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Abstract
Edited with Introduction by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi Princeton University Press, 2010, 284 pp + index Eric S. Nelson Published online: 11 October 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Understanding the Human World is a welcome collection of Diltheys key philosophical and psychological writings from the 1890s, a highly productive and controversial period in the development of his thought. Diltheys critics also included Neo-Kantian philosophers, in particular Windelband and Rickert, who protected the distinctiveness of the cultural sciences, as sciences of the individual person and ideal values, from naturalism by abandoning psychology to the universalizing hypothetical-causal explanations of the natural sciences.1 These early debates continue to haunt later reections on the possibility of a humanistic or interpretive psychology. Diltheys contributions to these philosophical and psychological disputes over the actuality of the self and its experiences of the world are worth reconsidering for their historical signicance, andgiven the increasing albeit still too limited appreciation for the social, historical, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions of psychological inquirybecause we are perhaps in a better position today to recognize the continuing relevance of Diltheys contextualizing epistemology and individual-oriented interpretive psychology. 1 On Diltheys articulation of an interpretive psychology, see Eric S. Nelson, Impure Phenomenology: Dilthey, Epistemology, and the Task of Interpretive Psychology. Objectifying third-person methods are useful in every science but should be contextualized in a human-oriented psychology that recognizes the conditional, negotiated, and fragile unity and identity of the individual person and the persons interpretive, mediated, and 123 474 E. S. Nelson self-reexive life. Because of the multifaceted mediation of the acquired psychic nexus, psychology cannot be merely descriptive but must also be analytic, comparative, and structural.