[213] now that cannot be understood in terms of qualities which follow by geometric necessity from the substance. They have characteristics which make this philosophically impossibole [sic.]. 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. QN: Last week you noted that the epistemologists i^bn the last century finally realized they were making certain ontological assumptions. You said there were similar assumptions the logical positivists^c made. I don't think, at least at that time, that you made clear what these assumptions were. PT: The question was: in which sense the epistemologists,^d i.e., actually the Neo-Kantian school^e 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^f, who was a fully developed Neo-Kantian^g 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 Kant^h 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