the
1980s and the 1990s to demonstrate the inevitable ‘present-
centredness’ of historical inquiry had been extensively examined by
Gadamer in Truth and Method (Gadamer, 2006a, [1960]). For instance,
the idea that ‘‘the conceptual apparatus available to historians will be
(or include) that of the present’’ (Pickstone, 1995, p. 205) is reminis-
cent of Gadamer’s belief that the historian is ‘‘a child of his time who
is unquestioningly dominated by the concepts and prejudices of his
own age’’ (Gadamer, 2006a [1960], p. 397; GW I, p. 400).
The central purpose of this article is to analyze philosophical
hermeneutics through the lens of the ‘presentist’ debate. In partic-
ular, I seek to determine the similarities and differences that can be
established between Gadamer’s approach to this question and that
of the historians of science. To do so, I examine Gadamer’s position
on the two main problems posed by the concept of ‘presentism’. In
the first part, I relate the definition of ‘presentism’ as a misleading
historiographical approach to Gadamer’s critique of historicism. To
begin, Gadamer does not ‘‘dispute the fact that controlling the pre-
judice of our own present to such an extent that we do not misun-
derstand the witnesses of the past is a valid aim’’ (Gadamer, 1976
[1966]: p. 6, GW II: 222). On this point, Gadamer was not far from
the ‘new’ history of science that, in the 1960s, rejected ‘whig his-
tory’ and called for an approach seeking to understand past texts
in their historical context. However, Gadamer diverged from these
historians in the way in which he considered the accomplishment
of such a task. In fact, Gadamer called into question the historicist
ideal of studying the past ‘in its own terms’ for such a model pre-
supposed that ‘‘in understanding history one must leave one’s own
concept aside and think only in the concepts of the epoch one is
trying to understand’’ (Gadamer, 2006a [1960], p. 398; GW I, p.
400). This positioning is ‘‘not only impossible but manifestly ab-
surd’’ (Gadamer, 2006a [1960], p. 398; GW I, p. 400), for historians
cannot go beyond their own time. To illustrate Gadamer’s critique
of historicism, I reconstruct his dialogue with Dilthey.
1
In this article, I refer both to Gadamer’s original publications and to their English translations. Following a long-established convention, I use in this paper the abbreviation
GW to refer to Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke (Gadamer, 1986) and GS for Dilthey’s Gesammelte Schriften (Dilthey, 1959–1968).
373
In the second part, I compare the different ways in which
Gadamer and historians of science in the 1980s and the 1990s
posed the question of the ‘present-centredness’ of history. I argue
that in both cases the emphasis on the present-mindedness of his-
torical practice was, up to a point, a reaction against the excesses of
historicism. In the case of Gadamer, he argued that the historicist
ideal of understanding the past ‘in its own terms’ was impossible
to achieve for ‘‘all understanding inevitably involves some preju-
dice’’ (Gadamer, 2006a [1960], p. 272; GW I, p. 274). For instance,
Gadamer argued that historical interpretations are prejudiced by
the tradition in which they take place, the language in which they
occur and, of course, the present from which they emerge. In this
point, Gadamer was certainly close to those authors who stated
that ‘‘the historian, in seeking to study, reconstruct and write about
the past, is constrained by necessarily starting from the perceptual
and conceptual categories of the present’’ (Ashplant & Wilson,
1988, p.253). However, Gadamer differed from these historians in
that he did not interpret this conditionedness as a limitation of his-
torical knowledge. On the contrary, he sought ‘‘to rehabilitate the
concept of prejudice and acknowledge the fact that there are legit-
imate prejudices’’ (Gadamer, 2006a [1960], p. 278; GW I, p. 281). In
other words, according to Gadamer, the fact that history is inevita-
bly present-prejudiced is not an obstacle for historical understand-
ing but, rather, it is the condition of historical knowledge.
I conclude by arguing that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneu-
tics can encourage historians of science to think about ‘presentism’
in new and productive ways. First, Gadamer develops in great de-
tail some of the arguments used by historians to evoke the many
faces of ‘presentism’. In this sense, philosophical hermeneutics
can be a source of inspiration to think more critically about this to-
pic. Second, Gadamer’s perspective on ‘presentism’ is not that of a
historian, but that of a philosopher. For this reason, Gadamer’s
viewpoint can inspire historians to think about ‘presentism’ be-
yond the limits defined by their own tradition.
Before proceeding to the analysis, two methodological notes are
in order. In the first place, this article establishes a systematic com-
parison between Gadamer and the ‘historians of science’, the latter
divided into two groups according to the definition of ‘presentism’
they endorse. I appreciate that the broad category of ‘historians of
science’ implies a monolithic and simplistic representation of
much more nuanced views (for instance, some of the authors I in-
clude in this group are not historians of science, but philosophers
of science). However I consider this reductionism justified for
two reasons. First, I cannot analyze each historian of science sepa-
rately in the parameters of a paper. Second, the authors mentioned
in this paper endorse one of the two aforementioned definitions of
presentism. The second consideration refers to the fact that the
comparison between Gadamer and historians of science can some-
times produce the erroneous impression that they established a
veritable dialogue. However, as I explain in the conclusion, this
interpretation is not accurate. For this reason, it is important to
remember it is I who compares the ideas of Gadamer with those
of historians.
2. Gadamer on ‘Whig history’: the critique of historicism
The first usage of the concept of ‘presentism’ among English-
speaking historians is inextricably linked to the emergence of the
‘new’ history of science in the 1960s. It was at that time when a
new generation of Anglo-Saxon historians defined an innovative
program characterized by a number of features, including a focus
on the paradigms or worldviews orienting scientific research, an