endless quarrels associated with them / is the theory of knowledge, and furthermore, the positive task of the theory of knowledge is to solve the problems of the relations among cognition, its meaning and its object by inquiring into the essence of cognition. Among these, there is the problem of explicating the essential meaning of being a cognizable object or, what comes to the same thing, of being an object at all: of the meaning which is prescribed (for being an object at all) by the correlation a priori (or essential correlation) between cognition and being an object of cognition. And this naturally applies also to all basic forms of being an object which are predetermined by the nature of cognition. (To the ontological, the apophantic* as well as the metaphysical forms.) Precisely by solving these problems the theory of knowledge qualifies as the critique of cognition, more exactly, as the critique of natural cognition in all the sciences of a natural sort. It puts us, in other words, in a position to interpret in an accurate and definitive way the teachings of these sciences about what exists. For the confusions of the theory of knowledge into which we are led by natural (preepistemological) reflection on the possibility of cognition (on the possibility of cognition's reaching its object) involve not just false views about the essence of cognition, but also self?contradictory, and, therefore, fundamentally misleading interpretations of the being that is cognized in the sciences of the natural sort. So, one and the same science is interpreted in materialistic, spiritualistic, dualistic, psychomonistic, positivistic and many other ways, depending upon what interpretation is thought to be the necessary consequence of those pre?epistemological reflections. Only with epistemological reflection do we arrive at the distinction between / the sciences of a natural sort and philosophy. Epistemological reflection first brings to light that the sciences of a natural sort are not yet the ultimate science of being. We need a science of being in the absolute sense. This science, which we call metaphysics, grows out of a "critique" of natural cognition in the individual sciences. It is based on what is learned in the general critique of cognition about the essence of cognition and what it is to be an object of cognition of one basic type or other, i.e., in accordance with the different fundamental correlations between cognizing and being an object of cognition. If then we disregard any metaphysical purpose of the critique of cognition and confine ourselves purely to the task of clarifying the essence of cognition and of being an object of cognition, then this will be phenomenology of