Wilhelm Windelband, “History and Natural Science”

“All scientific and scholarly work has the purpose of putting its special problems into a wider framework and resolving specific questions from the standpoint of more general perspectives. In this respect, there is no difference between philosophy and other disciplines. It is permissible for the other sciences to regard these more general perspectives and principles as given and established. This assumption is sufficiently reliable for the purposes of specialized research within the discipline in question. The essential feature of philosophy, however, is the following: its real object of investigation is actually these principles themselves.”