1. Wilhelm Dilthey has often been considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions, which are drawn from German literary and philosophical traditions.
Wilhelm 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.
Wilhelm Dilthey took some of his inspiration from the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher on hermeneutics, which he helped revive.
Wilhelm Dilthey argues that 'scientific explanation of nature' must be completed with a theory of how the world is given to human beings through symbolically mediated practices.
Wilhelm Dilthey saw understanding as the key for the human sciences in contrast with the natural sciences.
Wilhelm Dilthey's students included Bernhard Groethuysen, Hans Lipps, Herman Nohl, Theodor Litt, Eduard Spranger, Georg Misch and Erich Rothacker.
Wilhelm 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.
Wilhelm Dilthey did however have good things to say about the neo-Kantian sociology of Georg Simmel, with whom he was a colleague at the University of Berlin.
Wilhelm Dilthey strongly rejected using a model formed exclusively from the natural sciences, and instead proposed developing a separate model for the human sciences.
Wilhelm Dilthey's argument centered around the idea that in the natural sciences we seek to explain phenomena in terms of cause and effect, or the general and the particular; in contrast, in the human sciences, we seek to understand in terms of the relations of the part and the whole.
Wilhelm Dilthey defended his use of the term Geisteswissenschaft by pointing out that other terms such as "social science" and "cultural sciences" are equally one-sided and that the human mind or spirit is the central phenomenon from which all others are derived and analyzable.
In 1911, Wilhelm Dilthey developed a typology of the three basic Weltanschauungen, or World-Views, which he considered to be "typical" and conflicting ways of conceiving of humanity's relation to Nature.
Wilhelm Dilthey was not a Neo-Kantian, but had a profound knowledge of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which deeply influenced his thinking.
In 1859, Wilhelm Dilthey was asked to complete the editing of Schleiermacher's letters.
Wilhelm Dilthey inaugurated the academy edition of Kant's writings in 1895, and served as its first editor.
Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works are being published by Princeton University Press under the editorship of the noted Dilthey scholars Rudolf A Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi.