Heinrich Rickert

Philosopher, born in Gda?sk, N Poland (formerly Danzig, Germany). He was a pupil of Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), and founded with him the Baden school of neo-Kantianism. He became professor at Freiburg (1894) and Heidelberg (1916), and argued for a Kulturwissenschaft (‘science of culture’) which could be an objective science of those universal concepts (such as religion, art, and law) that emerge from the multiplicity of individual cultures and societies. His views were a great influence on, among others, Max Weber.

Heinrich John Rickert (25 May 1863 – 25 July 1936) was a German philosopher, one of the leading Neo-Kantians. Contrary to philosophers like Nietzsche and Bergson, Rickert emphasized that values demand a distance from life, and that what Bergson, Dilthey or Simmel called "vital values" were not true values.

Rickert's philosophy was an important influence on the work of sociologist Max Weber. Weber is said to have borrowed much of his methodology, including the concept of the ideal type, from Rickert's work. 30)

In his work Rickert, like Dilthey, intended to offer a unifying theory of knowledge which, although accepting a division between science and history or Natur and Geist, overcame this division in a new philosophical method.

Rickert, with Wilhelm Windelband, led the so-called Baden School of Neo-Kantians.