Znaczenie wymiaru historycznego dla kształtowania się sfery geisteswissenschaften. Ujęcie Wilhelma Diltheya i Ernsta Cassirera

Followers of methodological antinaturalism in philosophy, who criticise the application of methods representing the natural sciences to other realms of knowledge, argue for the necessity to separate the humanities from the empirical instrumentarium of research. The exposed dualism of investigation process reveals differences between axiomatic and deductive explanation of arguments of formal sciences and with the understanding of the humanistic interpretation and with idealizing historical and comparative analysis in the area of sciences concerning the spirit. An important contribution into historic analyses of the Geisteswissenschaften sphere came from a disciple of the Marburg Neo-Kantianism and follower of Kantian apriorism, Ernst Cassirer, and an author of the antipositivistic turn and the historical philosophy of life, Wilhelm Dilthey. Both philosophers enter into the polemics with naturalistic ideas of the man and the culture; they enter into polemic with a positivistic vision of the reality determined exclusively by physical and biological factors. In their own considerations they stress the irreducibility of the historical world to the dimension of nature. They underline the qualitative exceptionality of man as a conscious and creative (in cultural terms) individual. Taking as the point of departure the question of history, I will show dependences, collected at the perspective of the empirical (not metaphysical) ideas of the culture created by the selfconsciousness producing cultural meanings.