Abstract

Dilthey’s grounding of the human sciences made a transition from psychology to hermeneutics, but our study of Dilthey’s hermeneutics cannot be limited to his later thoughts; his reflections on the activity of understanding in the human sciences can be included in hermeneutics, even if the term “herme_x0002_neutics” is not used. Dilthey has always advocated a traditional methodological concept of hermeneutics, but his Kantian exploration of how human sciences are possible was an epistemological study, as opposed to an ordinary methodolog_x0002_ical study. At the same time, he reflects on the problem of understanding in the human sciences from the point of view of the philosophy of life, which already contains an ontological dimension. To clarify his ideas, Dilthey’s hermeneutics can be divided into three levels: the methodological, the epistemological, and the ontological, whereby the epistemological hermeneutics is at the center, the her_x0002_meneutic methodology is derived from the critique of knowledge and the answer to the epistemological question inevitably leads to the ontological level. It is this ontological content that shaped the development of ontological hermeneutics in later years. His reflections continue to be a great source of inspiration and an important reference for the philosophical inquiry into an ontological-epistemo_x0002_logical-methodological unity of hermeneutics.