Page 14 - Contribution To Phenomenology

REFLECTION ON THE CULTURAL DISCIPLINES 7

there has been a struggle to render into English the concept Wilhelm
Dilthey expressed with ''die Geisteswissenschaften'' and the French with
'Hes sciences humaines.'' The reference can be said preliminarily to be to
the psychological, social, and historical sciences as they thematize aspects
of human life, but the need is for a concise and apt expression.
Suggestions that the so-called ''humanities and social sciences" are
combined in the category in question may omit the role of psychology,
as does the expression "socio-historical sciences."^ It is ironic that Dilthey
was explicitly accepting Schiel's 1849 German translation of Mill's "moral
sciences," which only the book series edited by John O'Neill seems to
have attempted recently to revive in EngUsh.
In reaction to the positivistic tendency whereby all science is con-
sidered to be or at least to be like the natural sciences, the first widely
accepted rendering was "human studies," which is most conspicuously
reflected in the title of the journal edited by George Psathas and in the
subtitle of a major recent book/ Amadeo Giorgi, however, had prominen-
tly used "human science" in 1970,^ the present writer used it as a subtitle
in 1988,* and it is now standard in the series of volumes of Dilthey in
English translation coming fi-om Princeton University Press: "As given its
classic formulation by Dilthey, this theory has been entitled in English as
that of the 'human studies' in order to differentiate it from the positivist
ideal of a 'unified science'. Currently, the more forthright title, 'human
sciences,' has been adopted . . . ."^
Without challenging the suitability of "human science" as a translation
of Dilthey, it is now clear that there is a need for an even broader
concept and expression. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, much that

^ Dorion Cairns, Guide to Translating Husserl, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1973), 60.
^ Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1975).
^Psychology as a Human Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Cf.
Donald E. Polkinghorne, Methodology for the Human Sciences (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1983).
* Lester Embree, ed., Worldfy Phenomenology: The Continuing Influence of
Alfred Schutz on North American Human Science (Washington, D.C: Center for
Advanced Research in Phenomenology & University Press of America, 1988).
^ Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, edited by Rudolf A.
Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), Preface
to All Volumes, xiii.