Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 to 1911) was a German philosopher who held Hegel's chair in philosophy at the University of Berlin. Born in Biebrich in the Duchy of Nassau, he studied theology at Heidelberg and then at Berlin, wrote a biography of Schleiermacher, and held professorships at Basel from 1867 and at Berlin from 1882. He aimed to establish the methodological foundations of the human sciences, including history, hermeneutics and nascent psychology, distinguishing the explanation (erklären) pursued by the natural sciences from the understanding (Verstehen) of human expressions of life. He objected to being called a sociologist and rejected the evolutionist assumptions and narrowly natural-scientific methods of Comte and Spencer, yet J. I. Hans Bakker has argued that he should be counted among the classical sociological theorists because of his influence on the foundation of nonpositivist verstehende sociology. His work influenced Lebensphilosophie, the early Heidegger and Martin Buber, while Gadamer criticised his hermeneutics as overly subjective and method-oriented. He died in 1911.