Introduction Wilhelm Dilthey's name is most often linked with the title of a nonexistent book: Critique of Historical Reason. Although he never published a ...

For dilthey, poetry brings human life to a determinate focus through a present image. however, his view of the nature of the nexus being articulated undergoes significant changes. dilthey initially conceived of the life-nexus as the psychological nexus of the individual. so, poetic expression articulates the diverse strands of the poet's psychic life. in dilthey's later view, the life-nexus is a sociohistorical nexus which encompasses the life of the individual. thus, poetry reflects the ways in which an individual is a (...) crossing-point of concrete sociohistorical relations. (shrink)

In this dissertation I reconstruct Wilhelm Dilthey's Critique of Historical Reason as the solution to the epistemological-ontological problems raised in the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften . It is my contention that the solutions to these problems are internally related by their devotion to the task of providing an analysis of the structure and development of the life-nexus, i.e. the I-World relationship as given in lived experience. Accordingly, I present Dilthey's structural and developmental analysis of the life-nexus as a foundation for (...) the synchronic and diachronic study of the socio-historical world. ;Part One begins with an explanation of the unifying principles of the critique by presenting a brief historical sketch of Dilthey's work and a comparison of Dilthey to Kant . Dilthey's approach is characterized in chapter two as an alternative to the phenomenological approaches of Husserl and Heidegger. The nature of the human sciences is analyzed in Part Two by distinguishing them from the natural sciences and by focusing upon the way in which the human sciences form a system . ;Part Three contains the systematic analysis of the life-nexus which is to provide the critical ground for the human sciences. Chapter five studies our most primitive awareness of the life-nexus. It is first given as an indeterminate whole and is made increasingly clearer through a process of description which brings to a focus the already given connections. Chapter six presents the structure of life as a practical I-World correlation, and chapter seven discusses the principles of the development of psychic life. Finally, structure and development are brought together in chapter eight in order to describe the nature of socio-historical systems and to discuss the way in which history can be divided into periods. (shrink)