 Anderson’s Hegelian diagnoses of the obsessions of modern philosophy and Cartesianism with epistemology are likely to elicit recognition and appreciation from many contemporary readers. Cartesianism in modern philosophy represented for Anderson an anti-classicist movement: an antipathy towards history and tradition. Modern philosophy searched within abstract rationality as the ground of human knowledge, rather than in concrete and many-sided culture. The whole modern era was characterised by this lack of concreteness (EMP, 195). 