ABSTRACT
Direct contacts between Weber and Croce are few. Reviewing the Italian translations of 'Science as a vocation' and 'Politics as a vocation' in 1948, Croce's thoughts went back forty years. 'I had met Weber at the 1908 International Philosophy Congress in Heidelberg, he was friendly with friends of mine and they thought highly of him; I had no further contact with him, nor did I follow his scholarly work - from which I had only read his early book Roman Agrarian History.' 1 It was mainly Karl Vossler who was responsible for these few contacts; at that time a lecturer in Heidelberg, he had been asked by Windelband to convey to Croce the offer of delivering one of the principal addresses at the Congress (Croce chose as his theme 'Pure intuition and the lyric character of art'). 2 Croce sent Weber - again with Vossler as intermediary-the first edition of his Logica, which had appeared during 1905 in the series Atti dell' Accademia Pontaniana; 3 the following year Weber responded by sending Croce offprints of the third part of 'Roscher and Knies', and 'Critical studies in the logic of the cultural sciences'. 4 On this latter occasion Croce had asked his friend Vossler whether the author of both pieces 'were the same Weber who has written on Roman agrarian history', and announced his intention of sending the reprinted edition of his essays, Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx. 5 Contact between Weber and Crose was interrupted at this point, the interruption lasting until Croce suggested the Italian translation of Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany. This mutual esteem never became a dialogue. News of the death of Weber did, however, move Croce to write to Vossler, who had the previous year informed Croce of Weber's appointment at Munich, that 'I have heard of Weber's death with genuine pain, one of the finest minds of our time and a serene spirit'. 6
method of Verstehen, which excluded resort to causal explanation. His initial target was principally the contrast of '"free" and therefore irrational individual action of persons on the one hand, law-governed determination of the naturally given conditions of action on the other' 9 - a contrast which resulted in the denial of the possibility of a rational explanation of human action in principle. Weber's polemic was concerned with the methodology of the human sciences propounded by Wilhelm Wundt, in particular his concept of 'creative synthesis'; it led further to a rejection of the Kantian conception of causality through freedom. Consequently the concept of interpretation assumed a leading role in Weber's analysis, and he emphasized the inability of this concept to distinguish between the procedures of historical and natural scientific knowledge. His criticism was expressly directed against Hugo Miinsterberg's Grundzuge der Psychologie [Outline of Psychology] (1900}, the second edition of Georg Simmel's The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1905) and Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld's Herrschaft des Wortes (1904). In the background, however, there also emerged references to Dilthey and Rickert, marked in different ways. In the case of Dilthey, it was not only the distinction of natural from human sciences that was rejected on the grounds that its objective foundation was methodologically misleading, but also the conception of Verstehen, together with the relation between experience (Erleben) and Verstehen; in the case of Rickert, Weber accepted not only the distinction of natural from cultural sciences on the basis of their different cognitive purposes, but also the general methodological approach that was laid out in his Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung [The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science] (1902). And, finally, the polemic against the reduction of epistemology to psychology (and against the confusion of an epistemological with a psychological approach) found support in Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations, which had been published in 1900-1.
