ABSTRACT
In the later nineteenth century the call for a move 'back to Kant' and the high priority given to the problem of knowledge were of special interest for the natural and human sciences in general and for intellectual history in particular. According to the received story, Kant had set the agenda for continental philosophy, while Hegel had set about resolving remaining questions through a hybrid dialectic joining the ideal and the real. The intellectualism of Collingwood's view of history appears in several works down to the posthumously published Idea of History - which is actually, it should be noted, a history of philosophy. Another Neo-Kantian drawn to intellectual history as a way of carrying on the critique of reason was Ernst Cassirer, in whose own systematic effort, the philosophy of symbolic forms, 'The critique of reason becomes the critique of culture'.
