Understanding the human world

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This second volume in a six-volume translation of Wilhelm Dilthey's major writings highlights his enduring influence on Continental philosophy and various scholarly fields. Dilthey, a philosopher and historian of culture, made significant contributions to hermeneutics, phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and social science methodology. This volume features his key theoretical works from the 1890s, exploring the relationship between the self and the world. In "The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification," he posits that our engagement with the world is grounded in practical drives and the resistance they encounter, suggesting that our beliefs about reality are volitional rather than representational. "Life and Cognition" delves into how we categorize our experiences through concepts like selfsameness and essentiality, utilizing Dilthey's structural psychology to rival phenomenological insights. In "The Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology," he emphasizes the importance of lived experience in establishing a structural psychology beneficial to the human sciences. Finally, in "Contributions to the Study of Individuality," Dilthey critiques Windelband's view of the human sciences as purely idiographic, arguing for a systematic approach that balances the study of uniformities with individual differences, highlighting the significance of historical context in understanding human i