Wilhelm Dilthey
German philosopher, historian of ideas and theorist of the human sciences (1833–1911), born in Biebrich, Hesse, into a family of Protestant pastoral tradition, trained in theology, history and philosophy at Heidelberg and Berlin, who devoted much of his long academic career to an ambitious, never fully completed philosophical project: to provide an epistemological and methodological foundation for the 'human sciences' (Geisteswissenschaften) — history, philology, law, economics, psychology, religious studies — as a domain of knowledge just as legitimate as, but radically distinct from, the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). Against the positivist attempt by John Stuart Mill and others to apply the causal-explanatory methods of physics and chemistry to the study of society and culture, Dilthey argued that human and historical phenomena require a fundamentally different method, 'understanding' (Verstehen), an act of direct, intuitive grasp of the lived meaning of human actions and expressions from within, as opposed to the external causal 'explanation' (Erklären) applicable only to the physical world. This fundamental methodological distinction rests on his central thesis that all human understanding of culture ultimately springs from the immediate 'lived experience' (Erlebnis) of life itself, and that great cultural works — texts, institutions, works of art — are 'objectifications of life' (Objektivationen des Lebens) bearing the imprint of a concrete, historically situated human experience, capable of being comprehendingly relived by a later interpreter through what Dilthey called the 'hermeneutic circle', the continuous, never definitively closed movement between understanding the whole from the parts and the parts from the whole. This hermeneutic reflection, developed across his Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883) and other unfinished works, exerted a decisive, acknowledged influence on Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and the entire twentieth-century hermeneutic tradition, as well as on Max Weber's interpretive sociology, making Dilthey one of the undisputed founding fathers of the contemporary humanities and social sciences as methodologically autonomous disciplines.