ABSTRACT
A. Danto is unquestioningly convinced that "philosophy as such is architectonic, and imposes an external regimen upon its least systematic practitioners, so philosophers are systematic through the nature of their enterprise". In the physicalist hermeneutic mode, philosophy in its history appears as a phenomenon dependent upon some more basic reality: as a superstructural rationalization, for instance, masking a material power-base, as in Marxist entitative histories. And just as general history uses all the special sciences without itself being one, so also philosophic historiography presupposes both these sciences and the other philosophic tools and disciplines such as metaphysics or aesthetics, logic or rhetoric. The rise and development of conflicting forms of interpretation-theory are seen, not primarily in relation to the philosophic writings of individual philosophers, nor of particular philosophical movements such as pragmatism or phenomenology, but in relation to the historic cultural-cognitive frames of Modernity in its Enlightenment and Romantic modes.
