Dilthey and Kantian Project of The Philosophy of Humanities

Wilhelm Dilthey, a German philosopher, is one of the founders of the continental philosophy of humanities. Following Kant, he regards his intellectual project as the critique of historical reason. This project expresses itself along two main axes: negative and positive. In the negative section, although Dilthey accepts that his project is Kantian and acknowledges Kant’s conception of the nature and function of philosophy, he criticized Kant’s positions on unhistorical epistemology, subjectivity and categories. For him such Kantian positions have no efficiency in the philosophy of humanities. In the positive section, Dilthey, by two steps, proposes psychology and the hermenutics of socio-historical life as the philosophical foundations of humanities. He, rejecting positivism and historism, makes use of objectivity, taken from positivism, and historicity, taken from historism, as the strong points of them. He seeks to prove the objectivity of humanities through a process of applying Hegel’s objective spirit to an empirical-historical context, and of explaining lived experience, life expressions and objectifications of life.