Wilhelm Dilthey (; German: [ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈdɪltaɪ]; 19 November 1833 – 1 October 1911) was a German philosopher who held Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher working in the emerging modern research university, Dilthey aimed to establish the methodological foundations of the human sciences, including history, hermeneutics, and nascent psychology, in relation to the natural sciences. Dilthey's account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential is drawn from the traditions of German philosophy and literature, and differs from British empiricism and positivism in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions. But he emphasized experience and historical evidence, and has sometimes been styled an empiricist by contrast to then prevailing idealism.
Life Dilthey was born in 1833 as the son of a Reformed pastor in the village of Biebrich in the Duchy of Nassau, now in Hesse, Germany. As a young man he followed family traditions by studying theology at Heidelberg University, where his teachers included the young Kuno Fischer. He then moved to the University of Berlin and was taught by, amongst others, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg and August Böckh, both former pupils of Friedrich Schleiermacher. In January 1864, he received his doctorate from Berlin with a thesis in Latin on Schleiermacher's ethics, and in June of the same year he also earned his habilitation with a thesis on moral consciousness. He became a Privatdozent at Berlin in 1865. In 1859, he edited Schleiermacher's letters and soon after he was also commissioned to write a biography—the first volume of which was eventually published in 1870. In 1867 he took up a professorship at the University of Basel, but later—in 1882—he returned to Berlin where he held the prestigious chair in philosophy at the university. In 1874, he married Katherine Puttmann, and the couple had one son and two daughters. He died in 1911.
Work
Hermeneutics Dilthey took some of his inspiration from the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher on hermeneutics, which he helped revive. Both figures are linked to German Romanticism. Schleiermacher was strongly influenced by German Romanticism which led him to place more emphasis on human emotion and the imagination. Dilthey, in his turn, as the author of a vast monograph on Schleiermacher, responds to the questions raised by Droysen and Ranke about the philosophical legitimation of the human sciences. He argues that 'scientific explanation of nature' (erklären) must be completed with a theory of how the world is given to human beings through symbolically mediated practices. To provide such a theory is the aim of the philosophy of the humanities—a field of study to which Dilthey dedicated his entire academic career. The school of Romantic hermeneutics stressed that historically embedded interpreters—a "living" rather than a Cartesian dualism or "theoretical" subject—use 'understanding' and 'interpretation' (Verstehen), which combine individual-psychological and social-historical description and analysis, to gain a greater knowledge of texts and authors in their contexts. However, Dilthey remains distinct from other German Romantics and life philosophers through his emphasis on "historicality." Dilthey understood man as a historical being. However, history is not described in terms of an object of the past, but "a series of world views." Man cannot understand himself through reflection or introspection, but only through what "history can tell him…never in objective concepts but always only in the living experience which springs up out of the depths of his own being." Dilthey wants to emphasize the "intrinsic temporality of all understanding," that man's understanding is dependent on past worldviews, interpretations, and a shared world. The process of interpretive inquiry established by Schleiermacher involved what Dilthey called the hermeneutic circle—the recurring movement between the implicit and the explicit, the particular and the whole. Schleiermacher saw the approaches to interpreting sacred scriptures (for example, the Pauline epistles) and Classical texts (e.g. Plato's philosophy) as more specific forms of what he proposed as "general hermeneutics" (allgemeine Hermeneutik). Schleiermacher approached hermeneutics as the "art of understanding" and recognized both the importance of language, and the thoughts of an author, to interpreting a text. Dilthey saw understanding as the key for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) in contrast with the natural sciences. The natural sciences observe and explain nature, but the humanities understand human expressions of life. So long as a science is "accessible to us through a procedure based on the systematic relation between life, expression, and understanding", Dilthey considered it a part of the human sciences. Along with Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel and Henri Bergson, Dilthey's work influenced early twentieth-century Lebensphilosophie and Existenzphilosophie. Dilthey's students included Bernard Groethuysen, Hans Lipps, Herman Nohl, Theodor Litt, Eduard Spranger, Georg Misch and Erich Rothacker. Dilthey's philosophy also influenced the religious philosopher Martin Buber. Dilthey's works informed the early Martin Heidegger's approach to hermeneutics in his early lecture courses, in which he developed a "hermeneutics of factical life," and in Being and Time (1927). But Heidegger grew increasingly critical of Dilthey, arguing for a more radical "temporalization" of the possibilities of interpretation and human existence. In Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method, 1960), Hans-Georg Gadamer, influenced by Heidegger, criticised Dilthey's approach to hermeneutics as both overly aesthetic and subjective as well as method-oriented and "positivistic." According to Gadamer, Dilthey's hermeneutics is insufficiently concerned with the ontological event of truth and inadequately considers the implications of how the interpreter and the interpreter's interpretations are not outside of tradition but occupy a particular position within it, i.e., have a temporal horizon.
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