Knowra Wilhelm Dilthey Wilhelm Dilthey Wilhelm Dilthey was a German philosopher and historian who sought to ground the human sciences in the study of lived experience, understanding, and historical life.
Geisteswissenschaften : The human sciences, including history and philology, that study human life, meaning, and culture. Dilthey sought to establish their foundations and distinguish their methods from those of natural science.
Expression (philosophy) : An outward form through which inner experience or meaning becomes perceptible. For Dilthey, expressions of life provide material that interpretation can understand.
Johann Gustav Droysen : A German historian who distinguished historical understanding from the methods of natural science. Droysen’s account of historical understanding anticipated questions central to Dilthey’s project.
Martin Heidegger : A German philosopher whose work made being-in-the-world central to twentieth-century phenomenology. Heidegger drew on Dilthey while redirecting hermeneutics toward the structure of human existence.
Philosophical hermeneutics : The philosophical study of how understanding and interpretation condition human knowledge and experience. Dilthey helped shift hermeneutics from textual method toward a general account of understanding.
Verstehen : Interpretive understanding of human actions, expressions, and meanings in their contexts. Dilthey made understanding central to inquiry into historically situated human life.
Hermeneutic circle : The process of interpreting parts through a whole and revising the whole through its parts. It describes how Dilthey’s interpretation moves between individual expressions and the life-context they reveal.
Friedrich Schleiermacher : A German theologian and philosopher whose hermeneutics treated interpretation as a disciplined art. Dilthey developed Schleiermacher’s interpretive legacy into a broader philosophy of the human sciences.
Hans-Georg Gadamer : A German philosopher who developed philosophical hermeneutics as an account of historically situated understanding. Gadamer critically examined Dilthey’s effort to ground the human sciences through historical understanding.
Human sciences : Disciplines that study human beings, societies, history, and culture through interpretive and empirical methods. This is the broader field whose intellectual foundations Dilthey sought to clarify.
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