This is the second volume in a six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), a philosopher and historian of culture who continues to have a significant influence on Continental philosophy and a broad range of scholarly disciplines. In addition to his landmark works on the theories of history and the human sciences, Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics, phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences.

This volume presents Dilthey's main theoretical works from the 1890s, the period between the" Introduction to the Human Sciences" and "The Formation of the Historical World." A common thread of the writings included here is an interest in the relation between the self and the world.

In "The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification," Dilthey argues that our engagement with the world is rooted in our practical drives and the resistance they meet. The basic nexus of our beliefs about reality is volitional rather than representational. The next essay, "Life and Cognition," examines the main categories with which we organize our experience of life into an understanding of the human world: selfsameness; doing and undergoing; and essentiality.

These categorial relations are further articulated with the aid of Dilthey's structural psychology in ways that rival some of the insights of phenomenology. This occurs in "The Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology." By focusing on how lived experience places everything in a temporal continuum that can be described and analyzed, Dilthey saw the opportunity to establish a structural psychology that could be of great use to the human sciences in general.

In the final essay, "Contributions to the Study of Individuality," Dilthey attacks Windelband's thesis that the human sciences are idiographic. Many human sciences have systematic and structural aims that combine the study of uniformities with the examination of individuation. Applying the comparative method, Dilthey argues that living beings share many basic similarities within which typical variations tend to recur. For human individuation, however, the specification of the historical nexus is also essential.

This book completes a landmark six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), a philosopher and historian of culture who continues to have a significant influence on philosophy, hermeneutics, and the theory of the human sciences. These volumes make available to English readers texts that represent the full range of Dilthey's work. The works in this volume present Dilthey's most deeply held views about philosophy and how it can guide human practices. System of Ethics (1890) argues that Humean sympathy motivates us only externally and must be replaced with the internally motivated fellow-feeling of solidarity that respects others as ends in themselves. The Essence of Philosophy (1907) demonstrates how philosophy has developed from its traditional metaphysical role to the epistemological and encyclopedic functions that ground and order the natural and human sciences. The work also discloses an orientational function of philosophy that is explored further in "The Types of World-View and Their Development" (1911). Philosophical world-views are important in that they address the existential needs and riddles that grow out of life experience and are not solved by any of the sciences. In addition, the book features three other significant essays. "Present Day Culture and Philosophy" (1898) concerns the challenges to philosophy posed by contemporary culture. "Dream" (1903) is about the thinkers portrayed in Raphael's School of Athens and Dilthey's worries about them breaking up into three divergent groups. Finally, "The Problem of Religion" (1911) considers how religiosity can still inform lived experience in secular times.

This volume provides Dilthey's most mature and best formulation of his Critique of Historical Reason. It begins with three "Studies Toward the Foundation of the Human Sciences," in which Dilthey refashions Husserlian concepts to describe the basic structures of consciousness relevant to historical understanding.

The volume next presents the major 1910 work "The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences." Here Dilthey considers the degree to which carriers of history--individuals, cultures, institutions, and communities--can be articulated as productive systems capable of generating value and meaning and of realizing purposes. Hegel's idea of objective spirit is reconceived in a more empirical form to designate the medium of commonality in which historical beings are immersed. Any universal claims about history need to be framed within the specific productive systems analyzed by the various human sciences. Dilthey's drafts for the Continuation of the "Formation" contain extensive discussions of the categories most important for our knowledge of historical life: meaning, value, purpose, time, and development. He also examines the contributions of autobiography to historical understanding and of biography to scientific history.

The finest summary of Dilthey's views on hermeneutics can be found in "The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Manifestations of Life." Here, Dilthey differentiates understanding relative to three kinds of manifestations of life. After giving his analysis of elementary understanding, he examines the role of induction in higher understanding and interpretation, and the relevance of transposition and re-experiencing for grasping individuality.