Abstract

The article adumbrates the opposition between Aristotelian “metaphysical” meaning of the concept of substance and its critical relational meaning, strongly accentuated by the Marburg Neokantian School. Th is opposition was creatively developed by the aforementioned School. It starts with a critique of Aristotle and his concept of the “substance as being in itself” and proceeds to demonstrate with the reference to the Kantian transcendentalism that concept of the “substance as function” is one of the a priori rules of synthetic cognition. In the Marburg School, the history of the development of these two meanings takes the form of a history of two opposing directions of the thought: dogmatic philosophy – leaning toward the former meaning, and critical – based on the latter