Wilhelm Dilthey

Following Gadamer, Dilthey’s philosophy of the social world is beset by an implicit subjectivism which puts into question the very possibility of shared understanding. This subjectivism is taken to lie behind Dilthey’s emphasis on empathy, which becomes a condition of our understanding of others and knowledge of the socio-historical world generally. I argue that Dilthey does not give primacy to subjectivity, particularly in his later works. Dilthey’s own notion of sociality, accounted for in terms of the common realm of “objective (...) spirit,” is akin to Gadamer’s own anti-subjectivist account of the human sciences and understanding. Through objective spirit, Dilthey shows that understanding cannot be conceived in terms of an aggregation of individual mental acts but is instead an irreducibly social accomplishment. (shrink)

During the late 1930s, the failed attempt at collaboration between the Frankfurt School and the Vienna Circle culminated in Horkheimer’s 1937 paper ‘The Latest Attack on Metaphysics’. Horkheimer ([1937] 1972), relying on a caricature of positivism as espousing an uncritical myth of the given, drew far-reaching conclusions concerning positivism’s conservative prohibition of the radical questioning of appearances. Horkheimer (1940) later applied some of these criticisms to Dilthey’s conception of Verstehen, while presenting Logical Empiricism as dismissing Dilthey’s proposals nothing more than (...) poetry. By examining Neurath’s unpublished reply to Horkheimer, and drawing on Uebel’s (2019) account of Logical Empiricism’s stance towards Verstehen, this chapter will attempt to dispel Horkheimer’s caricature. I will highlight a parallel between Neurath’s attitude towards (i) claims about Verstehen in social science and (ii) Horkheimer’s proposals for the use of Vernunft by a ‘supra-scientific’ Critical Theory. Neurath argues that once Horkheimer’s objections to ‘positivism’ are reformulated in non-metaphysical terms, they point towards a genuine problem concerning science’s relation to social praxis. For Neurath, the problem can be addressed from within (rather than, as Horkheimer would have it, from above) empirically-minded investigations in the history and sociology of science. (shrink)

Since his death in 1911, Wilhelm Dilthey has, for many, loomed large as an important yet perennially underappreciated figure in German philosophy. As Jean Grondin says in his contribution to this volume, Dilthey's reputation was at once enhanced and compromised by the attention Heidegger paid him in the 1920s—enhanced by his indebtedness to Dilthey's account of the historicality of human existence; compromised by the trenchant criticism he deducted from that debt, charging Dilthey with uncritical reliance on notions of subjectivity and (...) expression of "inner experience" on one side, and of the validity and objectivity of scientific knowledge on the other. In a similar spirit, Gadamer criticized... (shrink)

This paper interprets Dilthey’s treatment of history and historical science through his engagement with Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. It focuses on Dilthey’s account of the possibility of objectivity in the Geisteswissenschaften. It finds in Dilthey a view of history as a law-governed, dynamical structure expressing the totality of human life, cast in a reworked Hegelian notion of objective spirit. The aim of historical thought is to understand the unity of this structure to the greatest extent possible, and thereby to understand (...) lived experience itself. Dilthey’s epistemological standpoint recommends beginning with concrete studies in the special human sciences, and working toward a more general representation of the regularities and patterns in the historical record. (shrink)

The present volume is the final tome in the six-volume translation of the main writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, offering a selection of what the series editors, Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, deemed the most important writings of the philosopher-historian. By comparison, Dilthey's Collected Works in the German spans twenty-six volumes and is now complemented by a four-volume edition of his correspondence. Thus, the texts gathered in this set of translations are but the tip of the iceberg of Dilthey's writings.The (...) sixth volume fills... (shrink)

The history of early analytic philosophy, and especially the work of the logical empiricists, has often been seen as involving antagonisms with rival schools. Though recent scholarship has interrogated the Vienna Circle’s relations with e.g. phenomenology and Neo-Kantianism, important works by some of its leading members are involved in responding to the rising tide of Lebensphilosophie. This paper will explore Carnap’s configuration of the relation between Lebensphilosophie and the overcoming of metaphysics, Schlick’s responses to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and Neurath’s reaction (...) against Spengler. (shrink)

Recently, a small but growing literature has started to fill the gap in our understanding of mid and late nineteenth-century German philosophy. But entrenched historiographical narratives suggest nothing much of interest happened in German-language philosophy after Hegel and before Nietzsche and Frege. So why should philosophers care about that period? Christian Damböck’s Deutscher Empirismus: Studien zur Philosophie im deutschsprachigen Raum 1830–1930 presents an argument for an unambiguous answer to that question, and one that matters for contemporary analytic philosophy. Naturalism in (...) analytic philosophy, especially in philosophy of science, often seems in the grip of an over-emphasis on the methods and results of the natural sciences, as opposed to the humanities and social sciences. This can lead to the neglect of and difficulty making sense of those matters dealt with by the humanities and social sciences. For example, we have a rich and mature literature on natural kinds, but only a comparatively limited and as yet immature understanding of social kinds. Damböck’s account of a tradition he calls German empiricism serves to illustrate what philosophy might look like if it took seriously the idea that knowledge is always embedded within a cultural and historical context, and thus that the theory of knowledge must be informed by those disciplines concerned with culture and history, namely, the Geisteswissenschaften. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ Dans cet article, je propose une interprétation de la philosophie de Wilhelm Dilthey qui repose sur trois idées directrices. La première idée identifie l'objet de sa philosophie : la vie. La deuxième idée établit sa méthode, soit l'autoréflexion. La troisième idée clarifie ce qui est révélé par l'autoréflexion, à savoir l'universalité et la variabilité de la vie. Dans un premier temps, je défends que la lecture épistémologique de la philosophie de Dilthey doit être abandonnée. Dans un deuxième temps, je (...) présente mon interprétation de la philosophie de Dilthey. ABSTRACT In this paper, I suggest an interpretation of Wilhelm Dilthey's philosophy that rests on three guiding ideas. The first idea identifies the object of his philosophy: life. The second one establishes its method, namely self-reflection. The third one clarifies what is revealed by self-reflection, that is the universality and the variability of life. First, I show that the epistemological reading of Dilthey's philosophy must be abandoned. Second, I detail my interpretation of Dilthey's philosophy. (shrink)

This book aims at six important conceptual tools developed by philosophers. The author develops each particular view in a chapter, hoping to constitute at the end a concise, interesting and easily readable whole. These concepts are: 1. Ethics and realism: elucidation of the distinction between understanding and explanation – the lighthouse type of normativity. 2. Leadership, antirealism and moral psychology – the lightning rod type of normativity. 3. Bright light on self-identity and positive reciprocity – the reciprocity type of normativity. (...) 4. The virtue of generosity and its importance for inclusive education – the divine will type of normativity. 5. Ethical education as normative philosophical perspective. The normativity of self-transformation in education. 6. Aesthetics as expression of human freedom and concern for the whole world in which we live. (shrink)

The professionalization of the study of history in the Nineteenth Century made possible a new way of thinking about the history of philosophy: the thought emerged that philosophy itself might be relative to time, historical culture, and nationality. The simultaneous demise of speculative metaphysics scattered philosophers’ confidence that the historical variance of philosophical systems could be viewed in terms of the teleological self-realization of reason. Towards the late Nineteenth Century, philosophers began to explicitly address the worry that all philosophical systems (...) might have only relative validity. This paper compares two key figures in late-nineteenth-century debates concerning historical relativism: Wilhelm Windelband and Wilhelm Dilthey. Beneath the deep disagreements between these two authors, it reveals their common concern to immunize philosophy from the threat of historical relativism. The paper traces how both philosophers sought to fend off relativism by defending the idea of an ahistorical and permanent stratum of philosophical thinking. And it argues that although they succeeded in blocking historical versions of relativism, they did so at the cost of incurring a relativism vis-à-vis philosophical systems. This relativism turned out to be rooted not in the historicity of philosophy but in the timeless essence of philosophical reasoning itself. (shrink)

This article has the same name as the second volume in a six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, published in Princeton University Press in 1991-1996, for two reasons: 1) to limit our research of key philosophical and psychological writings from the 1890-s, in which Dilthey propagated a descriptive and analytic psychology as a “human science” ; 2) to emphasize and understand Dilthey’s assertion that the human world was sufficiently different from the natural world that special methods were (...) required for its study; hermeneutics, the deliberate and systematic methodology of interpretation, was the only necessary approach for studying and understanding the human world. (shrink)

Esse texto procura explicitar a tese da compreensão atual que Simmel pressupõe como lócus de apreensão e interpretação dos processos humanos dotados de sentido. Para explicitá-la, confronta as posições de Dilthey e Simmel sobre o papel da vivência na fundamentação do conhecimento histórico. Ao contrário de Dilthey, no entanto, Simmel não pressupõe uma vivência que possa ser apreendida em outrem ou circunscrita a partir de um objeto, porque põe o fundamento da compreensão na atualidade daquele que compreende. Assim, opera com (...) possibilidades objetivas da construção de conexões de sentido por meio da projeção de processos psíquicos. Conquanto dificilmente seja lembrado no debate sobre a compreensão ou sobre a filosofia da história, Simmel possui uma posição própria e consistente acerca da fundamentação do conhecimento histórico, que pode ou abrir novos ângulos de pesquisa ou ser fecunda para se reexaminar perspectivas já consolidadas. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine two exemplary replies to the challenge of history that played a crucial role in the controversies on the nature and purpose of philosophy during the so-called long 19th century. Nietzsche and Dilthey developed concepts of philosophy in contrast with one another, and in particular regarding their approach to the history of philosophy. While Nietzsche advocates a radical break with the history of philosophy, Dilthey emphasizes the continuity with the philosophical tradition. I shall argue that these (...) conceptual reorientations are linked to specific social images of the philosopher. Nietzsche, on the one hand, presents us a new version of the philosophical recluse. Dilthey, on the other hand, embraces the idea of a philosophical community, thus emphasizing the collective character of philosophical research. My examination of these connections attempts to show that the history of philosophy should also be studied as a social tradition. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper elaborates a conception of the unity of science that emerges in the context of Dilthey’s well-known treatment of the distinction between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften. Dilthey’s account of the epistemological foundations of the Geisteswissenschaften presupposes, this paper argues, their continuity with the natural sciences. The unity of the two domains has both a psychological and a biological basis. Whereas the psychological functions at work in scientific thinking, the articulation of which is the task of Dilthey’s proposed science (...) of ‘descriptive and analytic psychology’, are common to both kinds of sciences, their ontological ground consists in the embodied and environmentally situated context of human beings, and is expressed in Dilthey’s central concept of ‘life’. Accordingly, this paper develops the shared biopsychological foundations of the epistemology of the natural and human sciences from Dilthey’s writings in the 1880s and 1890s. Dilthey’s conception of unity, furthermore, has implications for philosophy’s orientation towards the special sciences. Thus, in conclusion, this paper applies the biopsychological account to sketch an outline of Dilthey’s historicist method in the philosophy of science, and considers its similarities and differences with a contemporary approach in ‘historical epistemology’. (shrink)

Kohut’s lasting and most important contribution to psychoanalytic clinical theory was his recognition that the experiencing of selfhood is always constituted, both developmentally and in psychoanalytic treatment, in a context of emotional interrelatedness. The experiencing of selfhood, he realized, or of its collapse, is context-embedded through and through. The theoretical language of self psychology with its noun, “the self,” reifies the experiencing of selfhood and transforms it into a metaphysical entity with thing-like properties, in effect undoing Kohut’s hard-won clinical contextualizations. (...) The language of such decontextualizing objectifications bewitches intelligence in order to evade the tragic dimension of finite human existing. (shrink)

Dilthey’s moral writings have received scant attention over the years, perhaps due to his apparent tendency toward relativism. This essay offers a unified look at Dilthey’s moral writings in the context of his Kantian-styled “Critique of Historical Reason.” I present the Dilthey of the moral writings as an observer of reason in the spirit of Kant, watching practical reason devolve into error when it applies itself beyond the bounds of possible experience. Drawing on moral writings from across Dilthey’s corpus, I (...) retrace Dilthey’s argument that moral theories from Kantianism and utilitarianism to natural law theory suffer significant motivational problems because of the way they transcend the “synthesis” of moral perception. Dilthey’s argument suggests that abstract moral theory is always bound to seem unmotivating and unreal from the standpoint of lived experience, and perhaps that, to avoid this, moral philosophy should confine itself to more situated, case-specific judgments. (shrink)

This paper argues that Carnap's project in the Aufbau is best considered as an attempt to determine the conditions for both objectivity and understanding, thus aiming at refuting the skeptical contention that objectivity and understanding are incompossible ideals of science.

As a philosopher, psychologist, and physician, the German thinker Hermann Lotze defies classification. Working in the mid-nineteenth-century era of programmatic realism, he critically reviewed and rearranged theories and concepts in books on pathology, physiology, medical psychology, anthropology, history, aesthetics, metaphysics, logic, and religion. Leading anatomists and physiologists reworked his hypotheses about the central and autonomic nervous systems. Dozens of fin-de-siècle philosophical contemporaries emulated him, yet often without acknowledgment, precisely because he had made conjecture and refutation into a method. In spite (...) of Lotze's status as a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century intellectual thought, no complete treatment of his work exists, and certainly no effort to take account of the feminist secondary literature. Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography is the first full-length historical study of Lotze's intellectual origins, scientific community, institutional context, and worldwide reception. (shrink)

This study seeks to provide a new resolution to an old controversy regarding Wilhelm Dilthey's methodological writings, written from 1880 to 1911. This controversy concentrates on the relations of Dilthey's early psychology and his late hermeneutics. On one side of this controversy stand interpreters who claim that the appearance of the late hermeneutics marks a dramatic change in Dilthey's thought, and even creates an internal paradox in his thinking. On the other side, stand interpreters who view his thought as a (...) unified whole, by claiming that these methods were meant to work in tandem and complement each other. I largely agree with the latter group of interpreters regarding the unity of Dilthey's writings; however, instead of basing my view on the methodological level of Dilthey’s writings, I will concentrate on the object of these two methods. According to my new answer to the question of the continuity of Dilthey’s thought, Dilthey did intend to replace his early psychology with his late hermeneutics; even so, his thought should still be viewed as consistent and stable because he continued to apply both different methods to the same object: inner-universal content, that is, the inner psychological source of outer human reality. In this way, I will try show that the consistency of Dilthey's thought is derived from the stable destination he aspired to reach with the help of the different methods. (shrink)

This study examines the sources of human divergence as arise from Wilhelm Dilthey’s writings. While Dilthey assigns a central role to the human subject, he never synthesizes his major ideas on subjectivity into a unified theory of subjective uniqueness. I will show that such a theory can be derived from his writings through the combination of three ideas that appear in them. These ideas are: (1) the thesis that human understanding is possible because of psychological content that is shared by (...) both the creator and the interpreter; (2) the belief that this shared content is the only content that exists within human beings, meaning that there is no unique psychological content; and (3) the perception of this inner universal content as an accumulation of life-possibilities. When joined together, these ideas create an inspiring theory of human divergence, according to which the uniqueness of an individual is determined through partial realization of universal possibilities. (shrink)

Dieser Aufsatz möchte den Beitrag der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls zur Debatte über die Fundierung der Geisteswissenschaft in groben Zügen enthüllen. Zunächst wird eine schematische Zusammenfassung der aus der deutschen Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts stammenden Debatte über die Fundierung der Geisteswissenschaften dargeboten. Dies soll dazu dienen, den philosophisch-historischen Hintergrund, in den Husserls Denkmotiv über die Beziehung zwischen Phänomenologie und Geisteswissenschaften eingebunden ist, zu begreifen. Danach wird Husserls Beitrag in dieser Debatte abgewägt, wobei im Besonderen die neuen Begriffe und Denkmotive, die von (...) ihm in die Diskussion eingefügt wurden, nämlich der der regionalen Ontologie und der der personalistischen Einstellung, betrachtet werden. Dieser zweite und letzte Teil schließt mit einer Erörterung des von Husserl angegebenen Vorrangs der Geisteswissenschaften und des Geistes als ihr Korrelat, vor den Naturwissenschaften ab. (shrink)

This study seeks to contribute to the current debate in literary studies, philosophy, and the history of science about knowledge’s forms of representation and the “knowledge of literature,” while in two respects also going beyond the debate. First, it shows how and why the demand for an alternative non-scientific form of knowledge mediated by literature becomes widespread within a particular constellation in the history of ideas. In particular, it situates this phenomenon within the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) and the so-called (...) philosophy of world views (Weltanschauungsphilosophie) from 1870 to 1930, as well as in the works of Robert Musil. Second, the study shifts the focus of the debate. In this thesis, the focus is not on the question, often discussed with unsatisfactory results, as to whether or not literature in general can convey knowledge. Instead, it asks in which concrete circumstances a specific work of literature conveys knowledge. The conditions in which this is the case — formulated using concepts and insights from analytic philosophy — in amalgamate allow for a clear analysis of Musil's attempts to communicate a “living knowledge” by means of his literary works. (shrink)

(2013). Becoming a philosopher: What Heidegger learned from Dilthey, 1919–25. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 122-142. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2012.689753.

This article elaborates a claim, first introduced by Wilhelm Dilthey, that metaphysics represents an illusory flight from the tragedy of human finitude. Metaphysics, of which psychoanalytic metapsychologies are a form, transforms the unbearable fragility and transience of all things human into an enduring, permanent, changeless reality, an illusory world of eternal truths. Three “clinical cases” illustrate this thesis in the work and lives of a philosopher and two psychoanalytic theorists: Friedrich Nietzsche and his metaphysical doctrine of the eternal return of (...) the same, Sigmund Freud and his dual instinct theory, and Heinz Kohut and his theoretical language of the self. It is contended that the best safeguard against the pitfalls of metaphysical illusion lies in a shared commitment to reflection on the constitutive contexts of all our theoretical ideas. (shrink)