A term for the general emphasis on ‘life’ as an important element in philosophical vocabulary, especially as that emphasis was found in writers such as Dilthey in the nineteenth century. Generally speaking the movement stood for paying philosophical attention to life as it is lived ‘from the inside’, rather than to bloodless Kantian abstractions or the scientific reductions of positivism or naturalism. As a movement it heralded the phenomenology of Husserl. See also Verstehen.