Biography and human sciences in Wilhelm Dilthey

Abstract

By the late twentieth century, the biography-genre recovered its place of prestige in the reflections of historians, overcoming the distrust that had been imputed by Marxism and the historiography of the Annales. Nowadays, the proliferation of the studies on individual trajectories, whether of common or illustrious men, is a quite expressive phenomenon. On the other hand, several gender issues have already been faced by the nineteenth-century historiography. The aim of this paper is to recover the important formulations of Wilhelm Dilthey on biography. With this proposal, we intend to demonstrate how the German philosopher faced, in his time, crucial questions for biographical writing, such as the subjectivity of the biographer, the limits of narrative representation regarding an individual’s life, and the opposition between freedom and determinism.