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Hum Stud (2011) 34:471474
DOI 10.1007/s10746-011-9197-6
BOOK REVIEW
Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume II: Understanding the Human World. 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 endeavors to give both naturalistic and humanistic strategies their due regard and reconceive epistemology through the methods and data of the sciences, particularly history and psychology, led to the negative reaction of both positivists and idealists. No aspect of his thought was more provocative than his advocacy of a descriptive and analytic psychology as a human science (Geisteswissenschaft), which was opposed by those who considered psychology an exclusively naturalistic experimental science, including pioneering experimental psychologists such as Ebbing-haus and Wundt who pursued reductionist programs. 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. Studia Phaenomenologica, vol. 10, 2010: 1944.
E. S. Nelson (&)
Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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The volumes initial short pieces offer a context for Diltheys writings concerning the self and the formation of its sense of reality and its individuality. Dilthey proposes in his Draft for a Preface (1911) that the dominant...