Abstract

This volume is dedicated to two philosophicohistorical categories, whose origin dates back to Bacon’s famous simile of the ants, the spiders, and the bees, and which are widely diffused as a consequence of Hegel’s reconstruction of the history of philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel began his exposition of philosophy in the modern age with Bacon’s empiricism and Descartes’s rationalism and he has been followed in this by virtually all historians of philosophy to the present day. Engfer, however, mentions Hegel only when he comes to discuss the position of Bacon.