 The core commitment of the Marburg school was to a philosophical method: “the transcendental method” (Natorp 1912a; Cohen 1883: §7–9; Cohen 1885: §12; Richardson 2006). The method, as Natorp describes it, comes in two steps. In the first step, the philosopher identifies some “fact” of culture. Theoretical philosophy begins with the “fact of science”; practical philosophy with the fact of “social order”; aesthetics with the fact of “artistic creation”. These facts are concrete, detailed, and “historically verifiable”. For instance, a theoretical philosopher begins by investigating the best scientific theories of her contemporaries. In this first step, the philosopher is like a fact collector, investigating the methods, important concepts and laws of that aspect of culture, including the historical development of that area of culture up to the present day. In the second step, however, the philosopher goes beyond fact-collecting to identifying those aspects of that area of culture that make its objective validity possible. As they put it, this involves identifying the “laws” or “form” of that area of culture. Their model here is Kant in the Prolegomena. As they read Kant, he began by identifying within the best scientific theory of his time—Newton’s—the fundamental laws, concepts, and methods (which are contained in Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science). The second step is showing how these laws, concepts, and methods are made possible by even more fundamental concepts and laws, which are contained in the Critique itself—laws which make objective validity possible.