Eric S. Nelson

Responding to critiques of Dilthey’s interpretive psychology, I revisit its relation with epistemology and the human sciences. Rather than reducing knowledge to psychology and psychology to subjective understanding, Dilthey articulated the epistemic worth of a psychology involving (1) an impure phenomenology of embodied, historically-situated, and worldly consciousness as individually lived yet complicit with its naturally and socially constituted contexts, (2) experience- and communication-oriented processes of interpreting others, (3) the use of third-person structural-functional analysis and causal explanation, and (4) a recognition of the ungroundability, facticity, and conflict inherent in knowledge and life.

Wheatland intends in this work to demythologize the "Frankfurt school" and answer a lacuna by providing a detailed social history of its American exile and reception. He undertakes the first task by distinguishing the "Horkheimer circle" from later portrayals of the continuity and homogeneity of their thought, the mystique of theorizing in the "splendid isolation" of alienated exile, and their significance for the radical politics of the 1960s. Although it is doubtful that many philosophers and theorists believe these myths, and the book can be unsatisfying due to its overly generalizing and partial treatment of philosophical positions and arguments, it is helpful to understanding the Frankfurt exiles' social contexts and the impact of their connections with colleagues, critics, and interpreters in American academic, Jewish, and leftist circles.Part 1 portrays the complicated efforts to re-establish the Institute for Social Research in New York and Columbia University's interest in Horkheimer and his associates. Since they offered expertise in and a model for interdisciplinary empirical research integrating sociology, psychology, and theory, they were a solution to the decline of Columbia's sociology program, which was interested in expanding empirical social research in a situation of intense competition for funding. While fears of their Marxist connections persisted, the exiles' ever

This paper explores Dilthey’s radical transformation of epistemology and the human sciences through his projects of a critique of historically embodied reason and his hermeneutics of historically mediated life. Answering criticisms that Dilthey overly depends on epistemology, I show how for Dilthey neither philosophy nor the human sciences should be reduced to their theoretical, epistemological, or cognitive dimensions. Dilthey approaches both immediate knowing (Wissen) and theoretical knowledge (Erkenntnis) in the context of a hermeneutical phenomenology of historical life. Knowing is not an isolated activity but an interpretive and self-interpretive practice oriented by situated reflexive awareness (Innewerden) and self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung). As embedded in an historical relational context, knowing does not only consist of epistemic validity claims about representational contents but is fundamentally practical, involving all of human existence. Empirically informed Besinnung, with its double reference to sense as meaning and bodily awareness, orients Dilthey’s inquiry rather than the “irrationalism” of immediate intuition or the “rationalism” of abstract epistemological reasoning.

This dissertation is an investigation of the questions of time, history, and facticity in Dilthey and Heidegger. It is an exploration of the contextual character of experience and the scope and limits of understanding and interpretation. In particular, this work considers their historical and temporal character and relation to facticity. Facticity is that which escapes and resists interpretation, narration, and understanding. In Heidegger's language, facticity indicates the "thrownness" and "uncanniness" of existence which throws the "subject" and its construction of meaning into question. As such, facticity is a positive characteristic of the finitude of human existence. I offer a reconstruction of the question of history in the works of Dilthey and Heidegger through an analysis of "historicality" . The discussion of Dilthey attempts to clarify his project of a "critique of historical reason" and his grounding of the human sciences. The interpretation of Heidegger is based on Heidegger's "hermeneutics of factical life" as developed in his lecture courses of the early 1920's and his thinking of the "event"-character of being in his works of the 1930's

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, and subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger.