Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften, Vol. 1 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 599 those who study Kant are continually forced to refer to page concordances, those studying Schelling have, up to now, been able to avoid that variety of busy-work. The Historical-Critical Edition threatens to change that, even though its pagination is not completely idiosyncratic. It indicates the pagination of the original editions of individual works, but since no scholar since 186o has used those numbers, they serve no important purpose. Each volume also contains a concordance to the Complete Works. Continual page-shuffling will allow Black, proud possessor of the Historical -Critical Edition, to track down the references in Brown's book, written in the simpler times when only the Complete Works were available. By the time Black writes his own book, he will likely have had his fill of page-shuffling, and choose to rely on the numbers visible on the pages of his own edition. Brown will be able to locate the passages Black cites only with the aid of that edition. That is presumably the point: more sets will be sold. Life will be harder for Black as well as for Brown, but no one ever said philosophy was easy. To summarize: judging from Volume 3, we may expect from the Historical-Critical Edition helpful notes and indices, distracting introductions, and confusing pagination; Schelling deserves better. ALAN WHITE New Schoolfor Social Research Frithjof Rodi, editor. Dilthey-Jahrbuch fiir Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften . Vol. 1. G6ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983. Pp. 3o6. DM 68.oo. This new journal aims to contribute broadly to the history of philosophy and the history and philosophy of the human sciences, while also serving as the organ for Dilthey research. I begin with an overview. Frithjof Rodi's essay, "Ueber einige Grundbegriffe einer Philosophic der Geisteswissenschaften ," introduces some order into the disparate meanings and slogans associated with "hermeneutics" by providing some careful distinctions and the outlines of a taxonomy of interpretation in the human sciences. Rudolf Makkreel's "Dilthey und die interpretierenden Wissenschaften: Die Rolle von Erkl~iren und Verstehen," which I shall discuss below, offers the only explicit interpretation of Dilthey in the volume. In "Einfiihlen, Verstehen, Werten" Roland Simon-Schaefer contends that empathy (Einfiihlung) and re-experiencing (Nacherleben)are essential to the human sciences and the medium of all aesthetic understanding. And Hermann Liibbe's "Der Fortschritt und das Museum" presents an arresting account of the proliferation of museums today, which he attributes to a need for familiar reference points in a time of too rapid social change. Historical documentation includes Heinz-Ulrich Lessing's helpful collection of the texts of contemporary reviews of Dilthey's Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften,and a list of the courses in philosophy of history in German universities from 175o to a9oo. In the discussion section, Rodi summarizes recent developments in Dilthey scholarship (a six volume American translation of Dilthey is in progress under the editorship 600 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~3:4 OCTOBER 1985 of Rodi and Makkreel), and Zbigniew Kuderowicz traces the reception of Dilthey's thought in Poland. There are two bibliographies: a supplement to the standard Dilthey bibliography that brings it up through 1973 and one covering popular Lebensphilosophie in the nineteenth century. In assessing the timeliness and prospects of a journal devoted to Dilthey and the concerns associated with him, let me adopt the frame of reference suggested by Labbe's essay on museums. Are those who make Dilthey's preoccupations their own essentially the keepers of a museum? Is Dilthey's thought a modern relic in a postmodern epoch that is well beyond him? The answer depends on how well central themes in Dilthey's thought can be extricated from their contemporary setting (and Dilthey's often perplexing presentation of them) and brought to bear on the current philosophical climate. Makkreel attempts to do this in his illuminating article by relating Dilthey's thought to the contemporary "holism" ("indifferentism" might be a better name for it) associated with Richard Rorty. Rorty finds no significant differences between the natural and human sciences in the debris left by the collapse of the deductive-nomological model of explanation and foundational epistemology. Makkreel notes that Dilthey distinguished between the...