In this paper I undertake an interpretation of the concept of memory in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey and of its role in the framework of his theory of history.  Through analysis of the concept of memory, Dilthey interweaves the complex levels of personal biography, group interaction and historical life-experience.  According to my argument, it is in this capacity that memory, for Dilthey, stands at the center of the more general problem of the cohesion and continuity of history.

The paper investigates Dilthey’s hermeneutic conception of understanding with regard to the question of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), and analyses his path-breaking work as the first elaboration of a dualistic account in philosophy of science. Although not having reached a satisfying version of his approach, Dilthey opened with the distinction between natural sciences and human sciences an ongoing discussion on the unity or plurality of what might be called “science”. I follow in the paper how Dilthey developed in his later writings a hermeneutics designed to give epistemological foundations for human sciences. Afterwards, I explore the work of Dilthey by relating it to the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer which can be analyzed partly as continuation, partly as critique of Dilthey’s philosophical project. I shall argue for the claim that Gadamer gives a deeper image of human sciences, while renouncing to grasp them in terms of their scientific character..

In this paper, we start from the definition of understanding as Zusammenhang. We show that it is accomplished, based on the psychic structure, in the movement towards totalizing understanding through various levels, from our first reports to the world until the worldviews that reflects the philosophy of philosophy. The analysis of the structure of these conceptions which stabilize our relation to the world is not without difficulties, and the theory of worldviews is presented as an often ambivalent theory of understanding and interpretation : it actually reflects the contradiction between the need for stability, part of metaphysical impetus, and radical historicization, which gives an "insoluble contradiction", the "contradiction between the claim of universal validity for each worldview and for life, and the historical consciousness.

This essay considers Dilthey’s Weltanschauungslehre as a problematic result of his investigations on the constitution of the human sciences. The author highlights Dilthey’s main arguments in favor of the specificity of history and humanities. Moreover, the paper’s shows Dilthey’s attempt to find a balance between the instances of the individual and the need of universalisation that characterizes human knowledge.

For Dilthey, as for many intellectuals of his time, it is no more possible, after the kantian criticism in ontology and the growth of the historical consciousness, to give an absolute credence to the validity of synthetic metaphysical systems neither to the large cosmological, psychological and theological tales. But Dilthey is not a “post- metaphysical” philosopher. The aim of this paper is to show, by contrast and comparison with Franz Rosenzweig and Karl Löwith’s writings, that for Dilthey, the tragic element in the structure of the human life can be thought under two main aspects. The first is an epistemological one, concerning the historical and geographical limitation of the points of view, the transcendentals not only in the intellectualist Kantian meaning but on top of that in the vitalist Diltheyian meaning. It can be partially treated with the descriptive method and the narrative form of the sciences of mind. The second aspect is an existential one, inherent to the ambivalence, the contingency and the finitude of the individual life. Remedies to this last are the hermeneutical methods of the others individual lives.

Is it possible to build a system in philosophy? According to Dilthey, the historical « world view » (Weltanschauung) is a way to understand the human knowledge, including philosophy. This way provides a freedom to think by destroying every a priori. As a result of this historical manner to do philosophy, it seems, though, to be impossible to find any unhistorical ground. Should philosophy renounce once and for all to search any truth about the world ? Should we not be afraid ? Reading Dilthey with Anders (1902-1992), who studied with Husserl and Heidegger, could help us to solve the problem: the philosophy should be « grounded » on contingency, circumstances and insignificance – and by this way, it becomes a « prognostic hermeneutic » – otherwise we are condemned to describe some old systems, which are perpetually falling into disuse.

In his « Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology » Dilthey thinks of the psychic nexus or Lebenszusammenhang as a purposive nexus, and I shall first investigate the meaning of this notion; but as psychic nexus refers in this essay not only to human but more widely to animal psyche, how should we understand this purposiveness? In his last work Dilthey uses another word than purposiveness or Zweckmäßigkeit: the word Zielstrebigkeit which was borrowed from the biologist Karl von Baer und which means a strive without any consciousness. The third and last part of this paper invites to consider a key concept of Jakob von Uexküll, which gives perhaps the possibility to go beyond the “nexus”: the concept of Komposition.

In recent years, authors like Chebanov, Markŏs, and Ginev have attempted to implement hermeneutic categories in the domain of biology. Against this background, the author takes Dilthey’s scattered remarks on the notion of the organic and Plessner’s biophilosophy as his starting point for the development of a biohermeneutical theory of biological purposiveness, which aims at bridging the gulf between the natural and the human sciences. Whereas the natural and human sciences are closely connected with a third-person and a first-person perspective respectively, the author argues that the second-person perspective plays a crucial role in the life sciences. In opposition to the natural sciences, in which causality is the key notion, and the human sciences, which rest on the notion of meaning, the author argues that the central concepts that characterize the second-person perspective of the life sciences are functionality and intentionality.

This contribution deals with the controversy between the phsychologist Herman Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) on the status of psychology at the time when it began to be inspired by the model of naturalsciences. This controversy, which lies within the broader context of the debate that took place in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century on the status of the natural and human sciences, shows many points in common with the current debate on neo- reductionism. The current “neuromania”, i.e. the tendency to reduce the productions of mind to neurological processes of the brain, proposes arguments that have their roots in the never-resolved debate in the nineteenth century. The author wants to highlight that the misconceptions and misunderstandings that characterized the dialogue between scientists and philosophers at the time of Dilthey are reflected in the current comparison between neo-reductionists and supporters of the irreducibility of the spiritual to the natural.

If one wants to read Dilthey’s structural thinking after structuralistic, post- structuralistic and archeological philosophies, it can be interesting a comparison of it with Michel Foucault’s thought. In spite of their differences, Dilthey and Foucault have in common some important questions and topics: the reconstruction of the history of human sciences in relation to the aim of the foundation (Dilthey) or of the archeology (Foucault) of knowledge, the link between philosophy and history and the significance that both philosophers ascribe to anthropology in modern and contemporary philosophy. Like Dilthey, Foucault tries through his archeological and genealogical method to transform the Kantian a priori in a historical and empirical one. And like Dilthey (and Nietzsche), he considers man as historical being. Unlike Dilthey, Foucault aims to overcome anthropology as a vision which close subjectivity in the structure of human nature but he considers anthropology as a key question of modernity; Dilthey sees anthropology – as a grounding dimension of critique of historical reason – in the light of the principle of life’s inscrutability (Unergründlichkeit), which excludes every metaphysical determination of human nature. And if Foucault rejects every form of transcendental philosophy by setting and decentering subjectivity within the ensemble of discursive practices, Dilthey understands the origin of knowledge – the life-nexus – as a open and dynamic structure.

This essay aims to use Dilthey’s notion of structure to understand the human condition in the age of the Web 2.0. Dilthey is the philosopher of the «connection (Zusammenhang)» and the «structure (Struktur)». Hence, his perspective seems to be useful to understand the actual world’s global connectivity. The argument is developed in five sections. In the first section, the author gives a brief account of the status quaestionis. The second section considers Diltheyan definitions of the Individuum as «crossroad (Kreuzungspunkt)» of connections. In the third section, the Diltheyan notion of connection is seen from a wider point of view. The fourth section is devoted to the limits of the historical and social structure of life. In the last section Diltheyan meta-philosophy is faced as a new kind of hermeneutics, a hermeneutics 2.0 grasping the whole (multi-tasking, multi-cultural and multi-sided) life.

Despite the usual genealogies of hermeneutics, Heidegger’s appropriation of Dilthey’s philosophy only deals marginally with hermeneutics. Nevertheless, this paper aims to shed light on elements in favour of an implicit continuity in hermeneutics from Dilthey to Heidegger. Against the general background of the conception of life as self-interpretation, which allows the ontological radicalisation of Dilthey’s hermeneutical concepts, some diltheyan historical and aesthetical paradigms prove to be at work in Heidegger’s first phenomenology of life. “Destruction” itself, the very core of Heidegger’s concept of hermeneutics, can be partially traced back to diltheyan sources.

The legendary encounter at Davos (1929) between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger may be recognized as the crucial point in the "afterlife" of Dilthey's philosophy. Starting from the emblematic confrontation of phenomenology and Neo-Kantianism as to the "essence of philosophy", the present study first enquires after some surprising aspects of a "critique of historical reason" on either side, before moving on to tensions and dissonances. Behind the surface matter of proper Kant-exegesis there is the deeper issue of myth and language, yielding eventually a short meditation upon the Diltheyan concept of "structure" in the light of 20th-century structuralism.