The study investigates the evolution of modern philosophical history and the way it developed into a historical discipline in its own right in the period of transition from the Baroque to the Enlightenment and in the framework of scholarly discourse on historia litteraria. The conviction that philosophy is a product of the human mind dating back to ancient Greece is revealed as the fruit of a break with tradition by means of which the emergent Enlightenment set itself off from the Christian Aristotelianism of school philosophy and from the Platonic and hermetic speculations of the visionaries and pansophists.