Three Main Worldviews

 The nineteenth century German philosophy Wilhelm Dilthey was the first person to develop a comprehensive theory of worldviews (German: Weltanschauung). The American Heritage dictionary defines a worldview as, "the overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world." Our worldviews consist of our most basic beliefs, including our ontology (what we consider real), our epistemology (what we consider to be the best way to obtain knowledge), and our ethics (what we consider good and bad).

Dilthey felt that all worldviews fell into three main categories, each of which was based on the dominance of one of our primary mental acts or "attitudes":

Mental act emphasized Description Representatives Related worldviews

Democritus   Naturalism REASON (thinking) sees the physical, material world (as experieced through sense perception) as being the prime reality   David Hume Auguste Comte Ludwig Feuerbach Secular Humanism

Plato The Idealism of Freedom (Subjective Idealism) VOLITION (willing) emphasizes the human experience of free will, seeing it as something that is not the result of physical causation; tends toward a dualistic understanding of the mind   Aristotle Immanuel Kant William James Traditional Theism

Parmenides   Objective Idealism EMOTION (feeling) sees reality as a living, divine whole and relies more in intuition when it comes to understanding the world     Baruch Spinoza Hegel Goethe   Pantheism

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