Dilthey's Philosophy Of History Essay

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One of the goals of Wilhelm Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences is to answer whether the philosophy of history can provide knowledge of socio-historical reality as a whole. The philosophy of history is a theory that attempts to know the interconnectedness of historical reality through a correspondence with the unity of interconnected propositions (Dilthey, pg. 142). Gaining knowledge of the interconnectedness of the whole of history is his distinctive task, and he comes to the conclusion that the philosophy of history is not successful. The failure is due to his idea that philosophy of history is not a true science as it relies too heavily on abstractions and poor methods, and that it does not fulfill the tasks that it sets out to …show more content…
146). How the world works has no value without relating it back to the people within it (Dilthey, pg. 146). Thus, it makes sense that what humans give value to and express as rules for the will within society is rediscovered and given meaning when looking at world history (Dilthey, pg. 146). The findings we express as a discovery of history are nothing but reflections of our own thoughts and consciousness’s (Dilthey, pg. 146). The feeling one has of the progress of history is merely a projection of ones own experience onto the course of history, thus the feeling of a true sense of history is just a projection of consciousness (Dilthey, pg. 146). The philosophy of history has a clear religious basis that can be explained by this projection of oneself (Dilthey, pg. 147). Ideas of a God creating a plan for human history with a beginning and an end are products of theology (Dilthey, pg. 147). Over time, philosophy of history became a theory of spiritual nature, evolving with religion and being used by religion in order to answer divine questions, but it lacked empirical

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