Introduction to the Human Sciences carries forward a projected six-volume translation series of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey --a philosopher and historian of culture who has had a strong and continuing influence on twentieth-century Continental philosophy as well as a broad range of other scholarly disciplines. In addition to his landmark works on the theories of history and the human sciences, Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics and phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences. The (...) Selected Works will make accessible to English-speaking readers the full range of Dilthey's thought, including some historical essays and literary criticism. The series provides translations of complete texts, together with editorial notes, and contains manuscript materials that are currently being published for the first time in Germany. This volume brings together the various parts of the Introduction to the Human Sciences published separately in the German edition. Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi have underscored the systematic character of Dilthey's theory of the human sciences by translating the bulk of Dilthey's first volume and his important drafts for the never-completed second volume. (shrink)

Introduction to the Human Sciences carries forward a projected six-volume translation series of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey --a philosopher and historian of culture who has had a strong and continuing influence on twentieth-century Continental philosophy as well as a broad range of other scholarly disciplines. In addition to his landmark works on the theories of history and the human sciences, Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics and phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences. The (...) Selected Works will make accessible to English-speaking readers the full range of Dilthey's thought, including some historical essays and literary criticism. The series provides translations of complete texts, together with editorial notes, and contains manuscript materials that are currently being published for the first time in Germany.This volume brings together the various parts of the Introduction to the Human Sciences published separately in the German edition. Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi have underscored the systematic character of Dilthey's theory of the human sciences by translating the bulk of Dilthey's first volume and his important drafts for the never-completed second volume. (shrink)

Wilhelm Dilthey's contributions to hermeneutics go back to 1860 when he wrote a long manuscript entitled “Schleiermacher's Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics”. Because of the long hold that theology had over hermeneutics as the theory of interpretation, the important theoretical writings that contribute to Dilthey's life project of a Critique of Historical Reason before 1900 refer less to the problems of interpretation and more to the nature of understanding. Dilthey prefers the term lived experience (Erlebnis) and (...) increasingly focuses on the capacity of lived experience to encompass both inner and outer sense. Dilthey's last essay on hermeneutics entitled “The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Manifestations of Life”, he reiterates the three levels of understanding: the elementary understanding that derives from the commonalities that nurture us from birth, the higher conceptual understanding contributed by the sciences, and, finally, re‐experiencing as reflective assessment. (shrink)

This is the second volume in a six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, a philosopher and historian of culture who continues to have a significant influence on Continental philosophy and a broad range of scholarly disciplines. In addition to his landmark works on the theories of history and the human sciences, Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics, phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences. This volume presents Dilthey's main theoretical works from the 1890s, (...) the period between the Introduction to the Human Sciences and The Formation of the Historical World. A common thread of the writings included here is an interest in the relation between the self and the world. In "The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification," Dilthey argues that our engagement with the world is rooted in our practical drives and the resistance they meet. The basic nexus of our beliefs about reality is volitional rather than representational. The next essay, "Life and Cognition," examines the main categories with which we organize our experience of life into an understanding of the human world: selfsameness; doing and undergoing; and essentiality. These categorial relations are further articulated with the aid of Dilthey's structural psychology in ways that rival some of the insights of phenomenology. This occurs in "The Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology." By focusing on how lived experience places everything in a temporal continuum that can be described and analyzed, Dilthey saw the opportunity to establish a structural psychology that could be of great use to the human sciences in general. In the final essay, "Contributions to the Study of Individuality," Dilthey attacks Windelband's thesis that the human sciences are idiographic. Many human sciences have systematic and structural aims that combine the study of uniformities with the examination of individuation. Applying the comparative method, Dilthey argues that living beings share many basic similarities within which typical variations tend to recur. For human individuation, however, the specification of the historical nexus is also essential. (shrink)

The philosopher and historian of culture Wilhelm Dilthey has had a significant and continuing influence on twentieth-century Continental philosophy and in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. This volume is the third to be published in Princeton University Press's projected six-volume series of his most important works. Part One makes available three of his works on hermeneutics and its history: "Schleiermacher's Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics" ; "On Understanding and Hermeneutics", based on student lecture notes, and (...) the "The Rise of Hermeneutics", which traces the history of hermeneutics back to Hellenistic Greece. All the addenda to this well-known essay are translated here, some for the first time. In them Dilthey articulates three philosophical aporias concerning hermeneutics and projects an ultimate convergence between understanding and explanation. Part Two provides translations of review essays by Dilthey on Buckle's use of statistical history and on Burckhardt's cultural history; an essay "Friedrich Schlosser and the Problem of Universal History;" and a talk recalling his early years as a student of Boeckh, Jakob Grimm, Mommsen, Ranke, and Ritter. It also contains the important historical essay "The Eighteenth Century and the Historical World," in which Dilthey reexamines the Enlightenment to show its significant contributions to the rise of historical consciousness. (shrink)

This is the fifth volume in a six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, a philosopher and historian of culture who has had a significant, and continuing, influence on twentieth-century Continental philosophy and in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. In addition to his landmark works on the theories of history and the human sciences, Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics and phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences.This volume presents Dilthey's principal writings on (...) aesthetics and the philosophical understanding of poetry, as well as representative essays of literary criticism. The essay "The Imagination of the Poet" is his most sustained attempt to examine the philosophical bearings of literature in relation to psychological and historical theory. Also included are "The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and its Present Task," "Fragments for a Poetics," and two final essays discussing Goethe and Hölderlin. The latter are drawn from Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, a volume that was acclaimed on publication as a classic of literary criticism and that continues to be a model for the geistesgeschichtliche approach to literary history. (shrink)

The philosopher and historian of culture Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) has had a significant and continuing influence on twentieth-century Continental philosophy and in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. Rudolf Makkreel interprets Dilthey's philosophy and provides a guide to its complex development. Against the tendency to divorce Dilthey's early psychological writings from his later hermeneutical and historical works, Makkreel argues for their essential continuity.

This volume provides Dilthey's most mature and best formulation of his Critique of Historical Reason. It begins with three "Studies Toward the Foundation of the Human Sciences," in which Dilthey refashions Husserlian concepts to describe the basic structures of consciousness relevant to historical understanding.The volume next presents the major 1910 work The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Here Dilthey considers the degree to which carriers of history--individuals, cultures, institutions, and communities--can be articulated as productive systems capable (...) of generating value and meaning and of realizing purposes. Hegel's idea of objective spirit is reconceived in a more empirical form to designate the medium of commonality in which historical beings are immersed. Any universal claims about history need to be framed within the specific productive systems analyzed by the various human sciences. Dilthey's drafts for the Continuation of the Formation contain extensive discussions of the categories most important for our knowledge of historical life: meaning, value, purpose, time, and development. He also examines the contributions of autobiography to historical understanding and of biography to scientific history. The finest summary of Dilthey's views on hermeneutics can be found in "The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Manifestations of Life." Here, Dilthey differentiates understanding relative to three kinds of manifestations of life. After giving his analysis of elementary understanding, he examines the role of induction in higher understanding and interpretation, and the relevance of transposition and re-experiencing for grasping individuality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Das strukturierte Ganze: Studien zum Werk von Wilhelm DiltheyRudolf LuetheFrithjof Rodi. Das strukturierte Ganze: Studien zum Werk von Wilhelm Dilthey. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2003. Pp. 281. Cloth, €39,00.This book contains a collection of fourteen articles and essays by the well-known and highly respected German Dilthey scholar Frithjof Rodi. The majority of the texts were written between 1992 and 2002 but they have been revised and updated (...) for publication in this volume. All of the papers discuss the work of the German hermeneutic philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, but a variety of connected topics is also covered.The first two parts of the book contain articles analysing Dilthey's work in the two central areas of hermeneutics, especially the philosophical theory of historical knowledge, and aesthetics. While one of the central issues of Dilthey's hermeneutics is the reflection on the relation between life, history and historical knowledge, the core concepts of his aesthetics are "expression" and "vivacity" (Lebendigkeit). The two areas are connected via Dilthey's all-compassing interest in the structures of unities, be these forms of experiences or works of art. Dilthey's influential idea of a "dynamic unity" is discussed in the chapter entitled "Das Erlebnis: die 'dynamische Einheit'."The two other parts of the volume contain articles and essays by Rodi which refer to specific aspects of Dilthey's scholarly life and work and his position within nineteenth and early twentieth-century German philosophy, respectively. Although most of the articles in this book are strictly scholarly and document Rodi's thorough knowledge of every aspect of Dilthey's work, some of the essays in the third part are of a more polemical character. In one of these polemical essays Rodi fundamentally criticizes Hans Albert's concept of a "naturalistic" form of hermeneutics.The title of the collection draws on one of Dilthey's most important convictions to the effect that there are "different forms of unity," a conviction that is repeated in the title of the chapter: "'Der Zweck ist eben das strukturierte Ganze selbst.'" Although this article refers to the relevance of music in Dilthey's life and work, and although the concept of structured whole is itself taken from his [End Page 216] work on aesthetics, Rodi's claim is that this idea is relevant also to the other areas of Dilthey's philosophical endeavours, especially in his work on the hermeneutics of historical knowledge. The parts of the volume dedicated to this topic discuss very important issues, indeed: The critique of historical reason not only analyses different forms of structural unities, it also formulates many relevant distinctions within the concept of life, reminding us that Dilthey not only started his academic career as a theologian but that also as a philosopher he thought of "the divine in nature and history as an evident condition of thought and action" (10).One of Rodi's early books, entitled Morphologie und Hermeneutik (Stuttgart, 1969), discussed Dilthey's aesthetics within the context of Goethe's organolocical thinking. The first two chapters in part two try to correct some of the convictions formulated in this earlier book. In particular, Rodi now regards his use there of the term "morphology" as a confused running together of both Romantic and positivistic elements. The central issue of the chapter "Der 'schaffende' Ausdruck. Bemerkungen zu einer Kategorie des späten Dilthey" is a comparison between the concepts of hermeneutics formulated by Dilthey and Gadamer, respectively.The two chapters of part four, written in 1992 and in 2002, respectively, are dedicated to more specialized issues. The first of them, on "the intensity of life," refers to the relations of the "radical" work of Graf Yorck von Wartenburg to the thinking of both Heidegger and Dilthey, while the last chapter in the volume gives a detailed and inspiring interpretation of Bollnow's concept of "articulating decription" (artikulierende Beschreibung). A somewhat personal aspect of this last essay is the fact that here Rodi also reflects on the way in which Dilthey's philosophy influenced his own philosophical efforts and convictions: Rodi's philosophical mentor, Otto Friedrich Bollnow, was a student of Dilthey.The book also contains valuable supplementary material... (shrink)

For over fifty years, Rudolf J. Siebert (b.1927) has developed his Critical Theory of Religion and Society out of the Critical Theory of the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as the "Frankfurt School." Born from the World War II ruins of his hometown in Frankfurt, Germany, Siebert's Hegelian thought has developed in conversation with Christian theology, German Idealism, comparative religion, political-economy, sociology, psychology, and history. Also known as Dialectical Religiology, Siebert's literary corpus is saturated with the dialectics of (...) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), especially Hegel's philosophy of right, history, religion, as well as Hegel's theodicy, which lays at the core of the enlightener's work. This volume has collected Siebert's most important works on Hegel and the Hegelian influence on his Critical Theory of Religion and Society, some of which have never been published before. The articles contained in this volume represent over five decades worth of Siebert's engagements with Hegel, and his application of his dialectical critique to a variety of subjects, including secularization, theology, rebellion and revolution, civil society and the family, war and peace, the future of the West, and many other important subjects. As philosophers frequently return to Hegel, especially within the troubling conditions of modernity, this collection of Siebert's articles will serve as a foundational source for the study of Hegelian thought and its relevance to the contemporary moment well into the 21st century and beyond. (shrink)

The place of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911)in the history of hermeneutics has been subject to considerable misinterpretation. He is rightly regarded as having expanded the scope of hermeneutics by adding human actions to the kinds of texts that can be interpreted, but is wrongly dismissed as having overlooked the full significance of this move. His distinction between understanding and explanation has been stereotyped as a mere methodological distinction relevant for his theory of the human sciences. His reflections on interpretation have (...) been relegated to the domain of traditional philological hermeneutics and excluded from philosophical hermeneutics. Heidegger's ontical‐ontological distinction has been used to drive a wedge between the two and place Dilthey on the ontical side of a divide that cannot be fully justified. On the basis of newly available writings, a more adequate account dealing with the philosophical content of Dilthey's hermeneutic contributions can now be given. (shrink)

This paper examines the ways in which Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer place the arts in the spectrum of symbolization. Langer claims that Cassirer is wrong to consider artistic symbolism as a more concrete mode of linguistic symbolism. Instead, artists create presentational symbols that are just as capable of formal articulation, i. e., of complex combinations, as words are. According to Langer, the presentational modes of articulation of music and the visual arts are altogether different from the syntactical mode that (...) governs language. I argue that the way Langer imposes her presentational model on the literary arts goes too far in decontextualizing them from the real world. Thus I propose a more inclusive artistic spectrum which proceeds from Langer’s presentational symbolism to the typifying mode of symbolization suggested by Wilhelm Dilthey to Cassirer’s more ideational linguistic mode. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Craig Walton 1934-2007Rudolf A. Makkreel and Gerald A. PressThe Journal of the History of Philosophy is saddened to report that Craig Walton died on October 11th, 2007. Professor Walton served the Journal for many years. He was involved with it from its inception in 1963 and knew personally many of the founding philosophers, who had been at the Claremont Graduate Center. He was the Book Review Editor from 1975 (...) until 1981 and was a member of the Board of Directors from 1978 until 2004, where he promoted the study of the history of philosophy in many ways and maintained our institutional memory. For instance, it was Craig who remembered the important roles Salih Alich and Oskar Piest played in our early history. From 2001–03, he was the Treasurer of the Board. He believed strongly in the cosmopolitan nature of scholarship, and, as Book Review Editor, he was tireless in his efforts to review books on the history of philosophy written in languages other than English.Craig was born on December 6, 1934, in Los Angeles and earned his doctorate in philosophy at Claremont Graduate University in 1965. His dissertation, De la recherche du bien: A Study of Malebranche's Science of Ethics, was approved in 1964 by a doctoral committee that included Theodore Waldman, Herbert Schneider, and Philip Merlan, though he also worked with Richard Popkin, the founder of the Journal. He taught at the University of Southern California, Northern Illinois University and Emory University before moving to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1972. Craig was Chair of the Philosophy Department there from 1986 to 1989 and became the Director of the Institute for Ethics and Policy at UNLV in 1987. He held this post until his retirement in 2004. After his early work on Malebranche, for much of his career he was a scholar of David Hume and Thomas Hobbes; but he spent the last decade of his life urging that ethical issues be studied across the curriculum. Upon retiring from teaching, Craig extended his work in ethics by founding the Nevada Center for Public Ethics. The Chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education praised Craig as the voice of ethics in Nevada.As members of the Board of Directors of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, we remember Craig Walton for his enthusiasm for the history of philosophy and his warmth as a human being.Copyright © 2007 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

The Journal of the History of Philosophy is saddened to report that Professor Edward P. Mahoney died on January 8, 2009. Professor Mahoney served on the Journal's Board of Directors from 1984 until the spring of 2008, when he retired due to illness. Ed also served on the Journal's Book Review Advisory Board since 1990. He was a tireless advocate of scholarly rigor.Edward Mahoney was born in 1932 in New York City. Ed received his BA at Cathedral College, an MA (...) in Philosophy at St. John's University and an MA in Political Science, and in 1966 a PhD in Philosophy at Columbia University. He wrote his dissertation, The Early Psychology of Augustino Nifo, under the direction of Paul Oskar Kristeller, the noted scholar of medieval and Renaissance thought. Ed went on to become. (shrink)