I would like, finally, to recapitulate some of the most important distinguishing features of a philosophy of representation and of a philosophy of discrimination. The concepts “philosophy of representation” and “philosophy of discrimination” which I suggested as a characterization of the two differing attitudes of thought are perhaps still in need of a brief elucidation. “Philosophy of representation” is not intended as a description of an attitude of thought that orients itself naively according to given representations, but rather, of a philosophical and critical attitude to our representations of objects in the world. The Stoics already distinguished between representations that arise in us through sensory impressions — such representations are held to be “natural”; even animals possess them — and those to which we accord objectivity on the basis of their evidentiary character and which we symbolically “process” through generalization, comparison, etc. A philosophy of representation is a theory of the processing of mental representations. “Philosophy of discrimination” should not be understood as a post-structuralist procedure, that is, as though one could only understand an object in distinction from all other objects (in the sense of ever new and constantly changing objects). The fundamental axiom of a philosophy of discrimination is: something can be recognized only if, and only to the extent that, it has a distinguishable determinacy in itself. It thus expresses the (implicit) presupposition of this position, namely, that one must first be able to distinguish something for itself, before it can be distinguished from other things.