 It is a commonplace of nineteenth-century German intellectual history that with the collapse of post-Kantian Idealism, philosophy ceded its claim of scientificity to the positive  sciences.[12]  The special sciences made rapid and startling progress, continually adding to the store of human knowledge. Philosophy, meanwhile, seemed to have lost its way, and many thinkers pinned their hopes for a rehabilitation of philosophy on a return to Kant. The Marburg School in particular interpreted this to mean that philosophy should orient itself with respect to the sciences, rather than strive—as German Idealism had—to forge a scientific system of its own, independent from the results of the positive sciences: only in this attenuated sense would philosophy be “scientific”. For all that, Natorp by no means conceived philosophy as a humble handmaiden. On the contrary, its task is to discover and establish the highest principle(s) of rational understanding, and thereby the principles not only of the sciences, but also of ethics and aesthetics, in short, of all the domains of human culture (cf. Cohen 1902: 443). It must however take science as its primary object of inquiry because science represents the paradigm of knowing (Erkenntnis). Only a critique of science can therefore elucidate rationality or, as the Marburgers call it, the “logic” of thinking, for it is only in science that we can most reliably witness thinking at work, successfully achieving knowledge. Thus the question of the “concept of science” becomes “the chief question of logic and the foundational question of philosophy” (Cohen 1902: 445). The Marburgers identify the unifying principle of science and ethics in  particular[13]  as the concept of law (Gesetz), and, as Cohen puts it, “it is the business of logic to determine the meaning of law, or rather, the meanings of law” (Cohen 1902: 445).