Dietrich Tiedemann
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Dietrich Tiedemann (1748-1803) was a German philosopher who was a native of Bremervörde. He was a student at the University of Göttingen, and later a professor at Caroline College in Kassel and at the University of Marburg. He was father to physiologist Friedrich Tiedemann (1781-1861).
Tiedemann was author of the six-volume Geist der spekulativen Philosophie von Thales bis Berkeley (The Spirit of Speculative Philosophy from Thales to Berkeley). Tiedemann had strong disagreements regarding the philosophic beliefs of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), of which he critiques in two publications; On the Nature of Metaphysics: An Examination of Professor Kant's Principles-Against the Aesthetic and Continuation of the Examination of Professor Kant's Thoughts About the Nature of Metaphysics-Against the Analytic. Kant dismissed Tiedemann's arguments, which he reasoned were caused by a lack of understanding.
Tiedemann was also a pioneer of empirical psychology, and an early practitioner concerning the scientific study of child development. He kept a journal of his son's sensory, motor, language, and cognitive behavior during the first thirty months of his life. Through his empirical observations he claimed that children possessed a "pre-linguistic knowledge".
