Windelband was born the son of a Prussian official in Potsdam. He studied at Jena, Berlin, and Göttingen.
Philosophical work
Windelband is now mainly remembered for the terms nomothetic and idiographic, which he introduced. These have currency in psychology and other areas, though not necessarily in line with his original meanings. Windelband was a neo-Kantian who argued against other contemporary neo-Kantians, maintaining that "to understand Kant rightly means to go beyond him". Against his positivist contemporaries, Windelband argued that philosophy should engage in humanistic dialogue with the natural sciences rather than uncritically appropriating its methodologies. His interests in psychology and cultural sciences represented an opposition to psychologism and historicism schools by a critical philosophic system.
^Windelband defended foundationalism in his book Über die Gewißheit der Erkenntniss. (1873)—see Frederick C. Beiser (2014), The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 517.
Further reading
Rickert, Heinrich (1929) [1915]. Wilhelm Windelband (2nd ed.). Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr.
Mayeda, Graham (2008). "Is there a Method to Chance? Contrasting Kuki Shūzō's Phenomenological Methodology in The Problem of Contingency with that of his Contemporaries Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert". In Hori, Victor S; Curley, Melissa Anne-Marie (eds.). Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy II: Neglected Themes and Hidden Variations. Nagoya, Japan: Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture.
