Modern scientific rationality, seeking to move beyond the metaphysical foundations of objective knowledge, takes the experience of a particular fact to be the actual expression of prior laws of the human mind or of nature, thereby paradoxically constituting a new, 'invisible' metaphysics. Among contemporary critiques of this way of 'thinking and doing science', a constructivist understanding is gaining outline; according to this conception, a particular fact and objective knowledge thereof derive from circumstantial relations between human beings and their world. Revisiting some of the main founders of Western science, such as Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Newton, and Stuart Mill, this hermeneutic essay explores the participation of the meta-concept of 'necessity' within this dialectic of knowledge and, in epistemological terms, interprets its role in the construction and hypostatization of modern scientific rationality.
philosophy of science; history of science; constructivism; necessity; metaphysics