Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911)

This is a good little half-forgotten book in the history of philosophy. Dilthey's march through the formation of worldviews in the first chapters is tough going, but once he starts looking at particular formations- first religion, then poetry, then metaphysics, and then again at naturalism, subjective idealism, and objective idealism -things begin to flow beautifully. The final chapter that describes objective idealism as a sort of pantheistic sympathy that tries to see the unity in all things, is actually rather moving, though it's hard for me to see how he includes in this category both Hegel and Schopenhauer.

My only substantive complaint is that Dilthey has two chapters in the middle of the book which are very nearly identical. I'm not sure what happened, but on first impression it didn't seem like the second was a clarification on the first. Instead, it seemed like Dilthey accidentally slipped in a first draft copy in before a final draft copy of a chapter and didn't correct the error before publication.… (meer)