Christopher R. Myers

Website: https://christopherrmyers.com/. I am a PhD Candidate at Fordham University (New York, U.S.A), a Fulbright Researcher at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Bochum, Germany), and a Teaching Instructor in Philosophy. My areas of specialization are 18th, 19th, and 20th century European philosophy, philosophy of science (especially social science), and hermeneutics. I'm writing a dissertation which examines Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Wilhelm Dilthey’s concepts of “life” and efforts to reframe scientific knowledge from the perspective of life. In my dissertation I argue that Nietzsche’s and Dilthey’s representations of “life” were fundamentally hermeneutically motivated, and therefore were not primarily representations of “vital reality” or “biological life”, but rather representations of the singular hermeneutic situation that is in question with scientific research: the reality that all understanding is rooted in our own “fore-understanding” and the effective reality of history. The importance of this thesis consists in its implication that contemporary questions about interpretation and method in the humanities and social sciences (especially in biopolitics, bioethics, anthropology, etc.) can be traced back to Nietzsche, Dilthey, and the history of philosophical hermeneutics. Furthermore, the importance of this thesis consists in its implication that Nietzsche and Dilthey's representations of "life" have much to offer us in reflecting on the nature of interpretation between and across traditional disciplinary boundaries.