Rudolf Makkreel

This chapter examines Baumgarten’s empirical psychology by comparing it with Kant’s discussion of the same material in his _Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View_. Through a careful analysis of both texts, Makkreel shows that while Kant clearly adopts much of the structure and terminology of his own empirical psychology directly from Baumgarten, he nevertheless reworks and reorganizes these in quite different ways. According to Makkreel, this can be explained by Kant’s removal of empirical psychology from the realm of metaphysics, and his repurposing of Baumgarten’s ideas for the sake of developing a pragmatic, and ultimately morally directed, theory for the cultivation of the mind.

Kant’s efforts to replace psychology as a theoretical natural science with anthropology as a pragmatic science are examined on the basis of his anthropology lectures. For Kant, psychology posits the soul as a distinct substance, but his pragmatic anthropology makes no such metaphysical assumption. It can succeed by limiting itself to providing historical rather than rational cognition, being descriptive rather than explanative, and having a worldly rather than an academic perspective. Kant’s reflections on culture in the _Critique of Judgment_ are claimed to account for certain final changes in the anthropology that was published in 1798.

In this illuminating study of Kant's theory of imagination and its role in interpretation, Rudolf A. Makkreel argues against the commonly held notion that Kant's transcendental philosophy is incompatible with hermeneutics. The charge that Kant's foundational philosophy is inadequate to the task of interpretation can be rebutted, explains Makkreel, if we fully understand the role of imagination in his work. In identifying this role, Makkreel also reevaluates the relationship among Kant's discussions of the feeling of life, common sense, and the purposiveness of history.

This book provides an innovative approach to meeting the challenges faced by philosophical hermeneutics in interpreting an ever-changing and multicultural world. Rudolf A. Makkreel proposes an orientational and reflective conception of interpretation in which judgment plays a central role. Moving beyond the dialogical approaches found in much of contemporary hermeneutics, he focuses instead on the diagnostic use of reflective judgment, not only to discern the differentiating features of the phenomena to be understood, but also to orient us to the various meaning contexts that can frame their interpretation. Makkreel develops overlooked resources of Kant’s transcendental thought in order to reconceive hermeneutics as a critical inquiry into the appropriate contextual conditions of understanding and interpretation. He shows that a crucial task of hermeneutical critique is to establish priorities among the contexts that may be brought to bear on the interpretation of history and culture. The final chapter turns to the contemporary art scene and explores how orientational contexts can be reconfigured to respond to the ways in which media of communication are being transformed by digital technology. Altogether, Makkreel offers a promising way of thinking about the shifting contexts that we bring to bear on interpretations of all kinds, whether of texts, art works, or the world.

Wilhelm Dilthey's contributions to hermeneutics go back to 1860 when he wrote a long manuscript entitled “Schleiermacher's Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics”. Because of the long hold that theology had over hermeneutics as the theory of interpretation, the important theoretical writings that contribute to Dilthey's life project of a Critique of Historical Reason before 1900 refer less to the problems of interpretation and more to the nature of understanding. Dilthey prefers the term lived experience (Erlebnis) and increasingly focuses on the capacity of lived experience to encompass both inner and outer sense. Dilthey's last essay on hermeneutics entitled “The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Manifestations of Life”, he reiterates the three levels of understanding: the elementary understanding that derives from the commonalities that nurture us from birth, the higher conceptual understanding contributed by the sciences, and, finally, re‐experiencing as reflective assessment.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason stresses the limits of what our finite intellect can understand directly about our experience of nature. This raises the question of what role the more indirect process of interpretation can have in his overall system. Because religious interpretation is approached from the perspective of morality, this chapter considers it in relation to Critique of Practical Reason. Systematic interpretation falls within the province of theoretical reason and is considered in relation to Critique of Pure Reason. The third sense of interpretation still to be developed is oriented by Critique of the Power of Judgment. The figurative use of interpretation in relation to theoretical reason is found most explicitly in Kant's Reflections on Metaphysics: “for nature is our task, the text of our interpretation” Whereas determinant judgment is externally directed, reflective judgment can be called self‐orienting in searching for what else is worth knowing.

Interpretation becomes important when direct understanding is either lacking or inadequate. Observational understanding is geared to the world conceived on the model of nature outside of us and is directed by the goals of the natural sciences. Reflective understanding by contrast conceives the world as a sphere in which we participate and is more in line with how the human sciences, which include all the humanities and some of the more critically oriented social sciences, approach their subject matter. This chapter aligns observational understanding with the intellectual faculty of Verstand and reflective understanding with the power of Verstehen. To attain critical hermeneutics, we must be able to account for both kinds of understanding by considering them as part of a more full‐fledged theory of judgment. We can initiate this by developing what Kant has to say about a range of judgments and prejudgments whereby we orient ourselves to the world.

The place of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911)in the history of hermeneutics has been subject to considerable misinterpretation. He is rightly regarded as having expanded the scope of hermeneutics by adding human actions to the kinds of texts that can be interpreted, but is wrongly dismissed as having overlooked the full significance of this move. His distinction between understanding and explanation has been stereotyped as a mere methodological distinction relevant for his theory of the human sciences. His reflections on interpretation have been relegated to the domain of traditional philological hermeneutics and excluded from philosophical hermeneutics. Heidegger's ontical‐ontological distinction has been used to drive a wedge between the two and place Dilthey on the ontical side of a divide that cannot be fully justified. On the basis of newly available writings, a more adequate account dealing with the philosophical content of Dilthey's hermeneutic contributions can now be given.

This paper examines the ways in which Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer place the arts in the spectrum of symbolization. Langer claims that Cassirer is wrong to consider artistic symbolism as a more concrete mode of linguistic symbolism. Instead, artists create presentational symbols that are just as capable of formal articulation, i. e., of complex combinations, as words are. According to Langer, the presentational modes of articulation of music and the visual arts are altogether different from the syntactical mode that governs language. I argue that the way Langer imposes her presentational model on the literary arts goes too far in decontextualizing them from the real world. Thus I propose a more inclusive artistic spectrum which proceeds from Langer’s presentational symbolism to the typifying mode of symbolization suggested by Wilhelm Dilthey to Cassirer’s more ideational linguistic mode.

This essay explores the relation between worldly orientation and rational comprehension in Kant. Both require subjective grounds of differentiation that were eventually developed into a contextualizing principle for reflective judgement. This kind of judgement can proceed either inductively to find new universals or by analogy to symbolically link different objective spheres. I will argue that the basic orientational function of reflective judgement is to modally differentiate the formal horizonal contexts of field, territory, domain and habitat laid out in the Introduction to theCritique of the Power of Judgement. Assessing which context takes priority will be important in making aesthetic judgements and for applying practical reason to comprehend human affairs.