Cambridge University Press
1985

   What is human science? Is a truly human science of geography possible? What notions of spatiality adequately describe human spatial experience and behaviour?
The close relation between the social sciences and the methods and assumptions of the physical sciences has created both philosophical and methodological difficulties for the human and social sciences. The nature and choice of methods is affected, as is our interpretation of the world of human behaviour. This is particularly true for geography, where the accepted notions of space are predominantly those of physics and geometry.
   This book addresses itself to these problems through a discussion of the nature of science in the human sciences and, specifically, of the role of phenomenology in such inquiry. It criticizes established understanding of phenomenology in these sciences and demonstrates how the two are integrally related to each other. The discussion is developed clearly and imaginatively through four linked sections: geography and traditional metaphysics; geography and phenomenology; phenomenology and the question of human science; and human science, worldhood and place. The works of Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer and Kockelmans in particular are given careful and lucid consideration by the author.
   Arguing the need for a reflective geography to accompany all empirical science, this book will be of primary interest to geographers and will become a cornerstone in the philosophy of that discipline. Its outstanding scholastic and innovative qualities will ensure that it is of great importance to other areas of social science, especially where phenomenology, hermeneutics and the philosophy of science form the focus of contemporary debate, and to the philosophy of science itself.