Abstract
Fossil bones are part of the landscape. Digging exposes them but does not elucidate them. Radiometric and other dating techniques uncover their place in time and allow a particular imagined structure to take shape — perhaps an early form of australopithecine is imaginatively reconstructed — but the classification of an imagined structure is not the end of an explanation or understanding of the fossil bones. Paleontology is a science; it is also, however, a history. Transposing the past into the present, the paleontologist wants to say of his fossil reconstructions what Hamlet said of Yorick: "I know him well." Thus theories concerning early hominids are a result of what might or perhaps even should be called paleontological hermeneutics: where the would-be texts are fossils and where, consequently, a sense of life, continuity, and wholeness needs to be fleshed out in order that the text be there to interpret, what is requisite is a grasping of existential as well as structural and functional significations. It is a matter then not only of explaining a certain sequence of events - why a certain change in joint structure was successful or how certain practices were preadaptive to later capacities, for example it is also a matter of understanding a whole — an individual, a living presence and the day to day actuality of that living form.
Recommended Citation
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine
(1984)
"Toward an Openly Hermeneutical Paleontology,"
University of Dayton Review: Vol. 17:
No.
1, Article 6.
Available at:
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/udr/vol17/iss1/6
Comments
Presented at the 11th Annual Philosophy Colloquium of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Dayton, held in March 1982.