Continuations and Developments

Abstract

The various views concerning the nature of philosophy discussed above cannot be sharply distinguished from one another since they have a number of features in common and touch each other at different points; they were merely presented as ‘ideal types’. We now turn to several views of the nature of philosophy that appeared in the course of philosophical thought after Kant which may be characterized as a continuation of pre- Kantian classical approaches as was the Kantian one. We do not wish to assert that the examples we shall cite from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are all to be regarded as a continuation of any one view of the nature of philosophy. On the contrary, more than in previous centuries we find in the views of later generations a kind of fusion of the different approaches to philosophy. But despite the fusion we find here and there we can detect a definite direction which clearly indicates the kinship between the modern or post-Kantian approach and that which preceded it.