Abstract

This article has the same name as the second volume in a six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, published in Princeton University Press in 1991-1996, for two reasons: 1) to limit our research of key philosophical and psychological writings from the 1890-s, in which Dilthey propagated a descriptive and analytic psychology as a “human science” ; 2) to emphasize and understand Dilthey’s assertion that the human world was sufficiently different from the natural world that special methods were required for its study; hermeneutics, the deliberate and systematic methodology of interpretation, was the only necessary approach for studying and understanding the human world.