With an elder brother, Willich found a home in the family of Friedrich Schleiermacher, a theologian, whose wife was a distant relative.
Born in Breslau in the Prussian Silesia as the son of a Reformed Church chaplain in the Prussian army, Schleiermacher started his formal education in a Moravian school at Niesky in Upper Lusatia, and at Barby near Magdeburg.
Friedrich Nietzsche | Friedrich Schiller | Friedrich Engels | Carl Friedrich Gauss | Karl Friedrich Schinkel | Friedrich Dürrenmatt | Friedrich Hayek | Caspar David Friedrich | Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Friedrich Hölderlin | Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle | Friedrich Ebert | Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling | Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel | Friedrich Gulda | Friedrich Rückert | Friedrich Paulus | Johann Friedrich Böttger | Friedrich von Huene | Friedrich List | Friedrich | Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters | Johann Friedrich Blumenbach | Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von Bülow | Friedrich Specht | Friedrich Schleiermacher | Friedrich Schlegel | Friedrich Karl Dörner | Friedrich Fröbel | Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué |
He studied philosophy and theology in Erlangen, Halle and Berlin, and as a student had renowned instructors that included Friedrich Schleiermacher, August Neander, G. W. F. Hegel, Philip Marheineke and Friedrich Tholuck.
In 1778 he accepted the professorship of philosophy at Halle, where his students included Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Serbian writer Dositej Obradović.
Wayne Proudfoot traces the roots of the notion of "religious experience" further back to the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who argued that religion is based on a feeling of the infinite.
The thesis of Faith of the Fatherless holds that famous believers—e.g., Blaise Pascal, Edmund Burke, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Barth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—had strong and loving fathers, whereas their atheistic counterparts—e.g., Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Sigmund Freud, Mao Zedong, and Adolf Hitler—all had fathers who were weak, unloving, or absent.