Rickert's Relevance: The Ontological Nature And Epistemological Functions of Values

People make judgments about the world around them and about themselves all the time but hardly realize that they intrinsically are connected with values. Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936), in the tradition of Immanuel Kant, put such value-judgments in the center of his theory of knowledge and developed an elaborate philosophy of values in which he tried to avoid both historical relativism and metaphysical absolutism. He also rejected the irrationalism which dominated the vitalist philosophies from Nietzsche to Bergson, and later the French and German currents of existentialism, without, however, falling prey to a one-sided rationalism and intellectualism. He found an elegant solution to the old issue of the demarcation of Natural Science and Cultural Science without favoring, as is still usually done, one of them.