Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek was a German linguist. His work included A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages and his great project jointly executed with Lucy Lloyd: The Bleek and Lloyd Archive of ǀxam and !kun texts. A short form of this eventually reached press with Specimens of Bushman Folklore, which Laurens van der Post drew on heavily.
Wilhelm Josef Blos was a German journalist, historian, novelist, dramatist and politician (SPD). He served as a member of the imperial parliament (Reichstag) between 1877 and 1918, albeit with one three year break. After the end of World War I he served between 1918 and 1920 as the first president of the newly launched Free People's State of Württemberg.
Wilhelm Bölsche was a German author, editor and publicist. He was among the early promoters of nature conservation and committed to popularizing science.
Wilhelm Bousset was a German theologian and New Testament scholar. He was of Huguenot ancestry and a native of Lübeck. His most influential work was Kyrios Christos, an attempt to explain the origins of devotion to Christ as the product of second century Hellenistic forces, and is still the most widely influential academic work on early Christology, even if its conclusions are not supported by modern scholarship.
Wilhelm Brambach was a German classical scholar, music historian, and librarian. He was the son of organ builder Franz Jacob Brachmann and the brother of composer and choral conductor Caspar Joseph Brambach. He studied classical philology with Friedrich Ritschl and musicology with Heinrich Breidenstein at the University of Bonn. He worked as a librarian at Bonn University from 1862 to 1866, after which he was appointed Chief Librarian at the University Library Freiburg in 1866, a position he held for the next 38 years. He also con-currently served as a full professor of philology at the University of Freiburg from 1868 until his retirement in 1904.
Heinrich Christian Wilhelm Busch was a German humorist, poet, illustrator, and painter. He published wildly innovative illustrated tales that remain influential to this day.
Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G. W. F. Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions, which are drawn from German literary and philosophical traditions.
