Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey was the German philosopher who established the human sciences — history, psychology, social theory, the study of literature and culture — as disciplines with their own methods irreducible to natural science. Where the sciences of nature explain by seeking causal laws, the human sciences understand by grasping meaning: the lived experience of human beings expressed in texts, actions, and institutions.

Dilthey's method of hermeneutics — the interpretation of expressions of inner life through the "hermeneutic circle" of part and whole — became the foundation for twentieth-century theories of understanding from Heidegger to Gadamer and Ricoeur. His concept of "Weltanschauung" (worldview) argued that philosophy's various systems are expressions of different attitudes toward life — an insight that shaped later philosophy of culture and the sociology of knowledge.