Review: Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume II: Understanding the Human World (original) (raw)

Theory and practice in Wilhelm Dilthey's historiography

2018

In this MA thesis, I study Wilhelm Dilthey's thought primarily through his historical writings, identifying their underlying methodological and theoretical commitments. I concentrate on the first volume of Leben Schleiermachers (1870) and three selected essays from the last decade of Dilthey's life, from 1901-1911. The comparison between texts from different periods allows me to identify both continuities and changes in his historiography. I then connect my analysis to Dilthey's philosophical thought, defining points of intersection and possible direct connections with his philosophy and historical writings. My main thesis is that Dilthey's thought as a whole is informed in interesting and essential ways by his historicist convictions and the intuitions he gained through his work as a historian. Dilthey as a historian is thus not to be separated from Dilthey as a philosopher. I also argue that Dilthey's historical works reveal new perspectives on his philosophica...

Wilhelm Dilthey's Conceptualization of Mental Life: The Unity of Consciousness

2019

This study is an examination of Wilhelm Dilthey's conceptualization of mental life. An introduction recounting Dilthey's intellectual background is provided, including a detailed literature review of texts that elaborate his ideas. A description of Dilthey's analysis of the elemental constituents of consciousness is presented. Dilthey's assessment of self-consciousness is examined, and his psychological epistemology is explained. A discussion of Dilthey's analysis of logic and psychological processes is given. The study explicates Dilthey's position on the relation between aspects and dynamics within the psyche. A justification of Dilthey's distinction between mental and physical objects of psychological investigation is provided. Consciousness is shown to constitute a phenomenal unity. Examples of the relevance of Dilthey's ideas for contemporary psychological theory and practice are presented. Findings are recounted providing a detailed picture of main conclusions drawn from the study.

Wilhelm Dilthey and the Formative-Generative Imagination

Saulius Geniusas, ed., Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination: Studies in Kantianism, Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, 2018

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) is well-known as a philosopher and intellectual historian who prioritized the force and significance of the imagination in his popular and philosophical writings, such that he is accordingly identified as an heir to German Idealism and romanticism in a naturalistic and scientistic epoch. Dilthey‘s philosophical works on the nature and limits of the human sciences, descriptive and analytic (interpretive) psychology, and hermeneutics gave the imagination a central role in how subjects understand themselves and one another in ordinary common life as well as how individuals and groups are interpreted in human scientific constructions. His popular writings in intellectual and literary history, and particularly his widely read biographical sketches of eminent German poets, depict and praise—to the point of exaggeration—the heightened imagination and feeling of life of philosophers such as Leibniz and Schleiermacher and poets such as Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, and Hölderlin. Although Dilthey only addresses the concept of the “productive imagination” in historical discussions of German Idealism, the imagination is given across Dilthey’s works a generative role in human life and understanding as providing the “sense of the whole.” It is the imagination, after all, which shapes how human beings understand themselves, human others, and their sense of nature itself in its silence (GS 1: 36). The imagination does not only play a constitutive role in interpreting art and poetry, as Dilthey’s aesthetics is oriented toward disclosing the imaginative processes of the artist and the audience. The imagination is also crucial to understanding the modes of inquiry found in history and the human sciences, the rethinking of paradigms and radical epoch-changing transformations of thought evident in the natural sciences, and the elementary processes of understanding and interpretation in the midst of ordinary everyday human life.

Wilhelm Dilthey, John Stuart Mill, and the Logic of the Human Sciences

Revue Roumaine De Philosophie, 2024

Dilthey's early project aimed at a new critique of reason and theory of science that drew from and provided an alternative to contextualist historicism and scientistic positivism. While he sympathetically transformed the anti-theoretical emphasis on historical context and particularity of the historical school, he contested positivism's abstract ahistorical theorizing and its overextension of the naturalistic causal model. Dilthey's analysis of the immanent selfovercoming of positivism has obscured the importance of his sustained confrontation with Mill's philosophy, particularly his logic, for his own philosophical project. Dilthey critically appropriated elements from Comte and Mill, while unfolding an immanent critique of positivist aspirations and failures to develop an adequate theory and history of science. Mill's inductivism proved inappropriate to the logic of reciprocal understanding, his notion of experience too narrow and atomistic, his social and ethical philosophy inadequate to the rich complexity of the development and education of individuality and freedom, and his analysis of the moral sciences remained overly reductive to the naturalistic causal model. The theory of science instead needs to be reconstructed through the human sciences in relation to their history, normativity, and praxis. The sciences require the critical recognition of their structural conditions in the reflexively, biographically, and intersubjectively lived experiential life-nexus (the first-person participant perspective) and its reflective epistemic and human scientific investigation.

İlham Dilman: The Reality of the Human

From ontos verlag: Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society - New Series, 2013

Ilham Dilman joined the Philosophy Department at Swansea in 1961 and he remained an active member of it well after his retirement in 1997. As a student at Cambridge he had come in contact with Wittgenstein’s philoso-phy through the work of John Wisdom. Later in Swansea through constant discussions with Rush Rhees he deepened his understanding of Wittgen-stein. So Wittgenstein’s philosophy was a major although by no means ex-clusive source of influence upon Dilman’s thought. Naturally, then, one has to explore the nature of his intellectual debt to Wittgenstein in order to fully understand Dilman’s own philosophy.

Eric Nelson (ed.), Interpreting Dilthey

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2020

This volume is dedicated to Rudolf Makkreel and his unparalleled contributions to Anglophone Dilthey scholarship. Fittingly, it gathers together a distinguished set of authors noted for their contributions to fields of interest to both Dilthey and Makkreel: hermeneutics, aesthetics, phenomenology, psychology, history, science studies, and Kant studies. The editor's introduction offers, in addition to a biographical and historical sketch, helpful overviews of major themes in Dilthey's work: hermeneutics, theory of science, 'life-philosophy' (Lebensphilosophie), and aesthetics. There is little indication of a core organizing principle for the collection as a whole, though the topic of Dilthey's hermeneutics comes close to fitting the bill. Those expecting to find a unified treatment of Dilthey will be dissatisfied. Those who do not harbour such expectations, but instead wish to explore various aspects of his thought, will find much that is of value. The thirteen essays are divided into two parts: 'Life, Hermeneutics, and Science,' and 'Practical Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Interpretation.' While many of the essays deal with traditional concerns in Dilthey studies, there are also articles on relatively neglected topics, such as Dilthey's ethics, his interest in biological science, and his theory of the novel. And beyond the usual supporting cast-Gadamer, Heidegger, and Ricoeur-there are new interlocutors for Dilthey, such as Santayana, Wittgenstein, and Evan Thompson. This collection should interest not only scholars of Dilthey and of the history of phenomenology and hermeneutics but also those seeking insights from Dilthey for contemporary aesthetics, moral psychology, the philosophy of the life sciences, or philosophy of history.