 In distinguishing himself from his predecessors and peers, Hartmann carefully situated himself between various forms of idealism and exaggerated scientific realism. In contrast to his “logical idealist” teachers, German Idealists like Hegel, and phenomenological idealism, Hartmann thought that human thinking did not have easy access to its own workings, let alone those of the real world, and they certainly did not play the primary role in “constituting” the world. In contrast to naïve realists and positivists, he did not think that human perception and experience provided an unmediated adequate cognition of the world either. Deliberately positioning himself between these forms of idealism and naïve realism, Hartmann produced a “critical” epistemology that based itself on Kantian principles.