Roman Madzia is going to present a working paper on "Only a Life Can Understand Life: Dilthey and Dewey on the Inevitability of the Aesthetic"

The paper deals with philosophical foundations of Dilthey's philosophy of life and Dewey's insights on qualitative thought. In the first part, the author focuses on the projects of both Dilthey and Dewey of establishing what one could call a "new science of experience". By this endeavor, both thinkers (each in his own manner) reacted to the undeniable progress of natural science of the late 19th century which jeopardized the status of social sciences (or Geisteswissenschaften in Dilthey's rendition). After a short analysis of similarities and differences between their respective approaches, the author focuses more closely on Dilthey and explains the fundamental concepts of his Lebensphilosophie (such as the principle of phenomenality, reflexive awareness, structural nexus of life, etc.) and tries to demonstrate why they took the form they did. In the last part of the paper, the author elucidates Dilthey's reformulation of certain life-categories, previously known from Kant, and makes a connection to certain aspects of contemporary philosophy of biology.