Journal of the History of Philosophy

This book contains a collection of fourteen articles and essays by the well-known and highly respected German Dilthey scholar Frithjof Rodi. The majority of the texts were written between 1992 and 2002 but they have been revised and updated for publication in this volume. All of the papers discuss the work of the German hermeneutic philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, but a variety of connected topics is also covered.

The first two parts of the book contain articles analysing Dilthey's work in the two central areas of hermeneutics, especially the philosophical theory of historical knowledge, and aesthetics. While one of the central issues of Dilthey's hermeneutics is the reflection on the relation between life, history and historical knowledge, the core concepts of his aesthetics are "expression" and "vivacity" (Lebendigkeit). The two areas are connected via Dilthey's all-compassing interest in the structures of unities, be these forms of experiences or works of art. Dilthey's influential idea of a "dynamic unity" is discussed in the chapter entitled "Das Erlebnis: die 'dynamische Einheit'."

The two other parts of the volume contain articles and essays by Rodi which refer to specific aspects of Dilthey's scholarly life and work and his position within nineteenth and early twentieth-century German philosophy, respectively. Although most of the articles in this book are strictly scholarly and document Rodi's thorough knowledge of every aspect of Dilthey's work, some of the essays in the third part are of a more polemical character. In one of these polemical essays Rodi fundamentally criticizes Hans Albert's concept of a "naturalistic" form of hermeneutics.

The title of the collection draws on one of Dilthey's most important convictions to the effect that there are "different forms of unity," a conviction that is repeated in the title of the chapter: "'Der Zweck ist eben das strukturierte Ganze selbst.'" Although this article refers to the relevance of music in Dilthey's life and work, and although the concept of structured whole is itself taken from his [End Page 216] work on aesthetics, Rodi's claim is that this idea is relevant also to the other areas of Dilthey's philosophical endeavours, especially in his work on the hermeneutics of historical knowledge. The parts of the volume dedicated to this topic discuss very important issues, indeed: The critique of historical reason not only analyses different forms of structural unities, it also formulates many relevant distinctions within the concept of life, reminding us that Dilthey not only started his academic career as a theologian but that also as a philosopher he thought of "the divine in nature and history as an evident condition of thought and action" (10).

One of Rodi's early books, entitled Morphologie und Hermeneutik (Stuttgart, 1969), discussed Dilthey's aesthetics within the context of Goethe's organolocical thinking. The first two chapters in part two try to correct some of the convictions formulated in this earlier book. In particular, Rodi now regards his use there of the term "morphology" as a confused running together of both Romantic and positivistic elements. The central issue of the chapter "Der 'schaffende' Ausdruck. Bemerkungen zu einer Kategorie des späten Dilthey" is a comparison between the concepts of hermeneutics formulated by Dilthey and Gadamer, respectively.

The two chapters of part four, written in 1992 and in 2002, respectively, are dedicated to more specialized issues. The first of them, on "the intensity of life," refers to the relations of the "radical" work of Graf Yorck von Wartenburg to the thinking of both Heidegger and Dilthey, while the last chapter in the volume gives a detailed and inspiring interpretation of Bollnow's concept of "articulating decription" (artikulierende Beschreibung). A somewhat personal aspect of this last essay is the fact that here Rodi also reflects on the way in which Dilthey's philosophy influenced his own philosophical efforts and convictions: Rodi's philosophical mentor, Otto Friedrich Bollnow, was a student of Dilthey.

The book also contains valuable supplementary material...