Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) is a classic figure in the humanities and hermeneutic-historical thinking. The driving force behind his work was the conviction that neither traditional metaphysics nor the scientific way of thinking alone could adequately account for the human relationship to the world. And although the humanities were sharply distinguished from the natural sciences in his name, he assigned a central position to the concept of life, thereby linking biological and cultural processes closely together. Matthias Jung presents a thinker whose significance extends far beyond the foundation of the humanities. Contemporary debates on embodied cognition, the mind in the context of life, and naturalism find in Dilthey an impressive precursor.