| This dissertation focuses on Wilhelm Dilthey's question as to the possibility of securing scientific knowledge of the human world while preserving the truth of the human spirit. More specifically, he asks whether universal objective validity is possible in the human sciences. I trace the origins of the question back through Leibniz and Kant, in order to highlight some of Dilthey's main advancements, namely finitude and historicity. Whereas Leibniz fails to recognize the enabling conditions of space and time, Kant fails to recognize that time is not merely an enabling condition, but also experienced content. Furthermore, whereas Kant's project in the first Critique is mostly informed by a desire to understand the limits of our knowledge in the natural sciences, Dilthey is concerned with the human sciences. Thus, Dilthey, in his critique of historical reason, goes one step further than Kant in insisting that time is a real category and not simply ideal. This, in turn, effects the categories by which we think, since they too must be temporal.After "realizing" time and the categories by which we think, Dilthey now asks if universal objective validity is possible. I contend that it is, and that Dilthey's hermeneutics provides us with the rules for understanding these real categories, and the method for bringing our initial certainty of immediate lived experience to the level of reliability in articulating that experience. Of course, because of historicity, universal objective validity in the human sciences looks very different from that in the natural sciences. To flesh out this notion, I appeal to John Dewey's pragmatism, which shows us that the real test of validity is to be found in practical activity. I conclude that the judgments we make about the human world have universal objective validity insofar as they offer an interpretation that contributes to the meaning of its object, and does so in a way that expresses our values and our desires as to what we wish to actualize in this world. |
