Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G. W. F. Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be 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.

19 November 1833

Born on the same birth day (19 November): Dick Cavett • Dmitri Yushkevich • Evgenia Medvedeva • Jerry Sheindlin • Jon Potter • Michael Saunders • Petr Sýkora • Ray Collins (musician) • Tommy Dorsey • Vanessa Axente • Yuan T. Lee

Born in the same month (November 1833): Alexander Borodin • Edwin Booth • James Patterson (Australian politician) • Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge