Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen: Introduction -- Epistemological Distinctions and Cultural Politics: Educational Reform and the Naturwissenschaft/Geisteswissenschaft Distinction in Nineteenth-Century Germany -- Vestiges of the Book of Nature: Religious Experience and Hermeneutic Practices in Protestant German Theology, ca. 1900 -- How Wilhelm Dilthey Influenced Popular Science Writing: Kurd Laßwitz’s “Homchen. Ein Tiermärchen aus der oberen Kreide” -- Explaining History. Hippolyte Taine’s Philosophy of Historical Science -- Understanding and Explanation in France: From Maine de Biran’s Méthode Psychologique to Durkheim’s Les Formes Élémentaires de la vie Religieuse -- Instead of Erklären and Verstehen: William James on Human Understanding -- Erklären, Verstehen, and Embodied Rationalities: Scientific Praxis as Regional Ontology -- British Thought on the Relations Between the Natural Sciences and the Humanities, c. 1870–1910 -- Accounting for the Unity of Experience in Dilthey, Rickert, Bradley and Ward -- Individuality and Interpretation in Nineteenth-Century German Historicism -- Shaping Disciplinary Boundaries: Scientific Practice and Politics in the Methodenstreit Between the German Historical School and the Austrian School of Economics -- From Mill via von Kries to Max Weber: Causality, Explanation, and Understanding -- Social Science Between Neo-Kantianism and Philosophy of Life: The Cases of Weber, Simmel, and Mannheim -- Opposition to Verstehen in Orthodox Logical Empiricism.

The conceptual pair of "Erklären" and "Verstehen" (explanation and understanding) has been an object of philosophical and methodological debates for well over a century. Discussions – to this day – are centered around the question of whether certain objects or issues, such as those dealing with humans or society, require a special approach, different from that of the physical sciences. In the course of such philosophical discussions, we frequently find references to historical predecessors, such as Dilthey’s discussion of the relationship between "Geisteswissenschaft" and "Naturwissenschaft", Windelband’s distinction between nomothetic and idiographic methods, or Weber’s conception of an interpretative sociology. However, these concepts are rarely placed in the historical contexts of their emergence. Nor have the shifting meanings of these terms been analyzed. The present volume considers a variety of intellectual, social, and material factors that contributed to the debate. Far from reducing the debates to their cultural and institutional contexts, however, the volume also offers careful systematic reconstructions of the arguments at hand, thereby enabling the reader to not only appreciate the situatedness of this exciting period of intellectual history, but also to reflect upon the current relevance of the various interpretations of the dichotomy between explanation and understanding.