Metodo

International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Series | Book | Chapter

206943

British thought on the relations between the natural sciences and the humanities, c. 1870–1910

Roger Smith

pp. 161-185

Abstract

The fact is that debate about explanation and understanding in science, and the related debate about relations between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften, was a German-language debate conducted in German philosophical terms. There was no late nineteenth-century English-language argument about the same matters. There is no direct comparison to make, unless, that is, we were to take an essentialist view of philosophical questions and, as a result, look for what English-language writers missed, transformed into local idiom or substituted for the issues of substance rightly formulated by German-language philosophers and wrongly ignored by British ones. By contrast, if we take our cue from what Uljana Feest, in her introduction, refers to as "the thicket" of issues and debates in the late nineteenth century, rather than from imagining that there was one debate, possibilities for comparison open up.

Publication details

Published in:

Feest Uljana (2010) Historical perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 161-185

DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-3540-0_9

Full citation:

Smith Roger (2010) „British thought on the relations between the natural sciences and the humanities, c. 1870–1910“, In: U. Feest (ed.), Historical perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen, Dordrecht, Springer, 161–185.