Heinrich Rickert

Heinrich Rickert (1863 to 1936) was a German philosopher of the Southwestern school of Neo-Kantianism. He was born in Gdansk, then Danzig in Prussia, the son of a liberal politician and editor in Berlin. After study at Berlin and under Wilhelm Windelband at Strasbourg, where he completed a dissertation on the theory of definition in 1888, he moved to Freiburg and was appointed extraordinary professor in 1894 and ordinary professor in 1896. His Habilitation work, The Object of Knowledge, is a milestone of early twentieth century Neo-Kantianism. In 1915 he succeeded his mentor Windelband at Heidelberg, where he taught until he retired in 1932. His philosophy ranges across the theory of knowledge, the theory of science, the philosophy of values and history, metaphilosophy, and ontology and metaphysics. He died in Heidelberg on 25 July 1936 and was buried in Gdansk.