Hermeneutics
Dilthey took some of his inspiration from the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher on hermeneutics, which he helped revive. Both figures are linked to German Romanticism. Schleiermacher was strongly influenced by German Romanticism which led him to place more emphasis on human emotion and the imagination. Dilthey, in his turn, as the author of a vast monograph on Schleiermacher, responds to the questions raised by Droysen and Ranke about the philosophical legitimation of the human sciences. He argues that 'scientific explanation of nature' (erklären) must be completed with a theory of how the world is given to human beings through symbolically mediated practices. To provide such a theory is the aim of the philosophy of the humanities — a field of study to which Dilthey dedicated his entire academic career.
The school of Romantic hermeneutics stressed that historically embedded interpreters — a "living" rather than a Cartesian dualism or "theoretical" subject — use 'understanding' and 'interpretation' (verstehen), which combine individual-psychological and social-historical description and analysis, to gain a greater knowledge of texts and authors in their contexts.
The process of interpretive inquiry established by Schleiermacher involved what Dilthey called the hermeneutic circle — the recurring movement between the implicit and the explicit, the particular and the whole. The "general hermeneutics" that Schleiermacher proposed was a combination of the hermeneutics used to interpret sacred scriptures (for example, the Pauline epistles) and the hermeneutics used by Classicists (e.g. Plato's philosophy). Dilthey saw its relevance for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) in contrast with the natural sciences.
Along with Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel and Henri Bergson, Dilthey's work influenced early twentieth-century "Lebensphilosophie" and "Existenzphilosophie".
Dilthey informed the early Martin Heidegger's approach to hermeneutics in his early lecture courses, in which he developed a "hermeneutics of factical life", and in Being and Time (1927). Heidegger grew increasingly more critical of Dilthey, arguing for a more radical "temporalization" of the possibilities of interpretation and human existence.
In Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method, 1960), Hans-Georg Gadamer, influenced by Heidegger, criticised Dilthey's approach to hermeneutics as both overly aesthetic and subjective as well as method-oriented and "positivistic". According to Gadamer, Dilthey's hermeneutics is insufficiently concerned with the ontological event of truth and inadequately considers the implications of how the interpreter and the interpreter's interpretations are not outside of tradition but occupy a particular position within it, i.e., have a temporal horizon.
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