 Transhistorical “problem contents” could include both real and ideal factors, and only meticulous investigation can determine what these are. Unfortunately, there is no a priori way to determine which is which. While this conception of “problems” is likely influenced by the southwestern Neo-Kantian Wilhelm Windelband (1958 [1893]), this distinction is actually widely applicable throughout Hartmann’s work. The same transhistorical-historical division applies to ethical values as well as to ontological and cognitive categories, though in different ways. In general, it allows Hartmann to take a middle path between the extremes of absolutism and relativism, whether in regard to epistemology, ethics, or to ontology. Investigation of phenomena in all of these areas leads us to see that some core factors are relatively stable, while other elements are culturally and historically variable. This conception of problems sits midway between the Anglo-analytic view that problems like “the mind-body problem” are simply “there” and have nothing historical about them, and a historicist view in which everything about the problem is historical, with no stable problematic factors at all.