Epistemology

Introduction to the Human Sciences

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Wilhelm Dilthey

1883

Introduction to the Human Sciences (Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften) is Dilthey's foundational work and one of the most important philosophical texts of the nineteenth century for the theory of knowledge. Dilthey's central ambition was to provide a philosophical foundation for the humanities and social sciences — the Geisteswissenschaften (sciences of the spirit or human sciences) — comparable to the foundation Kant had provided for the natural sciences. The natural sciences explain nature by subsuming events under causal laws; the human sciences understand human life by interpreting expressions of inner experience: texts, actions, institutions, artworks, historical events. Understanding (Verstehen) is distinct from explanation (Erklären): it works from the outside in, from expressions back to the lived experience (Erlebnis) they express. The book's first volume lays out the scope and historical development of the human sciences from antiquity through Hegel, arguing that the natural-scientific model of knowledge is inappropriate for history, society, and culture. The project was never completed to Dilthey's satisfaction — a second volume remained unfinished — but Introduction to the Human Sciences established the conceptual framework that all of Dilthey's subsequent work, and much of twentieth-century hermeneutics and the philosophy of the social sciences, would develop.