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Dilthey
: Philosopher of the Human Studies by Rudolf A.
Makkreel
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. In addition to his
landmark works on the theories of history and human sciences,
Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics and
phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of
the social sciences. Here Rudolf A. Makkreel interprets Wilhelm
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. He places Dilthey's aesthetic writings at the center
of his thought and explores their philosophical implications for
his theory of history.
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From the Marxists.org
website
Excerpt:
German philosopher who made important contributions to a methodology
of the humanities and other human sciences. He objected to the pervasive
influence of the natural sciences and developed a philosophy of life emphasizing
historical contingency and changeability.
Dilthey was the son of a Reformed Church theologian. After he
finished grammar school in Wiesbaden, he began to study theology, first
at Heidelberg, then at Berlin, where he soon transferred to philosophy.
He taught for a time at secondary schools in Berlin but soon abandoned
this to dedicate himself fully to writing..
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Introduction
to the Human Sciences (Archive)
From the Marxists.org
website, these pages are excerpts from Dilthey's Introduction
to the Human Sciences, published by Princeton University Press
Site Includes:
Excerpt:
The emancipation of the particular sciences began at the end of the
Middle Ages. However, the sciences of society and of history retained
their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well
into the eighteenth century. In addition, the increasing power of the
knowledge of nature subjugated them in a new manner, and no less
oppressively. It was the Historical School - taking that term in its
broadest sense - that first brought about the emancipation of historical
consciousness and historical scholarship. The French system of social
thought developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its ideas
of natural law and natural religion, and its abstract theories of the
state and of political economy, manifested their political consequences
in the Revolution when the armies of that revolution occupied and
destroyed the ramshackle, thousand-year-old edifice of the Holy Roman
Empire. At the same time, the view developed in Germany that historical
growth is the source of all spiritual facts - a view which proved the
falsity of that whole French system of social thought. This insight was
shared by Winckelmann and Herder, the Romantic school, Niebuhr, Jakob
Grimm, Savigny, and Boeckh. It was strengthened by the reaction against
the Revolution. In England, it was promoted by Burke, in France by
Guizot' and de Tocqueville. In all the conflicts of European society, it
challenged eighteenth-century ideas about law, government, and religion.
The Historical School was characterised by a purely empirical mode of
observation, sympathetic immersion in the details of the historical
process, a universal approach to history aiming to determine the value
of a particular state of affairs solely from the context of its
development. This school considered spiritual life as historical through
and through and approached social theory historically, seeking the
explanations and rules of contemporary life in the study of the past.
New ideas flowed from it through countless channels into all the
particular disciplines.
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