The German philosopher and historian of philosophy Wilhelm Windelband was born in Potsdam and educated at Jena, Berlin, and Göttingen. He taught philosophy at Zürich, Freiburg im Breisgau, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg. He was a disciple of Rudolf Hermann Lotze and Kuno Fischer and was the leader of the so-called southwestern German (or Baden) school of neo-Kantianism. He is best known for his work in history of philosophy, to which he brought a new mode of exposition—the organization of the subject by problems rather than by chronological sequence of individual thinkers. As a systematic philosopher he is remembered for his attempt to extend the principles of Kantian criticism to the historical sciences, his attempt to liberate philosophy from identification with any specific scientific discipline, and his sympathetic appreciation of late nineteenth-century philosophy of value.

Windelband believed that whereas the various sciences (mathematical...