 Given that he takes the core of the critical project to consist in a quaestio juris—a concern with normativity—it seems surprising that throughout the 1880s Windelband insists that critical philosophy does not provide a “world-view”: the project of revealing the highest values of human life has nothing to do with “world-views”, he argues, because it does not provide a metaphysical account of the world and our place in it (1881: 140–141, 145). Questions about optimism or pessimism cannot be answered by means of “scientific” philosophy, since they depend on the idea that the world as a whole has a purpose. And claims about the ultimate purpose of the world arise only from an unscientific, subjective, and arbitrary projection of particular purposes onto the universe as such (1876: 231). Philosophy is a science, albeit a second-order formal science, and is thus barred from formulating a world-view that would be metaphysical in character.