While philosophy even up until Newton described scientific effort, in the Early Modern Age philology was understood in very different ways: as universal knowledge of all that is conveyed by language, but also as technical analysis of written documents or as collection of knowledge in the form of an encyclopedia. This book attempts to illuminate the different aspects in more detail. In order to understand the significance and consequences of the “philologization” of our cultural history, one should first focus on the intellectual gesture of which philology bears witness, such as the development of “critical activity”.