During the years of WW I, Steiner devoted himself intensively to defending his anthroposophical framework against contemporary critics. The three monographs in this volume, \'Vom Menschenrätsel\' (1916), \'Von Seelenrätseln\' (1917) and \'Goethes Geistesart\' (1918)\', testify of these efforts. They attach particular importance to making anthroposophy methodologically clearer and to delimiting its research approach from the methodologies that define natural science and the humanities. Consequently, relations between this scientific paradigm and certain contemporary debates about research methodology are particularly visible in them. Furthermore, the text of 1917 contains the first written formulation of the idea of a threefold structure of the human organism, which is central to anthroposophy.