Wilhelm Dilthey 1833 – 1911
Wilhelm Dilthey was a German philosopher and historian who devoted his career to the foundations of the human sciences, the Geisteswissenschaften, against the encroachment of natural-scientific methods. He distinguished explanation, the procedure of natural science, from understanding, the proper procedure for human and historical phenomena, and he developed a hermeneutics of lived experience as the basis for genuine knowledge of human life. He held the chair of philosophy at Berlin previously occupied by Hegel and shaped twentieth-century hermeneutics through his influence on Heidegger and Gadamer.
Key facts
- Nationality
- German
- Era
- Modern
- Movements
- Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Wilhelm Dilthey:
“We explain nature, but we understand mental life.”
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Attributed to Wilhelm Dilthey:
“Reality only exists for us in the facts of consciousness.”
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Attributed to Wilhelm Dilthey:
“Understanding is the rediscovery of the I in the Thou.”
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Attributed to Wilhelm Dilthey:
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
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Attributed to Wilhelm Dilthey:
“All learning is in the end the recognition of the form of one's own existence.”