- Lived:
- 1833–1911 · born in Biebrich on the Rhine; taught in Basel, Kiel, Breslau, and Berlin; died in the Tyrolean Alps
- Tradition:
- German philosophy of the human sciences; founder of modern hermeneutics as a general method
- The Big Idea:
- Studying people is not like studying rocks. Nature we explain from the outside with causal laws; human life we understand from the inside, through the meanings people live by — and the human sciences need their own foundation, as rigorous as physics but built differently.
- In their words:
- "We explain nature; we understand psychic life."
- If you remember one thing:
- He wanted to do for history what Kant had done for natural science — write a Critique of Historical Reason — and though he never finished it, every historian, sociologist, and psychologist who says "you have to understand it from their point of view" is living in the house he framed.