Wilhelm Dilthey
Encyclopedia
Wilhelm Dilthey (ˈdɪltaɪ; 19 November 1833 – 1 October 1911) was a German
historian
, psychologist
, sociologist and hermeneutic philosopher, who held Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism
prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism
in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions, which are drawn from German literary and philosophical traditions.
, now in Hesse
, Germany
. As a young man he followed family traditions by studying theology
in Heidelberg
, where his teachers included the young Kuno Fischer
. He then moved to the University of Berlin and was taught by, amongst others, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg
and August Boeckh, both former pupils of Friedrich Schleiermacher. He edited Schleiermacher's letters and was also commissioned to write a biography. In 1867 he took up a professorship in Basel, but later returned to Berlin where he held the prestigious chair in philosophy at the University of Berlin. He died in 1911.
. The school of Romantic hermeneutics stressed that historically embedded interpreters — a "living" rather than a Cartesian or "theoretical" subject — use 'understanding' and 'interpretation', which combine individual-psychological and social-historical description and analysis, to gain a greater knowledge of texts and authors in their contexts.
The process of interpretive inquiry established by Schleiermacher involved what Dilthey called "the Hermeneutic circle," which is the recurring movement between the implicit and the explicit, the particular and the whole. The "general hermeneutics" that Schleiermacher proposed was a combination of the hermeneutics used to interpret Sacred Scriptures (e.g. the Pauline epistles) and the hermeneutics used by Classicists (e.g. Plato's philosophy). Dilthey saw its relevance for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) in contrast with the natural sciences.
Along with Friedrich Nietzsche
, Georg Simmel
and Henri Bergson
, Dilthey's work influenced early twentieth-century "Lebensphilosophie" and "Existenzphilosophie."
Dilthey informed the early Martin Heidegger's
approach to hermeneutics in his early lecture courses, in which he developed a "hermeneutics of factical life", and in Being and Time
. Heidegger grew increasingly more critical of Dilthey, arguing for a more radical 'temporalization' of the possibilities of interpretation and human existence.
In Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), Hans-Georg Gadamer
, influenced by Heidegger, criticised Dilthey's approach to hermeneutics as both overly aesthetic and subjective as well as method-oriented and "positivistic." According to Gadamer, Dilthey's hermeneutics is insufficiently concerned with the ontological event of truth and inadequately considers the implications of how the interpreter and the interpreter's interpretations are not outside of tradition but occupy a particular position within it, i.e., have a temporal horizon.
today, although he strongly objected to being labelled as such, as the sociology of his time was mainly that of Auguste Comte
and Herbert Spencer
. He objected to their dialectic
al/evolution
ist assumptions about the necessary changes that all societal formations must go through, as well as their narrowly natural-scientific methodology. Comte's idea of positivism
was, according to Dilthey, one-sided and misleading. Dilthey did, however, have good things to say about the neo-Kantian sociology of Georg Simmel
, with whom he was a colleague at the University of Berlin. Simmel himself was later an associate of Max Weber
, the primary founder of sociological antipositivism
. J. I. Hans Bakker has argued that Dilthey should be considered one of the classical sociological theorists due to his own influence in the foundation of nonpositivist "verstehende" sociology
and the "verstehen
" method.
Jürgen Habermas
was also influenced by Dilthey, most notably in the Positivismusstreit
of the early 1960s and his early work Knowledge and Human Interests (1968).
Dilthey strongly rejected using a model formed exclusively from the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), and instead proposed developing a separate model for the human science
s (Geisteswissenschaften
). His argument centered around the idea that in the natural sciences we seek to explain phenomena in terms of cause and effect, or the general and the particular; in contrast, in the human sciences, we seek to understand in terms of the relations of the part and the whole. In the social sciences we may also combine the two approaches, a point stressed by German sociologist Max Weber
. His principles, a general theory of understanding or comprehension (Verstehen
) could, he asserted, be applied to all manner of interpretation ranging from ancient texts to art work, religious works, and even law. His interpretation of different theories of aesthetics
in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was preliminary to his speculations concerning the form aesthetic theory would take in the twentieth century.
Both the natural and human sciences originate in the context or "nexus of life" (Lebenszusammenhang), a concept which influenced the phenomenological account of the lifeworld
(Lebenswelt), but are differentiated in how they relate to their life-context. Whereas the natural sciences abstract away from it, it becomes the primary object of inquiry in the human sciences.
Dilthey defended his use of the term Geisteswissenschaft
(literally, "spiritual science") by pointing out that other terms such as "social science" and "cultural sciences" are equally one-sided and that the human spirit is the central phenomenon from which all others are derived and analyzable. For Dilthey, like Hegel, "spirit" (Geist) has a cultural rather than a social meaning. It is not an abstract intellectual principle or disembodied behavioral experience but refers to the individual's life in its concrete cultural-historical context. The very term "Spirit" lifts Dilthey's discussion beyond the philosophical premisses of pragmatism, instrumentalism and modern-day postmodernism.
.
This approach influenced Karl Jaspers
' Psychology of Worldviews as well as Rudolf Steiner
.
and Heinrich Rickert
, members of the Baden School of Neo-Kantianism
. Dilthey was not a Neo-Kantian, but had a profound knowledge of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which deeply influenced his thinking. But whereas Neo-Kantianism was primarily interested in epistemology on the basis of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Dilthey took Kant's Critique of Judgment as his point of departure. An important debate between Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians concerned the "human" as opposed to "cultural" sciences, with the Neo-Kantians arguing for the exclusion of psychology from the cultural sciences and Dilthey for its inclusion as a human science.
Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works are being published by Princeton University Press under the editorship of the noted Dilthey scholars Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi.
Published volumes include:
Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften are currently published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht:
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
, psychologist
Psychologist
Psychologist is a professional or academic title used by individuals who are either:* Clinical professionals who work with patients in a variety of therapeutic contexts .* Scientists conducting psychological research or teaching psychology in a college...
, sociologist and hermeneutic philosopher, who held Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism
Positivism
Positivism is a a view of scientific methods and a philosophical approach, theory, or system based on the view that, in the social as well as natural sciences, sensory experiences and their logical and mathematical treatment are together the exclusive source of all worthwhile information....
in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions, which are drawn from German literary and philosophical traditions.
Biography
Dilthey was born in 1833 in the Rhineland village of BiebrichBiebrich
Biebrich is the name of two places in Germany.*Biebrich, a borough of Wiesbaden, Hesse, until 1926 an independent town*Biebrich, Rhineland Palatinate, a small municipality in the Rhein-Lahn district, near Katzenelnbogen...
, now in Hesse
Hesse
Hesse or Hessia is both a cultural region of Germany and the name of an individual German state.* The cultural region of Hesse includes both the State of Hesse and the area known as Rhenish Hesse in the neighbouring Rhineland-Palatinate state...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. As a young man he followed family traditions by studying theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
in Heidelberg
Heidelberg
-Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of...
, where his teachers included the young Kuno Fischer
Kuno Fischer
Kuno Fischer, born Ernst Kuno Berthold Fischer, was a German philosopher, a historian of philosophy and a critic.-Biography:After studying philosophy at Leipzig and Halle,...
. He then moved to the University of Berlin and was taught by, amongst others, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg
Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg
Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg was a German philosopher and philologist.-Early life:He was born at Eutin, near Lübeck. He was educated at the universities of Kiel, Leipzig, and Berlin...
and August Boeckh, both former pupils of Friedrich Schleiermacher. He edited Schleiermacher's letters and was also commissioned to write a biography. In 1867 he took up a professorship in Basel, but later returned to Berlin where he held the prestigious chair in philosophy at the University of Berlin. He died in 1911.
Hermeneutics
Dilthey was inspired in part by the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher on hermeneutics, which he helped revive. Both figures are linked to German RomanticismGerman Romanticism
For the general context, see Romanticism.In the philosophy, art, and culture of German-speaking countries, German Romanticism was the dominant movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. German Romanticism developed relatively late compared to its English counterpart, coinciding in its...
. The school of Romantic hermeneutics stressed that historically embedded interpreters — a "living" rather than a Cartesian or "theoretical" subject — use 'understanding' and 'interpretation', which combine individual-psychological and social-historical description and analysis, to gain a greater knowledge of texts and authors in their contexts.
The process of interpretive inquiry established by Schleiermacher involved what Dilthey called "the Hermeneutic circle," which is the recurring movement between the implicit and the explicit, the particular and the whole. The "general hermeneutics" that Schleiermacher proposed was a combination of the hermeneutics used to interpret Sacred Scriptures (e.g. the Pauline epistles) and the hermeneutics used by Classicists (e.g. Plato's philosophy). Dilthey saw its relevance for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) in contrast with the natural sciences.
Along with Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
, Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel was a major German sociologist, philosopher, and critic.Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?',...
and Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize...
, Dilthey's work influenced early twentieth-century "Lebensphilosophie" and "Existenzphilosophie."
Dilthey informed the early Martin Heidegger's
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
approach to hermeneutics in his early lecture courses, in which he developed a "hermeneutics of factical life", and in Being and Time
Being and Time
Being and Time is a book by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Although written quickly, and despite the fact that Heidegger never completed the project outlined in the introduction, it remains his most important work and has profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, particularly...
. Heidegger grew increasingly more critical of Dilthey, arguing for a more radical 'temporalization' of the possibilities of interpretation and human existence.
In Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method .-Life:...
, influenced by Heidegger, criticised Dilthey's approach to hermeneutics as both overly aesthetic and subjective as well as method-oriented and "positivistic." According to Gadamer, Dilthey's hermeneutics is insufficiently concerned with the ontological event of truth and inadequately considers the implications of how the interpreter and the interpreter's interpretations are not outside of tradition but occupy a particular position within it, i.e., have a temporal horizon.
Sociology
Dilthey was very interested in what we would call sociologySociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
today, although he strongly objected to being labelled as such, as the sociology of his time was mainly that of Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...
and Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....
. He objected to their dialectic
Dialectic
Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues...
al/evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
ist assumptions about the necessary changes that all societal formations must go through, as well as their narrowly natural-scientific methodology. Comte's idea of positivism
Positivism
Positivism is a a view of scientific methods and a philosophical approach, theory, or system based on the view that, in the social as well as natural sciences, sensory experiences and their logical and mathematical treatment are together the exclusive source of all worthwhile information....
was, according to Dilthey, one-sided and misleading. Dilthey did, however, have good things to say about the neo-Kantian sociology of Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel was a major German sociologist, philosopher, and critic.Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?',...
, with whom he was a colleague at the University of Berlin. Simmel himself was later an associate of Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
, the primary founder of sociological antipositivism
Antipositivism
Antipositivism is the view in social science that the social realm may not be subject to the same methods of investigation as the natural world; that academics must reject empiricism and the scientific method in the conduct of research...
. J. I. Hans Bakker has argued that Dilthey should be considered one of the classical sociological theorists due to his own influence in the foundation of nonpositivist "verstehende" sociology
Antipositivism
Antipositivism is the view in social science that the social realm may not be subject to the same methods of investigation as the natural world; that academics must reject empiricism and the scientific method in the conduct of research...
and the "verstehen
Verstehen
Verstehen is an ordinary German word with exactly the same meaning as the English word "understand". However, since the late 19th century in the context of German philosophy and social sciences, it has also been used in the special sense of "interpretive or participatory examination" of social...
" method.
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...
was also influenced by Dilthey, most notably in the Positivismusstreit
Positivism dispute
Positivismusstreit is the German word for debate about positivism and refers to a well known philosophical dispute between Critical rationalism and the Frankfurt School in 1961, about the methodology of the social sciences...
of the early 1960s and his early work Knowledge and Human Interests (1968).
The Distinction between the Natural Sciences and the Human Sciences
A life-long concern was to establish a proper theoretical and methodological foundation for the "human sciences" (e.g. history, law, literary criticism), distinct from, but equally "scientific" as, the "natural sciences" (e.g. physics, chemistry). He suggested that all human experience divides naturally into two parts: that of the surrounding natural world, in which "objective necessity" rules, and that of inner experience, characterized by "sovereignty of the will, responsibility for actions, a capacity to subject everything to thinking and to resist everything within the fortress of freedom of his/her own person".Dilthey strongly rejected using a model formed exclusively from the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), and instead proposed developing a separate model for the human science
Human Science
Human science refers to the investigation of human life and activities via a phenomenological methodology that acknowledges the validity of both sensory and psychological experience...
s (Geisteswissenschaften
Geisteswissenschaft
Geisteswissenschaft is a traditional division of faculty in German universities that included subjects such as Philosophy, History, Philology, social sciences, sometimes even Theology, and Jurisprudence...
). His argument centered around the idea that in the natural sciences we seek to explain phenomena in terms of cause and effect, or the general and the particular; in contrast, in the human sciences, we seek to understand in terms of the relations of the part and the whole. In the social sciences we may also combine the two approaches, a point stressed by German sociologist Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
. His principles, a general theory of understanding or comprehension (Verstehen
Verstehen
Verstehen is an ordinary German word with exactly the same meaning as the English word "understand". However, since the late 19th century in the context of German philosophy and social sciences, it has also been used in the special sense of "interpretive or participatory examination" of social...
) could, he asserted, be applied to all manner of interpretation ranging from ancient texts to art work, religious works, and even law. His interpretation of different theories of aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was preliminary to his speculations concerning the form aesthetic theory would take in the twentieth century.
Both the natural and human sciences originate in the context or "nexus of life" (Lebenszusammenhang), a concept which influenced the phenomenological account of the lifeworld
Lifeworld
Lifeworld may be conceived as a universe of what is self-evident or given, a world that subjects may experience together. For Husserl, the lifeworld is the fundament for all epistemological enquiries. The concept has its origin in biology and cultural Protestantism.The lifeworld concept is used in...
(Lebenswelt), but are differentiated in how they relate to their life-context. Whereas the natural sciences abstract away from it, it becomes the primary object of inquiry in the human sciences.
Dilthey defended his use of the term Geisteswissenschaft
Geisteswissenschaft
Geisteswissenschaft is a traditional division of faculty in German universities that included subjects such as Philosophy, History, Philology, social sciences, sometimes even Theology, and Jurisprudence...
(literally, "spiritual science") by pointing out that other terms such as "social science" and "cultural sciences" are equally one-sided and that the human spirit is the central phenomenon from which all others are derived and analyzable. For Dilthey, like Hegel, "spirit" (Geist) has a cultural rather than a social meaning. It is not an abstract intellectual principle or disembodied behavioral experience but refers to the individual's life in its concrete cultural-historical context. The very term "Spirit" lifts Dilthey's discussion beyond the philosophical premisses of pragmatism, instrumentalism and modern-day postmodernism.
Weltanschauungen
Dilthey developed a typology of the three basic Weltanschauungen, or World-Views, which he considered to be "typical" (comparable to Max Weber's notion of "ideal types") and conflicting ways of conceiving of man's relation to NatureNature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
.
- in NaturalismNaturalism (philosophy)Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe that we know...
, represented by Epicureans of all times and places, man sees himself as determined by nature - in the Idealism of Freedom (or Subjective idealismSubjective idealismSubjective idealism, or empirical idealism, is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that physical things do not exist...
), represented by Friedrich SchillerFriedrich SchillerJohann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life , Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe...
and Immanuel KantImmanuel KantImmanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
, man is conscious of his separation from nature by his free will - in Objective idealismObjective idealismObjective idealism is an idealistic metaphysics that postulates that there is in an important sense only one perceiver, and that this perceiver is one with that which is perceived. One important advocate of such a metaphysics, Josiah Royce, wrote that he was indifferent "whether anybody calls all...
, represented by G. W. F. Hegel, Baruch SpinozaBaruch SpinozaBaruch de Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch Jewish philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death...
, and Giordano BrunoGiordano BrunoGiordano Bruno , born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited...
, man is conscious of his harmony with nature.
This approach influenced Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
Karl Theodor Jaspers was a German psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system...
' Psychology of Worldviews as well as Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and esotericist. He gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher...
.
Neo-Kantians
Dilthey's ideas should be examined in terms of his similarities and differences with Wilhelm WindelbandWilhelm Windelband
Wilhelm Windelband was a German philosopher of the Baden School.Windelband is now mainly remembered for the terms nomothetic and idiographic, which he introduced. These have currency in psychology and other areas, though not necessarily in line with his original meanings...
and Heinrich Rickert
Heinrich Rickert
Heinrich John Rickert was a German philosopher, one of the leading Neo-Kantians.-Life:He was born in Danzig, Prussia and died in Heidelberg, Germany.-Thought:...
, members of the Baden School of Neo-Kantianism
Neo-Kantianism
Neo-Kantianism refers broadly to a revived type of philosophy along the lines of that laid down by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century, or more specifically by Schopenhauer's criticism of the Kantian philosophy in his work The World as Will and Representation , as well as by other post-Kantian...
. Dilthey was not a Neo-Kantian, but had a profound knowledge of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which deeply influenced his thinking. But whereas Neo-Kantianism was primarily interested in epistemology on the basis of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Dilthey took Kant's Critique of Judgment as his point of departure. An important debate between Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians concerned the "human" as opposed to "cultural" sciences, with the Neo-Kantians arguing for the exclusion of psychology from the cultural sciences and Dilthey for its inclusion as a human science.
Further reading
- Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
- Jos de Mul, The Tragedy of Finitude: Dilthey's Hermeneutics of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works are being published by Princeton University Press under the editorship of the noted Dilthey scholars Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi.
Published volumes include:
- Volume I: Introduction to the Human Sciences
- Volume II: Understanding the Human World: Selected Works of Wilhelm Dilthey (2010) 312 pages.
- Volume III: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences
- Volume IV: Hermeneutics and the Study of History
- Volume V: Poetry and Experience
Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften are currently published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht:
- Volume 1: Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften
- Volume 2: Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation
- Volume 3: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes
- Volume 4: Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels und andere Abhandlungen zur Geschichte des Deutschen Idealismus
- Volume 5: Die geistige Welt
- Volume 6: Die geistige Welt
- Volume 7: Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften
- Volume 8: Weltanschauungslehre
- Volume 9: Pädagogik
- Volume 10: System der Ethik
- Volume 11: Vom Aufgang des geschichtlichen Bewußtseins
- Volume 12: Zur preußischen Geschichte
- Volume 13: Leben Schleiermachers. Erster Band
- Volume 14: Leben Schleiermachers. Zweiter Band
- Volume 15: Zur Geistesgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts
- Volume 16: Zur Geistesgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts
- Volume 17: Zur Geistesgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts
- Volume 18: Die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte
- Volume 19: Grundlegung der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte
- Volume 20: Logik und System der philosophischen Wissenschaften
- Volume 21: Psychologie als Erfahrungswissenschaft
- Volume 22: Psychologie als Erfahrungswissenschaft
- Volume 23: Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie
- Volume 24: Logik und Wert
- Volume 25: Dichter als Seher der Menschheit
- Volume 26: Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung