Wilhelm dilthey pdf

1. Dilthey’s Life and Thought

1.1 Brief Overview of Dilthey’s Philosophical Development

Wilhelm Dilthey was born in Biebrich on the Rhine in 1833, two years after Hegel had died. Dilthey’s ambivalent attitude towards Hegel can provide some initial clues about his own philosophical approach. He admired Hegel’s recognition of the historical dimension of philosophical thought, but rejected the speculative and metaphysical ways he developed this relation. Like the Neo-Kantians, Dilthey proposed a return to the more focused viewpoint of Kant, but not without also taking account of the higher emancipatory aspirations and broader perspectives of later thinkers such as Fichte, Herder, and Hegel.

Dilthey characterized his own expansive view of philosophy as one of establishing integral relations to all the theoretical disciplines and historical practices that attempt to make sense of the world. Instead of demarcating the boundaries that set philosophy apart from other ways of engaging life, Dilthey conceives its critical task as articulating th

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