  Rickert engaged in a lifelong controversy with another prominent theorist of the human sciences, Wilhelm Dilthey (on the controversy see Makkreel/Luft 2010 and Makkreel 2010). Dilthey advocated the necessity to maintain a primarily content-related distinction to demarcate different ambits of science and he defended the legitimacy of the phrase Geisteswissenschaft. Dilthey rejected the argument that psychology could not be foundational for the human sciences because of its methodological similarity to the natural sciences. He considered the empirical (or, in his language, explanative) psychology of his time to be deeply flawed in that it imitated the methods of the natural sciences without paying attention to the specificity of the mental domain (Dilthey 2010, 119). Psychology, for Dilthey, should be conducted in a descriptive-analytical spirit, starting off from the overall meaningfulness and intelligibility of mental phenomena and working to describe the intricate connections or nexuses of significance characterizing human life (Dilthey 2010, 182). “Such a psychology will become the foundation of the human sciences, just as mathematics grounds the natural sciences” (Dilthey 2010, 165). This is because, for Dilthey, all the products of culture studied by the human sciences are nothing but “psychic life that has become objective, […] the products of active forces of a psychic nature and stable configurations formed from psychic elements and their laws” (Dilthey 2010, 171). For this reason, Dilthey contends that in the human sciences we can only understand, as opposed to explain, (Dilthey 2010, 119) cultural products (poems, artworks, juridical systems, etc.) to the extent that we reactivate the psychic life at their origin and relive (nacherleben) the life-experience that brought them about. If we had theoretical tools provided by a descriptive psychology to orient ourselves in the complexity of psychic objectifications, we would make significant advancements in the human sciences, too.