ABSTRACT
Wilhelm Dilthey was born at Biebrich am Rhein in the then independent duchy of Hesse-Nassau on November 19, 1833. He received both philosophical and personal guidance from Adolf Trendelenburg. In 1865, he became a Privatdozent in philosophy at Berlin. The concept of philosophy or art or the religious attitude or law can be found only as the authors derive from the groups of facts, forming one of these fields, the relations of the characteristics constituting the concept. The circularity, involved in the procedure of defining philosophy, is inevitable. In the historical view every particular concept of philosophy becomes an instance, referring to the formative law which the essence of philosophy contains. The chief result emerging from the historical evidence discusses: an insulated logical and historical continuum leads from the metaphysics of the Greeks, who undertook to solve the great riddle of the world and of life with universal validity, to the most radical positivists or sceptics of the present.
