 While Dedekind was a great innovator, he was, of course, not alone in moving large parts of mathematics in a set-theoretic, infinitary, and structuralist direction. There was a whole group of  mathematicians who promoted a more “conceptual”  approach at the time, including several of his teachers in Göttingen. Within that group, Dirichlet has sometimes been picked out as the leader, or the “poet’s poet”, among others by being a big influence on Dedekind (Stein 1988, see also Merzbach 2018). As Hermann Minkowski, a major figure in this tradition himself, put it later (on the occasion of Dirichlet’s 100th birthday): he impressed on other mathematicians “to conquer the problems with a minimum amount of blind calculation, a maximum of clear-seeing thought” (quoted in Stein 1988).