Background
Wilhelm Dilthey was born in Biebrich, a village in the Rhineland, on 19 November 1833. His family was intimately connected with the dukes of Nassau, serving for generations as chaplains and councilors.
69117 Heidelberg, Germany
Wilhelm Dilthey attended Heidelberg University.
Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Wilhelm Dilthey attended the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Wilhelm Dilthey
Wilhelm Dilthey
Wilhelm Dilthey
Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Wilhelm Dilthey attended the Humboldt University of Berlin.
69117 Heidelberg, Germany
Wilhelm Dilthey attended Heidelberg University.
Wilhelm Dilthey
Wilhelm Dilthey
Wilhelm Dilthey
(This is the fifth volume in a six-volume translation of t...)
This is the fifth volume in a six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), a philosopher and historian of culture who has had a significant and continuing, influence on the twentieth-century Continental philosophy and in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. In addition to his landmark works on the theories of history and the human sciences, Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics and phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691029288/?tag=2022091-20
1986
(In addition to his landmark works on the theories of hist...)
In addition to his landmark works on the theories of history and the human sciences, Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics and phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences. The Selected Works will make accessible to English-speaking readers the full range of Dilthey's thought, including some historical essays and literary criticism. The series provides translations of complete texts, together with editorial notes, and contains manuscript materials that are currently being published for the first time in Germany.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691020744/?tag=2022091-20
1989
(The philosopher and historian of culture Wilhelm Dilthey ...)
The philosopher and historian of culture Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) has had a significant and continuing influence on twentieth-century Continental philosophy and in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. This volume is the third to be published in Princeton University Press's projected six-volume series of his most important works.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691149313/?tag=2022091-20
1996
(This is the second volume in a six-volume translation of ...)
This is the second volume in a six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), a philosopher and historian of culture who continues to have a significant influence on Continental philosophy and a broad range of scholarly disciplines. In addition to his landmark works on the theories of history and the human sciences, Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics, phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691147493/?tag=2022091-20
2010
(German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey dedicated the bulk of ...)
German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey dedicated the bulk of his long career to there and related questions. His Introduction to the Human Sciences is a pioneering effort to elaborate a general theory of the human sciences, especially history, and to distinguish these sciences radically from the field of natural sciences. Though the Introduction was never completed, it remains one of the major statements of the topic.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814318983/?tag=2022091-20
historian philosopher psychologist sociologist author
Wilhelm Dilthey was born in Biebrich, a village in the Rhineland, on 19 November 1833. His family was intimately connected with the dukes of Nassau, serving for generations as chaplains and councilors.
Wilhelm Dilthey's early education was at a local gymnasium, from which he graduated in 1852. Following family tradition, Dilthey entered the University of Heidelberg to study theology. After three semesters he moved to Berlin for historical studies under Friedrich Trendelenburg. To please his father, he took the examination in theology. In 1864 he took his doctorate at Berlin and obtained the right to lecture.
Wilhelm Dilthey preached his first sermon in 1856. His preferred occupation was secondary teaching, but after two happy years, he was forced to give this up as a result of persistent ill-health.
The next half-dozen years were spent in historical research and philosophical study at Berlin. In 1864, with an essay on the ethics of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Dilthey entered university teaching. In 1866 he was called to Basel. In 1882, after brief tours in Kiel and Breslau, he returned to Berlin as professor of theology, a post he held until 1905.
He searched for the philosophical foundation of what he first and rather vaguely summarized as the "sciences of man, of society, and the state," which he later called Geisteswissenschaften ("human sciences") - a term that eventually gained general recognition to collectively denote the fields of history, philosophy, religion, psychology, art, literature, law, politics, and economics. In 1883, as a result of these studies, the first volume of his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften ("Introduction to Human Sciences") appeared. The second volume, on which he worked continually, never did appear. This introductory work yielded a series of important essays; one of these - his "Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie" (1894; "Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology") - instigated the formation of a cognitive (Verstehen), or structural, psychology. During the last years of his life, Dilthey resumed this work on a new level in his treatise Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1910; "The Structure of the Historical World in the Human Sciences"), which was also left unfinished.
Dilthey published little during his lifetime, but since his death, 14 volumes of collected writings have appeared. These include profound essays in intellectual history and original work on the philosophy of the mind. He made repeated efforts to arrive at general categories for interpreting comparative Weltanschauungen (philosophies of life).
In imitation of Immanuel Kant's opus, Dilthey aspired to write a "Critique of Historical Reason," tracing the emergence and evolution of the great systems of thought. Dilthey concluded that no overall synthesis of these varying outlooks was possible but that awareness of certain historical relativity was the condition for intellectual liberation and creative work.
Dilthey argued convincingly for historical interpretation in all inquiries into man and his culture. Human life and creativity cannot be understood abstractly but only as part of a historical process. The historian must sympathetically enter into the alien cultures he seeks to understand.
Much of Dilthey's work was an effort to describe the characteristic differences between this approach in historical subjects and the approach of the natural scientist toward his subject matter. He died on October 3, 1911, in Seis.
Dilthey is best known for the way he distinguished between the natural and human sciences. He held that psychological principles should form the basis of historical and sociological research.
In 1911, Dilthey developed a typology of the three basic Weltanschauungen, or World-Views, which he considered to be "typical" and conflicting ways of conceiving of humanity's relation to Nature.
(This is the fifth volume in a six-volume translation of t...)
1986(This is the second volume in a six-volume translation of ...)
2010(In addition to his landmark works on the theories of hist...)
1989(The philosopher and historian of culture Wilhelm Dilthey ...)
1996(German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey dedicated the bulk of ...)
Dilthey's ideas should be examined in terms of his similarities and differences with Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, members of the Baden School of Neo-Kantianism. Dilthey was not a Neo-Kantian but had a profound knowledge of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which deeply influenced his thinking.
Opposed to the trend in the historical and social sciences to approximate the methodological ideal of the natural sciences, Dilthey tried to establish the humanities as interpretative sciences in their own right. In the course of this work he broke new philosophical ground by his study of the relations between personal experience, its realization in creative expression, and the reflective understanding of this experience; the interdependence of self-knowledge and knowledge of other persons; and, finally, the logical development from these to the understanding of social groups and historical processes. The subject matter of the historical and social sciences is the human mind, not as it is enjoyed in immediate experience nor as it is analyzed in psychological theory, but as it manifests or "objectifies" itself in languages and literature, actions, and institutions. Dilthey emphasized that the essence of human beings cannot be grasped by introspection but only from a knowledge of all of history; this understanding, however, can never be final because history itself never is: "The prototype ‘man’ disintegrates during the process of history." For this reason, his philosophical works were closely connected to his historical studies. From these works later arose the encompassing scheme of his Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes ("Studies Concerning the History of the German Mind"); the notes for this work make up a complete coherent manuscript, but only parts have been published.
Dilthey held that historical consciousness - i.e., the consciousness of the historical relativity of all ideas, attitudes, and institutions - is the most characteristic and challenging fact in the intellectual life of the modern world. It shakes all belief in absolute principles, but it thereby sets people free to understand and appreciate all the diverse possibilities of human experience. Dilthey did not have the ability for definitive formulation; he was suspicious of rationally constructed systems and preferred to leave questions unsettled, realizing that they involved complexity. For a long time, therefore, he was regarded primarily as a sensitive cultural historian who lacked the power of systematic thought. Only posthumously, through the editorial and interpretative work of his disciples, did the significance of the methodology of his historical philosophy of life emerge.
Quotations:
"What is experienced from within cannot be categorized in concepts that have been developed for the external world of the senses."
"In the case of lived experience, there is no difference between an object that is perceived and the eye that perceives it."
"Paradox is a characteristic of truth."
"We explain by means of purely intellectual processes, but we understand by means of the cooperation of all the powers of the mind in comprehension. In understanding, we start from the connection of the given, living whole, in order to make the past comprehensible in terms of it."
"If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context."
"The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of the matter."
"A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society's resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization."
"No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought."
"In real life - process, willing, feeling, and thinking are only different aspects."
In 1874 Dilthey married Katherine Puttmann. The couple had one son and two daughters.
