Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen

For 100 years, the conceptual pair of Erklären (explanation) and Verstehen (understanding) has fostered philosophical and methodological debates. This book considers these terms in historical context and systematically reviews the arguments they've inspired.

twentieth-century literature about the distinction between explanation and und- standing)? Second, can we do justice to a particular writer's notion of that category by taking at face value what he writes about his own motivation for adopting it? In response to both types of questions, there is by now a consensus amongst many historians of science and of philosophy that (a) intellectual history like other kinds of history has to be careful not to uncritically adopt actors' categories, and (b) more generally, even the actors' own thinking about a particular issue has to be contextualized vis-à-vis their other intellectual commitments and interests, as well as the complex conditions that make the totality of their commitments possible. Such conditions include cognitive as well as practical, institutional, and cultural factors. The articles in this volume respond to these challenges in several ways. For example, one author (Christopher Pincock) seeks to read some of the nineteen- century philosophical writings about Erklären and Verstehen as standing for a more fundamental problem, which he terms the problem of the unity of experience.

It addresses a current interest in a contextualized history of philosophy It is interdisciplinary in that it brings together historians of science and philosophers

Contenu
Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen: Introduction.- Epistemological Distinctions and Cultural Politics: Educational Reform and the Naturwissenschaft/Geisteswissenschaft Distinction in Nineteenth-Century Germany.- Vestiges of the Book of Nature: Religious Experience and Hermeneutic Practices in Protestant German Theology, ca. 1900.- How Wilhelm Dilthey Influenced Popular Science Writing: Kurd Laßwitz's Homchen. Ein Tiermärchen aus der oberen Kreide.- Explaining History. Hippolyte Taine's Philosophy of Historical Science.- Understanding and Explanation in France: From Maine de Biran's Méthode Psychologique to Durkheim's Les Formes Élémentaires de la vie Religieuse.- Instead of Erklären and Verstehen: William James on Human Understanding.- Erklären, Verstehen, and Embodied Rationalities: Scientific Praxis as Regional Ontology.- British Thought on the Relations Between the Natural Sciences and the Humanities, c. 18701910.- Accounting for the Unity of Experience in Dilthey, Rickert, Bradley and Ward.- Individuality and Interpretation in Nineteenth-Century German Historicism.- Shaping Disciplinary Boundaries: Scientific Practice and Politics in the Methodenstreit Between the German Historical School and the Austrian School of Economics.- From Mill via von Kries to Max Weber: Causality, Explanation, and Understanding.- Social Science Between Neo-Kantianism and Philosophy of Life: The Cases of Weber, Simmel, and Mannheim.- Opposition to Verstehen in Orthodox Logical Empiricism.