This article offers a critical reconstruction of the cultural approach in the philosophy of history and argues that, without clear conceptual and methodological distinctions, cultural analyses tend to conflate historical description, sociological explanation, and philosophical reflection. The central claim of the paper is that culture can and should be regarded as a fundamental level of analysis in the philosophy of history, but not as a single explanatory principle or a fixed historical essence. By providing precise definitions of key concepts such as culture, history, meaning, historical explanation, and interpretive horizon, the article traces the historical development of cultural approaches in the philosophy of history and critically examines both cultural essentialism and reductionist anti-cultural perspectives. Drawing on analytic philosophy of history and philosophical hermeneutics, the paper advances an alternative framework that conceives culture as a multilayered interpretive horizon. This framework preserves the possibility of historical critique while avoiding both metaphysical holism and relativistic arbitrariness, and thus offers a philosophically robust account of cultural meaning in history compatible with contemporary humanities scholarship.