The “Foundation” of the Human Sciences

Abstract

We have to start this chapter with Dilthey who is generally credited for having distinguished the human sciences from the natural sciences in the late nineteenth century. This does not mean that the human sciences where born with him or that he made any scientific contribution. Rather than being remembered for having established the human sciences, he is known for providing its subject matter or, more precisely, the “delimitation of the human studies”. Before him, the domain of the human sciences had received several names: Hume (1739) called it that of “moral subjects” and referred to them collectively as “the science of man” and J. S. Mill (1843) as the “moral sciences”. Unlike his predecessors, Dilthey (1883) wanted to take distance from the concept of human being as rational nature, “a mere process of thought”, and argued for man as a “psychophysical life-unit” who is “the carrier and co-developer of this immense structure of socio-historical reality”. And thus he conceived “the sciences of individuals”, namely, psychology and anthropology, “as elements of socio-historical reality” whose study can be further divided into “the science of the cultural systems” (ethics, art, science) and “the science of the external organization of society” (law, economics, religion, and language). This was Dilthey’s original demarcation of the human sciences. But what is the subject matter common to all the human studies? Well, according to Dilthey, human scientists deal with a different type of fact when they study the human world, mental facts, and thus with a different type of experience, inner experiences.