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ENGFER, Hans-Jurgen. Empirismus versus Rationalismus?: Kritik eines philosophie-historischen Schemas. Paderborn: Schoningh, 1996. 461 pp. Cloth, DM 68.00-This volume is dedicated to two philosophico-historical categories, whose origin dates back to Bacon's famous simile of the ants, the spiders, and the bees (see Novum Organum I, c. 95), 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 (p. 33).
Let us consider the question mark Engfer has placed after "empiricism against rationalism" in the title of his book. Engfer points out that the pair of concepts empiricism and rationalism constitutes a "scheme,"...