Author Description

The German philosopher and historian of philosophy Wilhelm Windelband was born in Potsdam and educated at Jena, Berlin, and Gottingen. He taught philosophy at Zurich, Freiburg im Breisgau, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg. He was a disciple of Rudolf Hermann Lotze and Kuno Fischer and was the leader of the so-called southwestern German (or Baden) school of neo-Kantianism. He is best known for his work in history of philosophy, to which he brought a new mode of exposition -- the organization of the subject by problems rather than by chronological sequence of individual thinkers. As a systematic philosopher he is remembered for his attempt to extend the principles of Kantian criticism to the historical sciences, his attempt to liberate philosophy from identification with any specific scientific discipline, and his sympathetic appreciation of late nineteenth-century philosophy of value. Windelband believed that whereas the various sciences (mathematical, natural, and historical) have specific objects and limit their investigations to determined areas of the total reality, philosophy finds its unique object in the knowledge of reality provided by these various disciplines taken together as a whole. The task of philosophy, he held, was to explicate the a priori bases of science in general. The aim of philosophy was to show not how science is possible but why there are many different kinds of science; the relationships that obtain between these various sciences; and the nature of the relation between the critical intelligence -- the knowing, willing, and feeling subject -- and consciousness in general.