Homo Interpretans: On Daston, Augustine, Wynter.

For Lorraine Daston, humans long to possess a knowledge formation that transcends the limitations of our species. After briefly introducing the wider project of which this paper forms a part -- a rethinking of solidarity for the Anthropocene -- I sketch a program for philosophical anthropology I call (repurposing Johann Michel) homo interpretans, the human as most basically a hermeneutic animal, by way of an extended quarrel with Daston. In doing so, my aim is to press the hermeneutics of revelation in two new directions: first by taking Daston's claim (theology haunts epistemology) as opening a fresh vantage onto Christian hermeneutics' own locus classicus, Augustine's De Doctrina; second by showing how this unlikely convergence of Christian hermeneutics and modern history of science matters for the task of rethinking solidarity in the present amid racial modernity. I organize this argument by contending that Daston's claim above is at once brilliant (Part 1) and odd (Part 2), then I turn to sketch its salience for rethinking the human within the world race built by a brief suggestive engagement with the notion of homo narrans in the work of Black feminist theorist Sylvia Wynter (Part 4). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]