ABSTRACT
Appraising something like an “influence” of Kierkegaard in Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833-1911) work appears to be a quite difficult task since one can actually find only a single reference to the Danish philosopher in Dilthey’s complete works. Moreover, this reference does not concern especially Kierkegaard’s works or concepts. The context where it appears is the academic lectures that Dilthey gave at the University of Berlin in the last years of the nineteenth century on the “general history of philosophy,” a history of which he outlined the “biographic and literary plan.”1 The Danish philosopher is mentioned right after Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), at the end of a paragraph on the German philosophy of “the second stage of the 19th century.”2 He appears together with Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910) and Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) as an example, outside Germany, of an increasing philosophical trend turned against systematic thinking and “aiming at understanding and assessing life from the standpoint of life itself.”3
