Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey , 1833-1911, German philosopher. He taught at the universities of Basel, Kiel, Breslau, and Berlin. He was one of the first to claim the independence of the human sciences as distinct from the natural sciences. Dilthey laid down a foundation of descriptive and analytic psychology on which to base a study of philosophy. One of his principal works is Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften [introduction to the human studies] (1883).

Bibliography: See his monograph, The Essence of Philosophy (tr. 1954); study by R. A. Makkreel (1975).

Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911) A German philosopher, one of the great precursors of the interpretative tradition in sociology, Dilthey's central preoccupation was with the creation of an adequate philosophical foundation for knowledge in the human or historical sciences. For him, the world of human history and culture consisted of ‘expressions’ of human life-experience (Erlebnis) which were to be apprehended and understood in ways quite different from and irreducible to the methods of the natural sciences. His early conviction that psychology could play the part of a foundational science for the human sciences was eventually displaced in favour of a hermeneutic approach (see INTERPRETATION) to institutions, religions, buildings, and so on, as so many ‘objectifications’ of life-experience. See also GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN AND NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN; IDEOGRAPHIC VERSUS NOMOTHETIC APPROACHES.