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now that cannot be understood in terms of qualities which follow by geometric necessity from the substance. They have characteristics which make this philosophically impossible. Now here you see the two levels of discussion. And one and the same concept in Spinoza^a produces these two levels of discussion.

And so we could go on in the whole history of philosophy, and I would say a distinction is possible, but not a clear distinction because in the reality of the life of the philosophers – and of their philosophy, which also has a life of its own – the ambiguity of his existence is manifest.

Question: Last week you noted that the epistemologists in the last century finally realized they were making certain ontological assumptions. You said there were similar assumptions the logical positivists made. I don't think, at least at that time, that you made clear what these assumptions were.

Answer (Paul Tillich)^d: The question was: in which sense the epistemologists, i.e., actually the Neo-Kantian school and all those who discussed the same problems with this school – how, in which sense, they made ontological presuppositions. The man who is important for the beginning of philosophy in the first half of this century is Nicolai Hartmann^g, who was a fully developed Neo-Kantian when he started. Out of this he tried to show – and I think very successfully, not only externally (this ended, actually, the importance of the Neo-Kantian school), but also logically, that in the way in which Kantⁱ speaks of time, space, the categories, consciousness generally, the birth of consciousness, the “thing-in-itself,” the problems of apperception, and all that belongs to the Neo-Kantian school, has presuppositions