Dilthey and the anthropological turn of philosophy

Abstract

This text is a critical analysis of the vision of human being contained in Dilthey’s hermeneutical philosophy of life. Dilthey based his early epistemology of the humanities on so-called descriptive psychology that anticipated the phenomenology of Husserl. I try to show that this concept is explicitly connected with a philosophical anthropology that tries to discover – on a basis of historical research of human culture – the universal categories describing the essence of human being. Because of reflecting on the corporeality of human existence Dilthey’s philosophy of life have some advantage over the phenomenology of Husserl and fundamental ontology of Heideggeer. Life is for him something more than a way of self-realization of consciousness: spiritual and cultural forms of life have some basis «im naturgebundenem Leben».