 Hartmann was committed to approaching the problem of cognition from the perspective of its embeddedness in a broader cognitive and ontological context. Human cognition is in a perpetual state of unrest, dynamically allowing us to get our bearings in an overstimulating environment, to orient ourselves in the world, and to pursue practical projects. It is an active and open process of coming to terms with an environing world in historical time, not an isolated and static epistemological exercise. In our unrest we come up against problems in need of solution. Hartmann was strongly influenced by Kant’s famous claim that experience presents problems that reason is unable to solve, such as the “antinomies” bearing on the origin of the cosmos and of freedom. This is a claim about the limitations of human reason, and more generally, a statement about the relation between thinking and being. Contrary to dogmatic metaphysics, Kant claimed that thinking does not have complete access to being. Our very consciousness that there are problems in reality—not just temporary, episodic problems but perennial, enduring ones—in fact demonstrates this limitation quite clearly. If we begin with the whole “phenomenon of cognition,” as Hartmann did in his groundbreaking epistemological work, and not merely with the narrower relation between subject and object, we see that it includes features such as “problem consciousness” and “cognitive progress.” These complex “facts,” he showed, presuppose that there is an ontological basis for what is cognized. The main point of Metaphysics of Cognition was that epistemological discussions always entail ontological assumptions about the nature of what exists. Determining the minimum set of these assumptions for an adequate account of cognitive phenomena was its task.