Rudolf A. Makkreel

Descriptive psychology and historical understanding

Descriptive Psychology and the Human Studies.- Lived Experience, Understanding and Description.- Structure and Development in Psychic Life.- Psychology and Hermeneutics.- Understanding, Re-experiencing and Historical Interpretation.- Ideas concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (1894).- I: The Problem of a Psychological Foundation for the Human Studies.- II: Distinction between Explanatory and Descriptive Psychology.- III: Explanatory Psychology.- IV: Descriptive and Analytic Psychology.- V: Relationships between Explanatory Psychology and Descriptive Psychology.- VI: Possibility and Conditions of the Solution of the Task of a Descriptive Psychology.- VII: The Structure of Psychic Life.- VIII: The Development of Psychic Life.- IX: Study of the Differences of Psychic Life: The Individual.- Remark.- The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Expressions of Life.- I. Expressions of Life.- II. The Elementary Forms of Understanding.- III. Objective Spirit and Elementary Understanding.- IV. The Higher Forms of Understanding.- V. Projecting, Re-creating, Re-experiencing.- VI. Exegesis or Interpretation.- Appendices.

Dilthey : philosopher of the human studies

The philosopher and historian of culture Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) has had a significant and continuing influence on twentieth-century Continental philosophy and in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. Rudolf Makkreel interprets Diltheys philosophy and provides a guide to its complex development. Against the tendency to divorce Diltheys early psychological writings from his later hermeneutical and historical works, Makkreel argues for their essential continuity.

The cognition–knowledge distinction in Kant and Dilthey and the implications for psychology and self-understanding

Abstract Both Kant and Dilthey distinguish between cognition and knowledge, but they do so differently in accordance with their respective theoretical interests. Kant’s primary cognitive interest is in the natural sciences, and from this perspective the status of psychology is questioned because its phenomena are not mathematically measurable. Dilthey, by contrast, reconceives psychology as a human science. For Kant, knowledge is conceptual cognition that has attained certainty by being part of a rational system. Dilthey also links knowledge with certainty; however, he derives the latter from life-experience rather than from reason. Dilthey’s psychology begins with the self-certainty of lived experience and life-knowledge, but this turns out to fall short of cognitive understanding. In the final analysis, both Kant and Dilthey move beyond psychology to arrive at self-understanding. Because of his doubts about introspection, Kant replaces psychology with a pragmatic anthropology to provide a communal framework for self-understanding. Dilthey supplements psychology with other human sciences as part of a project of anthropological reflection.

Orientation and judgment in hermeneutics

This book provides an innovative approach to meeting the challenges faced by philosophical hermeneutics in interpreting an ever-changing and multicultural world. Rudolf A Makkreel proposes an orientational and reflective conception of interpretation in which judgment plays a central role. Moving beyond the dialogical approaches found in much of contemporary hermeneutics, he focuses instead on the diagnostic use of reflective judgment, not only to discern the differentiating features of the phenomena to be understood, but also to orient us to the various contexts that can frame their interpretation. Makkreel develops overlooked resources of Kants transcendental thought in order to reconceive hermeneutics as a critical inquiry into the appropriate contextual conditions of understanding and interpretation. He shows that a crucial task of hermeneutical critique is to establish priorities among the contexts that may be brought to bear on the interpretation of history and culture. The final chapter turns to the contemporary art scene and explores how orientational contexts can be reconfigured to respond to the ways in which media of communication are being transformed by digital technology. Altogether, Makkreel offers a promising way of thinking about the shifting contexts that we bring to bear on interpretations of all kinds, whether of texts, art works, or the world.

The confluence of aesthetics and hermeneutics in Baugmarten, Meier, and Kant

Etude des relations entre lappreciation esthetique et le probleme de linterpretation chez Baumgarten, Meier et Kant. Etablissant un rapport entre la sensibilite et la raison a travers un processus de contextualisation, lesthetique moderne definie par Baumgarten et Kant rencontre lhermeneutique de Meier fondee sur lidee dune interpretation authentique

How is Empathy Related to Understanding

A close link between empathy and understanding has often been attributed to Dilthey, but in fact one seldom finds the German word for empathy—Einfuhlung— in his writings. For this and other reasons one should be reluctant to reduce Dilthey’s theory of Verstehen to a form of empathy.1 The relation between Einfuhlung and Verstehen is much more explicit in Husserl. By working out what this relation is for Husserl in Book Two of Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und phanomenologischen Philosophie and in some other late writings, we can see how phenomenology transformed the aesthetic meaning of Einfuhlung, which had been originally established by the psychologist Theodor Lipps. In addition to distinguishing several senses of empathy, I will compare them to a range of related phenomena such as sympathy and pity, divination and transposition, appreciative understanding and critical understanding.

The Underlying Conception of Science in Dilthey’s

In this essay I show that Dilthey does not merely supplement the natural sciences as he knew them with a theory of the human sciences. He also criticizes the natural sciences as part of a larger attack on Western metaphysics and the epistemological conception of science it has fostered. Both the natural and human sciences are rooted in a pre-scientific knowledge (Wissen) of life which is then transformed into mediated forms of conceptual knowledge (Erkenntnis). Whereas the natural sciences increasingly abstract from the reflexive awareness involved in Wissen, the human sciences should not. Instead, the human sciences must make what is immediately reflexive available for reflection.

Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment

In this study of Kants theory of imagination and its role in interpretation, Rudolf A. Makkreel argues against the commonly held notion that Kants transcendental philosophy is incompatible with hermeneutics. The charge that Kants foundational philosophy is inadequate to the task of interpretation can be rebutted, explains Makkreel, if one fully understands the role of imagination in his work. In identifying this role, Makkreel also re-evaluates the relationship among Kants discussions of the feeling of life, common sense, and the purposiveness of history.