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Although Nietzsche is typically regarded neither as a philosopher of science nor an epistemologist, he was surprisingly preoccupied with these issues.¹ Nietzsche's question is the critical question of the possibility of truth itself and it is in the same critical and Kantian spirit that he reflects upon the dynamic of scientific inquiry. For Kant, it is the structure of questioning (and the art or framing activity of questioning) rather than the ideal of objective, "factual" observation which supports the possibility of a positive or empirical and progressive or secure science of nature (KdrV Bxiii).² Nietzsche's decidedly radicalized but still-Kantian advance shifts the focus of the critically scientific question, as the constituting constraint of intuition, to science itself as well as and thereby to the ideal of critique. This critical move, questioning both science as well as the possibility of scientific critique, is essentially philosophical: raising the question of science as the Heideggerian question-of-the-question, proposed as a genuine question or challenge to the natural sciences.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2428-9_1

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