Interpreting Dilthey


Book Description

Examines Dilthey's hermeneutics, aesthetics, practical philosophy, and philosophy of history, showing how his work remains relevant for philosophers today.




Heidegger Becoming Phenomenological


Book Description

This book sets the record straight about the greater influence of Dilthey than Husserl in Heidegger's initial formulation of his conception of phenomenology.




The Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies


Book Description

Process approaches to organization studies focus on flow, activities, and evolution, understanding organizations and organizing as processes in the making. They stand in contrast to positivist approaches that see organizations and phenomena as fixed, static, and measurable. Process approaches draw on a range of ideas and philosophies. The Handbook examines 34 philosophers and social theorists, both those commonly linked to process thinking, such as Whitehead, Bergson and James, and those that are not as often addressed from a process perspective such as Dilthey and Tarde. Each chapter addresses the background and context of this thinker, their work (with a focus on the processual elements), and the potential contribution to organization and management research. For students and scholars in the field of Organization Studies this book is an entry point into the work of philosophical thinkers and social theorists for whom the world is far from being a solid place.




Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding


Book Description

Perhaps no philosopher has so fully explored the nature and conditions of historical understanding as Wilhelm Dilthey. His work, conceived overall as a Critique of Historical Reason and developed through his well-known theory of the human studies, provides concepts and methods still fruitful for those concerned with analyzing the human condition. Despite the increasing recognition of Dilthey's contributions, relati vely few of his writings have as yet appeared in English translation. It is therefore both timely and useful to have available here two works drawn from different phases in the development of his philosophy. The "Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology" (1894), now translated into English for the first time, sets forth Dilthey's programma tic and methodological viewpoints through a descriptive psychology, while "The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Expressions of Life" (ca. 1910) is representative of his later hermeneutic approach to historical understanding. DESCRIPTIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND THE HUMAN STUDIES Dilthey presented the first mature statement of his theory of the human studies in volume one of his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Human Studies), published in 1883. He argued there that for the proper study of man and history we must eschew the metaphysical speculation of the absolute idealists while at the same time avoiding the scientistic reduction of positivism.




Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume III


Book Description

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.




Introduction to the Human Sciences


Book Description

For some two centuries, scholars have wrestled with questions regarding the nature and logic of history as a discipline and, more broadly, with the entire complex of the "human sciences, " with include theology, philosophy, history, literature, the fine arts, and languages. The fundamental issue is whether the human sciences are a special class of studies with a specifically distinct object and method or whether they must be subsumed under the natural sciences. German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey dedicated the bulk of his long career to there and related questions. His Introduction to the Human Sciences is a pioneering effort to elaborate a general theory of the human sciences, especially history, and to distinguish these sciences radically from the field of natural sciences. Though the Introduction was never completed, it remains one of the major statements of the topic. Together with other works by Dilthey, it has had a substantial influence on the recognition and human sciences as a fundamental division of human knowledge and on their separation from the natural sciences in origin, nature, and method. As a contribution to the issue of the methodologies of the humanities and social sciences, the Introduction rightly claims a place. This is the first time the entire work is available in English. In his introductory essay, translator Ramon J. Betanzos surveys Dilthey's life and thought and hails his efforts to create a foundational science for the particular human sciences, and at the same time, takes serious issue with Dilthey's historical/critical evaluation of metaphysics.







A Companion to Continental Philosophy


Book Description

Covering the complete development of post-Kantian Continental philosophy, this volume serves as an essential reference work for philosophers and those engaged in the many disciplines that are integrally related to Continental and European Philosophy.




Poetry and Experience


Book Description

This is the fifth volume in a six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), 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" (also known as his Poetics) 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.




The Tragedy of Finitude


Book Description

The author then elaborates a systematic reconstruction of Dilthey's ontology of life. In the final section of the book, Dilthey's hermeneutic ontology is confronted with the works of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida, and its relevance in current philosophical debate is evaluated."--Jacket.