Dilthey as a philosopher of science

This volume contains the contributions to a conference at the Institute Vienna Circle of the University of Vienna in June 2013 that aimed at examining Diltheys work as a philosopher of science in the light of the results of the last decades Dilthey research that have moved him further away from the idea of a merely continental philosophy of the hermeneutics of life. He has been shown as a representative of the academic philosophy in 19th century Germany that was oriented towards and interested in all sciences. Dilthey neither advocated a strict dichotomy of human sciences and natural sciences nor did he understand hermeneutics or descriptive psychology in opposition to the natural sciences. His understanding of science was holistic and committed to a comprehensive notion of empirical knowledge that differs from the view of British or French empirism only in his inclusion of higher regions of the inner life in addition to sensorily experience. (This is an issue that numerous of the articles in this volume take up.) The articles in this book draw heavily on the programmatic reorientation in Dilthey research. Gudrun Kühne-Bertram, for example, determines Diltheys complex conception of the relationship between natural and humanities. Helmut Johach emphasizes the significance of the social sciences for Diltheys notion of the humanities; Helmut Pulte discusses Diltheys relation to the natural sciences. The contributions by Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Christian Damböck, Kurt Walter Zeidler, Sebastian Luft, Ernst Wolfgang Orth, and Rudolf A. Makkreel highlight the connections between Dilthey and several contemporary philosophers and philosophical movements that, like Dilthey, are characterized by a positive relation to the sciences: John Stuart Mill (Lessing), Hermann Cohen (Damböck), Adolf Trendelenburg (Zeidler), Wilhelm Windelband, and Heinrich Rickert (Luft) as well as Ernst Cassirer (Orth, Makkreel). Gottfried Gabriels contribution illustrates the importance Dilthey had for one of the pioneers of modern theory of science, Rudolf Carnap. Jos de Mul underlines the actuality of Diltheys work in todays debates about the philosophy of science by reference to the philosophical problems of biosemantics.