ABSTRACT
Our treatment has shown that questions as to the ideal conditions of the possibility of knowledge in general, and of theoretical knowledge in particular, ultimately lead us back to certain laws, whose roots are to be found purely in the content of knowledge, or of the categorial concepts that it falls under, and which are so abstract that they contain no reference to knowledge as an act of a knowing subject. These laws (or the categorial concepts which enter into them) are what are to be understood as constituting the conditions of the possibility of theory in general, in the objectively ideal sense. For it is possible to raise questions as to the conditions of possibility, not only in regard to theoretical knowledge, as we have so far done, but also in regard to its content, i.e. we can raise them directly in regard to theory itself. We then understand by ‘theory’, let us again stress, a certain ideal content of possible knowledge, just as in the case of ‘truth’, ‘law’ etc. There is a single truth, which corresponds to the multitude of individual acts of knowledge having the same content, which is just their ideally identical content. In like manner, the ideally identical content of a theory corresponds to the multitude of individual knowledge-combinations, in each of which – whether occurring now or then, in these subject or in those – the same theory comes to be known. It is accordingly not made up of acts but of purely ideal elements, of truths, and that in purely ideal forms, those of ground and consequent.
