 Second, although Windelband agrees that the historical development of philosophical ideas is partly driven by critique and self-improvement, he does not think of this process in terms of progress. Windelband probes the often unacknowledged presuppositions of our talk about progress. In “Pessimismus und Wissenschaft” (1876) Windelband argues that science cannot decide between historical optimism and historical pessimism (1876: 243). In “Kritische und genetische Methode” (1883) he gives a more detailed analysis of why this is the case. Historical change itself is not progress, he observes. In order to determine whether a given historical development is progressive, we need to be in possession of “a standard, the idea of a purpose, which determines the value of the change” (1883: 119). Windelband is wary of triumphalist narratives that identify the historical development of present-day values with progress. History is determined by contingent cultural factors and could have produced “delusions and follies … which we only take to be truths now because we are inescapably trapped in them” (1883: 121). Of progress we can only speak legitimately, if we are in possession of an absolute value that allows us to assess the historical development. At minimum, this means that the appeal to a progressive history of philosophy is of no help when it comes to the systematic task of uncovering the system of absolute values: progress cannot aid in revealing absolute values as it presupposes them.