Impure Phenomenology: Dilthey, Epistemology and the Task of Interpretive Psychology
Impure Phenomenology: Dilthey, Epistemology and the Task of Interpretive Psychology
Author(s): Eric Sean NelsonSubject(s): Philosophy
Published by: Societatea Română de Fenomenologie
Keywords: Epistemology; Hermeneutics; Human Sciences; Interpretation; Psychology
Summary/Abstract: Responding to critiques of Dilthey’s interpretive psychology, I revisit its relation with epistemology and the human sciences. Rather than reducing knowledge to psychology and psychology to subjective understanding, Dilthey articulated the epistemic worth of a psychology involving (1) an impure phenomenology of embodied, historically-situated, and worldly consciousness as individually lived yet complicit with its naturally and socially constituted contexts, (2) experience- and communication-oriented processes of interpreting others, (3) the use of third-person structural-functional analysis and causal explanation, and (4) a recognition of the ungroundability, facticity, and conflict inherent in knowledge and life.
Journal: Studia Phaenomenologica
- Issue Year: X/2010
- Issue No: 10
- Page Range: 19-44
- Page Count: 26
- Language: English
- Content File-PDF