possible forms. But equally nonsensical at bottom is the expression "scientific philosophy," because philosophy is prior to all science, and can be so only because it is already, in an eminent sense, what "science" can be only in a derived sense. The alternatives, either a scientific or a world-view philosophy, are just as superficial as is a combination of both.
What Kant, on the contrary, means by dividing philosophy into the academic conception and the world conception coincides in a certain way with the difference already mentioned. "In a certain way," because the idea of metaphysics is not correspondingly grounded and developed in a positive manner, as the foundation itself is.
We now summarize this orientation in the history of the concept of world. "World" as a concept of the being of beings designates the wholeness of beings in the totality of their possibilities, a wholeness which is itself, however, essentially related to human existence, and human existence taken in its final goal. For preparing the following phenomenological clarification of the transcendental concept of world, and at the same time as a systematic summary of what was said, we can distinguish four concepts of world (cf. Being and Time, p. 64 f.):
1. An ontical concept: "world" is simply the term for what is extant itself together as a whole, for "nature ." This pre-philosophical, naive concept of world can thus also be called the ontic-natural concept.
2. An ontological (in a certain way) concept which is subordinate to the aforementioned concept. It is "world" as the region of nature, as the totality of what belongs to a nature as such.
3. There is a further ontical concept: "world" here means not nature (inorganic and organic) but means existing humans as existing; it is in this sense we speak of "the wide world," of a woman or man "of the world." This pre-philosophical concept of world is the ontic-existentiell (or human) concept, in contradistinction to the ontic-natural concept.
Anticipating, we can name the fourth the ontological concept of world that indicates, not human society in an ontical way, but indicates ontologically the metaphysical essence of Dasein as such with respect to its basic metaphysical constitution, i.e., transcendence.
The transcendental concept of world is evidently related, in its own way, to the other conceptions. On the other hand, none of the concepts mentioned, from 1 to 3, nor even their sum, exhausts the concept "world" as a constituent of transcendence.