Heinrich Rickert

Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936) was one of the leading figures of neo-Kantianism and, together with Wilhelm Windelband, led the Baden school. He matters chiefly for his account of how the sciences work, especially the sciences of culture and history, and for his influence on the sociologist Max Weber.

He was born in Danzig, then in Prussia and now Gdańsk in Poland, to a journalist who later turned to politics. He taught philosophy at Freiburg from 1894 to 1915, and then at Heidelberg, where he had succeeded Windelband and where he died in 1936. Edmund Husserl succeeded him at Freiburg, and Martin Heidegger began his academic career as Rickert's assistant.

Rickert argued that history is a genuine science, though one different in kind from the natural sciences. Against Nietzsche, Bergson, Dilthey and Simmel, who championed so-called vital values, he held that true values demand a certain distance from life itself. His central claim is that historical facts differ from natural ones in their relation to values, and that the observer is never neutral: choosing an object of study and forming concepts are guided by interests and values, so facts do not exist independently of a system of values.

He played a prominent part in the Methodenstreit, the debate over the aims and methods of the social sciences, and his positions shaped Max Weber's work, including the concept of the ideal type. Later in life he moved toward National Socialism, a shift that continues to weigh on how his work is received.