Verstehen

Verstehen is seeing a hook-like object and reflexively and instantaneously imagining that you could use it to catch fish, or seeing a sharp-edged object and imagining without any internal discourse or deliberation that “I could kill and eat food with that”.

Archive 2009-07-01 enowning 2009

On the other hand, an understanding (Verstehen) in this subjective sense is not anchored in a non-cognitive empathy or intuitive appreciation that is arational by nature; it can gain objective validity when the meanings and values to be comprehended are explained causally, that is, as a means to an end.

Asthmatic 2009

Verstehen basically means ‘thereness’, ‘openness to experience’, or ‘primordial comprehendability’.

Archive 2009-07-01 enowning 2009

Verstehen basically means ‘thereness’, ‘openness to experience’, or ‘primordial comprehendability’.

enowning enowning 2009

Verstehen is seeing a hook-like object and reflexively and instantaneously imagining that you could use it to catch fish, or seeing a sharp-edged object and imagining without any internal discourse or deliberation that “I could kill and eat food with that”.

enowning enowning 2009

(Verstehen) for Dilthey is a process that employs all our capacities and is to be distinguished from pure intellectual understanding (Verstand).

Wilhelm Dilthey Makkreel, Rudolf 2008

Yet they nowadays favor the concept of understanding (Verstehen) and reject the earlier identification of understanding and empathy for two specific reasons.

Empathy Stueber, Karsten 2008

At the beginning of the 20th century, empathy understood as a non-inferential and non-theoretical method of grasping the content of other minds became closely associated with the concept of understanding (Verstehen); a concept that was championed by the hermeneutic tradition of philosophy concerned with explicating the methods used in grasping the meaning and significance of texts, works of arts, and actions.

Empathy Stueber, Karsten 2008

Verstehen! yahooBuzzArticleHeadline = 'You will vote the way we tell you to vote!

You will vote the way we tell you to vote! Verstehen! 2007

Whereas Droysen speaks of the method of the historian as “understanding by investigation” (forschendes Verstehen), Humboldt sets off historical understanding from mere deductive rational procedures by calling it an assimilation of the investigative capability (forschende Kraft) and the object under investigation (GS Vol 4, 39).

Wilhelm von Humboldt Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt 2007