Wilhelm Dilthey, a man of extraordinary erudition even by nineteenth-century standards, made significant contributions to the fields of philosophy, cultural history, literary theory, psychology, and aesthetics. He is often viewed as the founder of the German school of thought known as Geistesgeschichte (intellectual history; sometimes inaccurately translated as "history of ideas"), but in fact Dilthey based his scholarly career on a vehement critique of post-Hegelian notions of history. He believed that the various "philosophies of history" written in the wake of the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel were predicated on an essentially metaphysical concern for locating a single principle of historical development. This endeavor impressed him as a reductive activity whose roots could be found in the teleologically inspired universal histories of the medieval period. Instead of looking for what he felt was a nonexistent mainspring of history, Dilthey embarked on a lifelong enterprise that he called...