This chapter sets out the origins of the traditional historiography of early modern philosophy based on the dichotomy of empiricism and rationalism. After reconstructing the spread of the notions of empiricism and rationalism in Germany during the 1780s, we argue that the first outline of a history of metaphysics that displays the Kantian, epistemological, and classificatory biases can be found in Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s works from the early 1790s. Two early Kantian historians, Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann and Johann Gottlieb Buhle, turned Reinhold’s outline into fully fledged histories of early modern thought. Tennemann, who became a Kantian after reading Reinhold’s works, developed Reinhold’s historical sketches into a detailed, nuanced, and comprehensive account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy that revolves around the empiricism/rationalism distinction and displays the biases of the traditional historiography. Thus, in Germany, the decline of experimental philosophy and the eclipse of the experimental/speculative distinction went hand in hand with the rise of Kantianism and the development of a historiography based on the empiricism/rationalism distinction.