Overall, the planned volume claims to make a significant contribution to modern intellectual
and cultural history, and contemporary philosophical discussions about the limits of philosophy
itself, by highlighting the idea of historicity as a fundamental challenge to metaphysics and
speculative thought. To so treat the concept of historicity with the necessary precision, the
focus is explicitly placed on the modernity in which not only the historical self-positioning of
humankind became a central theme, but also the course of philosophy itself was understood for
the first time as a coherent whole, viewed from the perspective of a historical logic of its
development. The contributions to this volume aim to illustrate how and to what extent the
systematic and direct access to the fundamental principles of the world, which had previously
characterized metaphysics, was increasingly abandoned – and how this access might be
regained today.
