Dietrich Richard Alfred von Hildebrand (12 October 1889 – 26 January 1977) was a German Roman Catholic philosopher and religious writer.

In 1909 he attended the University of Göttingen, where he completed his doctorate in philosophy under Husserl and Adolf Reinach, whom he later credited with helping to shape his own philosophical views.

Upon the outbreak of the First World War Hildebrand was drafted into service as a physician's assistant in Munich, serving as a kind of surgical nurse.

[2] Hildebrand published his first book, The Nature of Moral Action (Die Idee der Sittlichen Handlung), in 1916, and two years later, after the war had ended, was given a teaching position at the University of Munich, eventually gaining an assistant professorship there in 1924.

There, with the support of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, he founded and edited an anti-Nazi weekly paper, Der Christliche Ständestaat ("The Christian Corporative State").

When the Nazis invaded France in 1940 he went into hiding; after many hardships, and the heroic assistance of Frenchmen, including Edmond Michelet and the American journalist Varian Fry, he was able to escape to Portugal with his wife, their son Franz, and their daughter-in-law.

[5] He was a founder of Una Voce America and vice director of Luigi Villa's Chiesa viva ("Living Church")[6] But his personalist work—for example, on the freedom of persons and on the unitive end of sexual intercourse—also helped prepare for many aspects of the Second Vatican Council's teachings, and Hildebrand always advocated reading the council's texts in continuity with the Catholic Church's tradition.

[8][10] Like Reinach, Scheler, Roman Ingarden, and many Munich phenomenologists, Hildebrand reacted against Edmund Husserl's transcendental idealist turn in phenomenology, on which the meaning of all objects is constituted by conscious subjects.

On this phenomenological method, we set out to focus attention on explanatory, causal, or abstract theories regarding the things we experience, so as to attain "existential contact with reality" and a "living plenitude and full flavor of being" and to do "justice to the qualitative nature of the object.

But he also uses this method to show how we can directly analyze all sorts of real phenomena, including human persons, organisms, artworks, and communities.

Contemplation, which is intrinsically enjoyable and done for its own sake, can occur in relation to beautiful artworks and natural beings, friends and loved ones, essential and necessary truths, and God.

As in his discussion of values, Hildebrand writes a lot about distinguishing kinds of feelings, and about analyzing their place in the moral life, as well as in the Christian life—something he emphasizes by a careful analysis of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

[15] Von Hildebrand argues that the goal of the Christian life is not simply to follow a set of rules or to achieve a certain level of moral perfection, but rather to be transformed from within and to develop a deep personal relationship with God.

He stresses the importance of cultivating virtues such as humility, faith, hope, and love, and of seeking to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of our spiritual growth.

[15] Throughout the book, von Hildebrand draws on the teachings of the Bible, the writings of the saints, and his own personal experiences to offer insights into the spiritual life.