In this new study of Dilthey, Professor Makkreel attempts to counteract the common tendency among Dilthey scholars to divorce his early psychological work from his later hermeneutical-historical position by showing their essential continuity. Makkreel also attempts to show the centrality of Dilthey’s aesthetic writings, and to reveal their implications for his theory of historical understanding. A disregard of these themes, the author claims, has encouraged a fragmentary interpretation of Dilthey’s philosophy. The thrust of the book is to provide a historical (...) and theoretical background for the development of hitherto disregarded aspects of Dilthey’s mature philosophy. In Part II, for example, Professor Makkreel examines Dilthey’s aesthetics as a model human science and explores the role of the poetic imagination by exposing its apparently unnoticed epistemological implications. One such implication is that Dilthey’s theory of the imagination involves a concept of articulation which relates it to poetry and history. It is not clear in the text, however, why this implication is "epistemological," or how Makkreel’s treatment of it exhibits any epistemic analysis. The book also discusses Dilthey’s later hermeneutics and philosophy of history which some commentators believe to have replaced Dilthey’s earlier psychology as the means of understanding human existence in time. Makkreel denies this interpretation, and he reinstates the importance of psychology at all stages of Dilthey’s thought. One chapter examines the interesting question of Husserl’s relation to Dilthey. It attempts to show to what extent Dilthey reformulated his previous psychological descriptions of the lived experience in the light of Husserl’s work. (shrink)

In Hegel’s Dialectic the English speaking world is presented with a collection of five newly translated essays from the pen of Hans-Georg Gadamer. These essays on various topics in Hegel will all be of interest to Hegel scholars.

In this new study of Rousseau, Levine presents a Kantian reading of the Social Contract. By attempting to reveal Rousseau’s anticipation of such Kantian themes as moral right and obligation the author’s purpose has been "to produce a Kantian reading of The Social Contract, a reading that emphasizes the many respects in which Rousseau anticipates Kant and motivates his investigations in moral philosophy". This purported similarity has been noted previously by thinkers such as Hegel and Cassirer. The book also develops (...) the theme that the solution to the conflict between moral autonomy and political authority is the main issue in The Social Contract. Because Rousseau apparently "grasped his conflict better than either Hobbes or Locke" he was able to anticipate Marx’s critique of the contractarian tradition. Consequently, Rousseau’s political philosophy underlies the "deep structure" of contemporary mentality, and continues to dominate our own sense of self, society, and being-in-the-world. While the main issues in Kant’s moral philosophy—autonomy/heteronomy, person/thing, rule of reason/heteronomous irrationalism—are present in ovo in Rousseau, the author warns us of crucial differences between the two thinkers, for example, in Kant the notion of our being forced to our own freedom is absent. But both thinkers share the belief that any conception of the state’s function as merely external coercion or coordination is sub-rational. Also, Kant’s conception of moral autonomy located in the de jure kingdom of political ends is anticipated in Rousseau’s attempt to direct society to the norm of the general will as its legitimate political end. In sum, Levine’s book, while drawing from the previous work of Althusser, avoids the usual Marxist concept manipulation, and gives us an interesting addition to Rousseau scholarship.—H.N.T. (shrink)

At last an English edition of Georg Simmel’s Philosophie des Geldes has appeared. Simmel first published this work in Germany in 1900. A second and enlarged edition was published in 1907. The Philosophy of Money is the first complete English translation of the second edition.

Max Weber's dominant scholarly concern was the development of rationalism in the West. He exemplified his interest in this theme in his two great works, Economy and Society and The Economic Ethics of the World Religions. In Wolfgang Schluchter's new book, The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber's Developmental History, the author presents an analysis and re-evaluation of Weber's sociology of Western rationalism. He also wants to show Weber's relation to the sociological school of neo-evolutionism. By an examination of Weber's (...) relation to the neo-evolutionary thought of such men as Habermas and Parsons, Schluchter attempts to show that Weber's developmental historical sociology, if properly understood and formulated, is still the best explanatory model of Western rationalism in contemporary sociology. (shrink)