Wilhelm Windelband

Wilhelm Windelband (1848 to 1915) was a German philosopher of the Baden school. Born in Potsdam, he studied at the University of Jena, where he attended lectures by Kuno Fischer, and later at Berlin and Göttingen, and in 1870 he presented his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Hermann Lotze. He became professor of inductive philosophy at the University of Zurich in 1876, professor of philosophy at the University of Freiburg in 1877, and from 1882 held a post at the German University of Strasbourg, where he served as rector. He is mainly remembered for the terms nomothetic and idiographic, which he introduced in his 1894 rectoral address. A neo-Kantian who maintained that to understand Kant rightly means to go beyond him, he argued against positivism that philosophy should engage in humanistic dialogue with the natural sciences, and Heinrich Rickert was closely associated with him.