ABSTRACT
The very central point on which the author fully agree with Max Weber is the assertion that science, by its nature, has no application to the development and formulation of a Weltanschauung. There are only sciences in the plural. A Weltanschauung, by contrast, demands unity, and there is no division of labour in its acquisition. Science proceeds either by a formal–deductive method, based on implicit definitions whose cognitive value is tested, not by mathematics itself, but by the philosophy of mathematics. Of course, somehow or other a place has to be found for people like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, etc., since they, like all the world's great metaphysicians, neither understood their role to be that of policemen of sciences and formal epistemologists, nor that of specialist researchers; nor were they content simply to describe the Weltanschauung of others or to ‘understand’ it in a psychological or sociological sense.
