ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the phenomena of culture and history became a great challenge in philosophy. The discovery of new cultures and other social structures, as well as the emergence of historism relativized our view on Western culture, kicking it of the podium as the natural way of being. The modern natural sciences have branched off quickly as the field that attempts to determine and explain the real world. Going back to the works of Kant was regarded as a possibility for developing a philosophy that could satisfy these requirements. Yet, going back to Kant meant going back to new circumstances. Dilthey expressed this with the phrase “Critique of historical reason,” which hints at the need for developing a foundation for historical sciences and humanities as Kant did for the mathematical sciences. But there was more to it. It meant finding a basic principle that holds true for all sciences, i.e. referring to the ascent of historism and cultural sciences, new forms of reason had to be reflected in the critique of reason, and you could not afford to focus only on the most abstract and general, namely the mathematical sciences. One possibility was to return to the point before reflective structures, to find the origin of the different forms of science – humanity and mathematics.
