Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey was born on 19 November 1833 in Germany, and by the time he assumed Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy chair at the University of Berlin, he was already moving against the idealist current that dominated German thought. His research focused on scientific methodology and the status of historical evidence - whether the study of human life could claim the rigor of science without borrowing the assumptions of British empiricism or positivism. As a polymath working across history, psychology, sociology, and hermeneutic philosophy, he drew his epistemological and ontological framework from German literary and philosophical traditions, carving out a version of the empirical that refused to flatten experience into data. He died on 1 October 1911, having reframed what it meant to study human beings scientifically.