Abstract

In providing an English translation of Heinrich Rickert's Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung: Eine logische Einleitung in die historischen Wissenschaften, Guy Oakes has rendered a valuable service to scholars concerned with neo-Kantian thought or the histories of the philosophy of science and the philosophy of history. In this work Rickert --a student of Wilhelm Windelband, member of the Southwest German school of neo-Kantianism, and sometime colleague of Max Weber--analyzes the natural and historical sciences and defends the propriety and ineliminability of a distinctively historical science. In the course of this effort, Rickert's targets range from Comte to Hegel. While the text may at first appear to have only historical interest, a number of Rickert's arguments will interest the contemporary scholar concerned with the philosophy of history and history's putative distinctiveness vis-à-vis natural science.