Page 28 - Contribution To Phenomenology

REFLECTION ON THE CULTURAL DISCIPLINES 21

possible because psychic life and social and even historical relations can
also be viewed through an habitual abstraction from the values and
purposes they have for the individuals and groups in the relevant cultural
worlds. This would seem characteristic, for example, of psychology as a
naturalistic science in contemporary academe.^

(Figure 3)
Special Sciences
/ \
Formal Contentual
/ I \ / \
Naturalistic Cultural
/ \
Psychological Communal
/ \
Social Historical
/ 1 \ / ! \

This sketchy survey of the cultural sciences would not be complete
without it being emphasized again that there are various particular
cultural sciences within the subspecies and species discussed. Something
in the way of a list of particular social sciences has been offered above.
It and the following can be related to Figure 3, where the opening for
further specification is shown at the bottoms of the branching root
system. The historical cultural sciences include cultural history in a
perhaps narrower signification, diplomatic history, economic history,
military history, history of science, social history, history of technology,
gender history, ethnic history, etc. But philosophical reflection that focuses
on one or another individual discipline or subdiscipline would do well to
be cognizant of the species and genus that the combination of cultural
practices focused on belongs to and what can be learned by doing so.

'^^ Advocacy for psychology as a cultural science can be traced back to Dilthey
and appears clearly within phenomenology in Edmund Husserl, Phenomenological
Psychology, translated by John Scanlon (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977).