Wilhelm Windelband
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Wilhelm Windelband (11 May 1848 – 22 October 1915) was a German philosopher of the Baden School.
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Life
Windelband was born the son of a Prussian official in Potsdam. He studied at Jena, Berlin, and Göttingen.
Philosophy
Windelband is now mainly remembered for the terms nomothetic and idiographic, which he introduced. These have currency in psychology and other areas, though not necessarily in line with his original meanings. Windelband was a neo-Kantian who protested other neo-Kantians of his time and maintained that "to understand Kant rightly means to go beyond him". Against his positivist contemporaries, Windelband argued that philosophy should engage in humanistic dialogue with the natural sciences rather than uncritically appropriating its methodologies. His interests in psychology and cultural sciences represented an opposition to psychologism and historicism schools by a critical philosophic system.
Windelband relied in his effort to reach beyond Kant on such philosophers as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Friedrich Herbart and Hermann Lotze. Closely associated with Windelband was Heinrich Rickert. Windelband's disciples were not only noted philosophers, but sociologists like Max Weber and theologians like Ernst Troeltsch and Albert Schweitzer.
Bibliography
The following works by Windelband are available in English translations:
- Books
- History of Philosophy (1893) (two volumes) reprinted 1901, 1938 and 1979 by Macmillan
- History of Ancient Philosophy (1899)
- An Introduction to Philosophy (1895)
- Theories in Logic (1912)
- Articles
- "History and Natural Science" (J. T. Lamiell, transl.). Theory and Psychology 8, 1998, 6–22.
See also
