 The history of the modern origins of hermeneutics includes distinctive contributions by Wilhelm Dilthey. Whereas Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is closely associated with German romanticism, Dilthey’s considerations may be grasped in connection with historicism. ‘Historicism’ refers to a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual movement that no longer treated “human nature, morality, and reason as absolute, eternal, and universal,” but sought, instead, to grasp these as “relative, changing and particular,” shaped by historical context (Beiser 2011, 1). Dilthey’s overall (though never completed) project was to establish a critique of historical reason that would secure independent epistemological foundations of research in the human sciences, that is, the sciences distinguished by their focus on historical experience (Grondin 1994, 84–90; Bambach 1995, 127–185; Makkreel 2015). In this, Dilthey’s concern is to defend the legitimacy of the human sciences against charges either that their legitimacy remains dependent on norms and methods of the natural sciences or, to his mind worse, that they lack the kind of legitimacy found in the natural sciences altogether.