Rudolf Makkreel

Moving beyond the dialogical approaches found in much of contemporary hermeneutics, this book 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 the various meaning contexts that can frame their interpretation. It assesses what such thinkers as Kant, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Habermas and others can contribute to the problems of multicultural understanding, and reconceives hermeneutics as a critical inquiry into the appropriate contextual conditions of understanding and interpretation.

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.

Starting with Kant’s doubts about psychology as a natural science capable of explaining human behavior, several alternative attempts to conceive of human life, culture and history are examined. Kant proposes an anthropology that will be a commonly useful human science rather than a universally valid natural science. This anthropology relates to philosophy as a mode of world-cognition. Special attention is given to how Kant’s theory of right can help define our appropriate place in a communal world. The different ways in which Wilhelm Dilthey and Hermann Cohen respond to Kant’s idea of legitimate appropriation are also considered. The various tasks that descriptive elucidation, explanation, reflective understanding, characterization and interpretation can perform for the human and cultural sciences are examined throughout the essay.Keywords: Appropriation; Hermann Cohen; Culture; Wilhelm Dilthey; Human sciences; Immanuel