Wilhelm Dilthey Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

All science is experiential; but all experience must be related back to and derives its its validity from the conditions and context of consciousness in which it arises, i.e., the totality of our nature.

Wilhelm Dilthey
From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

Wilhelm Dilthey
The individual always realizes only one of the possibilities in its development, which could always have taken a different turning whenever it has to make an important decision.

Wilhelm Dilthey
On the other hand, for the whole human being who wills, feels, and represents, external reality is given simultaneously and with as much certitude as his own self.

Wilhelm Dilthey
Ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day.

Wilhelm Dilthey
On the whole, the question whether some aspect of reality can be treated scientifically is like the question whether the knife lying before me is sharp. One must simply try to cut with it.

Wilhelm Dilthey
The sciences which take socio-historical reality as their subject matter are seeking, more intensively than ever before, their systematic relations to one another and to their foundation.

Wilhelm Dilthey
In the real life-process, willing, feeling, and thinking are only different aspects.

Wilhelm Dilthey
If we conceive all the changes in the physical world as reducible to the motion of atoms, motions generated by means of the fixed nuclear forces of those atoms, the whole of the world could thus be known by means of the natural sciences.

Wilhelm Dilthey
The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.

Wilhelm Dilthey
A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society's resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization.

Wilhelm Dilthey
No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

Wilhelm Dilthey
Any theory intended to describe and analyze socio-historical reality cannot restrict itself to the human spirit and disregard the totality of human nature.

Wilhelm Dilthey