Time, history, and facticity in Dilthey and Heidegger

This dissertation is an investigation of the questions of time, history, and facticity in Dilthey and Heidegger. It is an exploration of the contextual character of experience and the scope and limits of understanding and interpretation. In particular, this work considers their historical and temporal character and relation to facticity. Facticity is that which escapes and resists interpretation, narration, and understanding. In Heidegger's language, facticity indicates the "thrownness" and "uncanniness" of existence which throws the "subject" and its construction of meaning into question. As such, facticity is a positive characteristic of the finitude of human existence. I offer a reconstruction of the question of history in the works of Dilthey and Heidegger through an analysis of "historicality" (analyzed as facticity and possibility). The discussion of Dilthey attempts to clarify his project of a "critique of historical reason" and his grounding of the human sciences. The interpretation of Heidegger is based on Heidegger's "hermeneutics of factical life" as developed in his lecture courses of the early 1920's and his thinking of the "event"-character of being in his works of the 1930's.