Heinrich Rickert, the German neo-Kantian philosopher, was born in Danzig and received his degree in 1888 from the University of Strasbourg. In 1891 he began lecturing at Freiburg, succeeding Alois Riehl as professor in 1894. In 1916 he went to Heidelberg as successor to Wilhelm Windelband.

Rickert belonged to the southwestern school of neo-Kantianism. His main efforts were devoted to a study of the logical and epistemological foundations of the natural sciences and to the historical disciplines in the hope of arriving at a "unity of reality and values." He departed from Wilhelm Dilthey in his criticism of Dilthey's subjective approach to the understanding of historical reality and in his attempt to find a set of more objective criteria; his departure from Windelband consisted in rejecting Windelband's separation of natural and historical disciplines and offering instead a theory that considered all reality to be historical.

Philosophy and Natural Science