Some Remarks on the Interpretative Categories of Early Modern Philosophy

Abstract

The paper considers the common strategy of interpreting Early Modern Philosophy   in terms of the following opposing categories: Rationalism and Empiricism.   Following Knud Haakonssen, it analyses origins and the criterion for this distinction   in a formation process of the so-called philosophical history of philosophy   in the nineteenth century. It emphasizes serious limitations of such interpretative   categories and suggests a possibility of the supplementary interpretation   of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy in terms of the Weberian   ideal types.