Journal of the History of Philosophy

Wilhelm Dilthey has received a great deal of attention in recent years. The second volume of his Selected Works was published in 2010, making Dilthey’s works from the 1890s available in English for the first time. Frederick Beiser also devotes a chapter to Dilthey in The German Historicist Tradition (2011). And Paul Guyer has said that Dilthey will be one of the heroes of his forthcoming Evolution of Modern Aesthetics. The essays collected in Lessing, Makkreel, and Pozzo’s Recent Contributions to Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Human Sciences were originally intended for a new Dilthey International Yearbook, which would capitalize on the resurgence of interest in Dilthey.

The organization of Recent Contributions still reflects the themes to which the first two issues of the Yearbook were to be devoted. Part 1 is on Kant and Dilthey; part 2 is about Dilthey [End Page 622] and hermeneutics. They are preceded by an introduction by Rudolf Makkreel. Going beyond the biographical sketch we might expect, Makkreel discusses the role of generation in Dilthey’s thought (26–31) and the significance of Kant’s distinction between determinant and reflective judgment (24–26). The former—the concept of generation—is significant for at least two reasons. In his early works, Dilthey hoped to explain the internal development of human creativity from psychological principles. Yet he also recognized the importance of social and historical context, which affects the course of individual psychological development. Makkreel argues that Kant’s distinction between determinant and reflective judgment is relevant to understanding this relationship, because the relationship between individual generative capacities and the generation to which an individual belongs is understood through reflection, rather than causal laws that determine and predict outcomes.

The five chapters on Kant and Dilthey are of very high quality. Annette Hilt suggests that Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology developed out of a critique of Dilthey’s historicism, even though Plessner sought to complete Dilthey’s “longtime project of a post-metaphysical and post-transcendental Kantian critique of historical reason” (35). In the next chapter, Massimo Mezzanzanica shows that Helmholtz’s account of perception inspired Dilthey’s attempt to overcome the opposition between the sensible and the intellectual in experience, as well as to explain our belief in the reality of the external world through the principle of “the fullness of life” (59, 77–80). Jared Millson returns to some of the themes addressed by Makkreel, arguing that Dilthey strives to acknowledge human creativity while situating it within a context that makes it understandable. Millson also tracks the influence of Kant’s conception of reflective judgment from Dilthey’s early works on aesthetics (92–95) to his later hermeneutics of historical understanding (95–103). Eric Sean Nelson’s essay serves as a response to Hilt’s discussion of Plessner’s critique of Dilthey’s historicism. Nelson discusses the meaning of history in Dilthey and his transformation of previous philosophies of history, as well as the relation between history and self-understanding (106). He demonstrates that Dilthey’s conception of history neither overemphasizes nor underemphasizes the individual, and that it maintains contact with empirical research and provides a viable model for historical understanding. In the last essay on Dilthey and Kant, Frithjof Rodi traces Dilthey’s preoccupation with the concepts of intuition, wholeness, connection, and reflective experience back to his biography of Schleiermacher, which places Schleiermacher’s development in the context of Kant’s critical philosophy and the literary developments of the Goethezeit.

The four chapters on Dilthey and hermeneutics are also insightful. Benjamin Crowe assesses Dilthey’s significance for contemporary religious epistemology, arguing that Dilthey contributes to the view, common among followers of John Henry Newman, that religious belief cannot be justified by strict proof, but rather by informal kinds of reasoning and the accumulation of evidence (158). Theodore Kisiel shows how Heidegger appropriated Dilthey’s claim that religious experience is “a fundamental experience of life” (178) by reconstructing Heidegger...