 Wilhelm Dilthey was a German philosopher who lived from 1833–1911. Dilthey is best known for the way he distinguished between the natural and human sciences. He defined the human sciences broadly to include both the humanities and the social sciences. Whereas the main task of the natural sciences as Dilthey found them was to arrive at law-based causal explanations, he projected the core task of the human sciences to be that of providing an understanding of the organizational structures and dynamic forces of human and historical life. It will be shown that this distinction is not so sharp as to rule out causal explanations in particular human sciences such as psychology, political theory, and economics; it mostly delimits the scope of explanations in these fields. Dilthey’s aim was to expand Kant’s primarily nature-oriented Critique of Pure Reason into a Critique of Historical Reason that can also do justice to the social and cultural dimensions of human experience. Understanding the meaning of human historical events requires being able to organize them in their proper contexts and to articulate the structural uniformities that can be found in this way. Dilthey’s reflections on the human sciences, historical contextualization, and hermeneutics influenced many subsequent thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Cassirer, Gadamer and Ricoeur. Recently, there has been some attention given to the ways in which Dilthey’s empirical approach to experience influenced Carnap in his early attempts to overcome metaphysics in favor of more analytical methods.