Philosophical Conceptions of Life and Importance of Hermeneutics in Comprehension of the Essence of Living Beings

It is shown how searching for the ways of knowledge and means of explaining the things essence philosophers strove for rising in their reasoning up to the level of comprehension of the state of things while counting such a comprehension as a genuine knowledge of nature. Later on philosophers made a great deal of efforts for discovering thorough foundations of natural sciences and humanity. They proposed theses concerning the comprehension of life which study presupposes a quest for epistemological replies to fundamental issues. In this way significant contribution was made by W. Dilthey suggesting to distinguish not two (natural and humanitarian) but three types of sciences and emphasized biological sciences based on the knowledge of teleological nexus. Developing this idea H. Plessner characterized biological sciences like the second-person ones as distinct from the first-person and the third-person sciences while distinguishing three types of life (vegetable, animal and human) and introducing the concept of "vitality". In the paper basic theses of biohermeneutics and the conception of eidetic biology as continuation of Dilthey and Plessner ideas are considered. A conclusion on the importance of hermeneutics for understanding the essence of living beings at the modern stage of development of the philosophy of life is drown.