Abstract

The fourth to appear of a projected six volumes, the third volume of Dilthey’s Selected Works is a meticulous, eminently responsible translation of the seventh volume of his Gesammelte Schriften. Its textual corpus offers many repetitions of terms and themes, concepts envisioned, revised, and discarded, alternative formulations of the same proposition or postulate, sentences begun but left unfinished. It provides a fitting autograph of the thinker whom writing made anxious and who was ready with rare confidence to identify the human experience of “inadequacy” or “aversion” as the primary affective motor at once of hermeneutical progress and of the “nexus of the great world events”. Amid an array of drafts and supplements, however, the corpus also includes Dilthey’s most sustained and systematic contribution to a critique of historical reason, a “fourth critique” that remains true to Kant’s methodological precedent even as it draws regularly on Husserl’s lexicon and semantic analyses. The editors adopt the title of that critique as the subtitle of the third volume itself.