ABSTRACT
With regard to the past, whether of events or ideas, most positions have their reasoning defenders. The author's decision-rule has been to side with those who do not see an end to intellectual debate, but who also do not think that all is chaos. He was first influenced by the writings of Wilhelm Dilthey who abandoned his earlier efforts to develop a philosophical synthesis of his own in favor of ordering the history of philosophy into a tripartite typology of basic philosophical premises: objective idealism, subjective idealism, and naturalism. Dilthey’s thesis was that all philosophies, or at least those of Western civilization, are reducible to these three types. More recently, the author has been influenced by the work of his Heidelberg colleague Wolfgang Schluchter, who is developing the idea that modern social theory falls into a Hegelian, a Kantian or a utilitarian mode, a rather striking parallel to Dilthey’s typology.
