Neo-Kantianism

The paper discusses Arvi Grotenfelt's, professor of philosophy in Helsinki 1905 – 29, reading of Heinrich Rickert's philosophy of history. Rickert was one of the key figures of the so-called south-west German neo-Kantianism. In the center of attention of the south- west neo-Kantians was the topic that Immanuel Kant himself had omitted: how to philosophically establish the humanities and the social sciences and separate them from the natural sciences? Rickert's philosophy of history was essentially an attempt to ground the historical (...) knowledge in a strictly transcendental philosophy in the Kantian sense. His argumentation relied on his concept of value. Grotenfelt did not share Rickert's definition of values. According to his view, the fundamental foundation of our judgements of value is beyond scientific reasoning. I will also argue that Grotenfelt's standpoint has a general affinity to Wilhelm Dilthey's philosophy of world view. (shrink)

Carnaps Denken wurde während seines Studiums und der Arbeit an seiner Dissertation von Neukatianischen Motiven beeinflusst, von denen er sich nach seiner Habilitation in Wien (1926) zunehmend distanzierte. Er besuchte in Freiburg bei Heinrich Rickert (1911/1912) und in Jena (1913/14) bei Bruno Bauch Lehrveranstaltungen zur Philosophie. Außerdem besuchte er in Freiburg bei Jonas Cohn Lehrveranstaltungen zur experimentellen Psychologie. Bei Bauch reichte er 1920 eine Arbeit mit dem Titel Welche philosophische Bedeutung hat das Problem der „Grundlegung der Geometrie“ für die Lehramtsprüfung (...) und 1921 seine darauf aufbauende Dissertation Der Raum. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre ein. Rickert war das Haupt der von Wilhelm Windelband begründeten Südwestdeutschen Schule des Neukantianismus, zu der auch Cohn und Bauch gezählt werden. Bauch war jedoch auch von der von Hermann Cohen begründeten Marburger Schule des Neukantianismus, deren herausragenste Vertreter Paul Natorp und Ernst Cassirer sind, beeinflusst. Vor allem Natorps Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften (1910a) und Cassirers Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (1910) beeinflussten Carnaps Verständnis der methodischen Grundlagen der Mathematik und der Physik (Richardson 1998, 115-117, 138-139; Mormann 2000, 44-46). In persönlichem Kontakt war Carnap seit seinem Umzug nach Buchenbach Anfang der 1920er Jahre auch mit dem Rickert-Schüler Broder Christiansen. (shrink)

Intuition and Knowledge in Nicolai Hartmann (1911-1926). On the Premises of Critical Ontology. The author considers Nicolai Hartmann’s main points on the relationship between intuition and knowledge in his early and middle works (1911-1926). The author first shows how Hartmann’s critical ontology emerged as a reaction to the approach of the logical idealism of the Marburg School, against which Hartmann defends the existence of an irrational dimension of knowledge that legitimizes a minimum of metaphysics even in the gnoseological sphere. The (...) author then focuses on the way in which Hartmann interprets the relationship between intuition and givenness, apriority, status of a priori principles, and understanding. Hartmann argues that intuition is not exclusively the same as empirical intuition, and that the problem of knowledge should no longer be considered in terms of the distinction between sensibility and understanding, but through the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. (shrink)

WILHELM WINDELBAND’S STANDPOINT: FORSCHUNGSGRUNDLAGEN AND PRÄLUDIEN. The author discusses two recent important books on Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915). Firstly, the author evaluates "Forschungsgrundlagen" Wilhelm Windelband, which provides essential primarily unpublished documents regarding the philosopher’s biography, along with an extensive selection of his correspondence. Secondly, the author presents a richly edited new edition of Windelband’s main work, the "Präludien", which has not been available in the German publishing world for a century. The resulting picture stimulates a comprehensive philosophical reappraisal of the founder (...) of the Baden School from both a historiographical and a theoretical perspective. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This paper revisits debates on a tension in Cassirer's philosophy of culture. On the one hand, Cassirer describes a plurality of symbolic forms and claims that each needs to be assessed by its own internal standards of validity. On the other hand, he ranks the symbolic forms in terms of a developmental hierarchy and states that one form, mathematical natural science, constitutes the highest achievement of culture. In my paper, I do not seek to resolve this tension. Rather, I aim (...) to arrive at a better understanding of how it arises, and of the different options that it presents for understanding the development of culture. I discuss three recent attempts at resolving the tension, put forward by Sebastian Luft, Samatha Matherne, and Simon Truwant, respectively. Based on a reconstruction of Cassirer's system of symbolic forms that centralizes the concept of function, I show that the most promising of these attempts, formulated by Truwant, is not successful. I then turn to Cassirer's philosophy of the cultural sciences, the implications of which for the present problem have not yet been sufficiently explored. I argue that in this context, Cassirer develops the contours of an alternative to the function-based view of cultural development. I conclude that this alternative does not resolve the tension either, but that it allows for a reconceptualization of the teleology of culture as open. (shrink)

Performativity plays a significant role avant la lettre in Classical German Philosophy. It is, among other things, a central component of original interpretations of the Absolute, the Subject, and Knowledge. Since the 2010s, there has been an increasing number of studies examining the performative in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schliermacher, and Schlegel. This anthology picks up on this development. Through interdisciplinary contributions, performativity within Classical German Philosophy is explained and discussed, highlighting the hermeneutic and systematic insights gained (...) from performative interpretations. [In German: Performativität spielt avant la lettre in der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie eine bedeutende Rolle. Sie ist u.a. ein zentraler Bestandteil originärer Interpretationen des Absoluten, des Subjekts oder auch des Wissens. Seit den 2010er Jahren mehren sich daher Untersuchungen, die dem Performativen bei Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schliermacher, und Schlegel. Dieser Sammelband greift diese Entwicklung auf. Anhand interdisziplinärer Beiträge wird Performativität innerhalb der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie erläutert und diskutiert. Dabei wird der hermeneutische und systematische Ertrag performativer Interpretationen dargestellt.]. (shrink)

Der Beitrag untersucht den Zusammenhang von Kritizismus (qua Heterologie) und Kritischer Theorie (qua Dialektik) anhand der Konstellation Rickert-Adorno. Heterologie und Dialektik werden von der Forschung bislang als gegensätzliche Methodenkonzepte erachtet. Dagegen soll gezeigt werden, dass Adorno diesen Gegensatz gezielt infrage stellen und sich auf das heterologische Denkprinzip berufen muss, um die dialektische Tradition zu kritisieren. Die These lautet: Bei Adorno bildet Heterologie den Sinnhorizont der dialektischen Negation. Sonst wäre die negative Dialektik eine positive Dialektik – die Kritische eine traditionelle Theorie (...) geblieben. (shrink)

El libro ilustra un caso de migración de ideas a través de un análisis contextual e histórico-filosófico que introduce al lector en la traducción de la tesis doctoral del filósofo japonés Nakajima Rikizo (1858-1918), La doctrina kantiana de la cosa en sí (1889), defendida en la Universidad de Yale. En el estudio introductorio se examina la aportación del pensador a la luz de la querella sobre la cosa en sí de Kant y esta se enmarca en la corriente neokantiana del (...) siglo XIX, extrayéndose, de ahí, consecuencias para situar el papel de la disertación en el interior de la recepción del idealismo alemán y el neokantismo en la historia de la modernidad filosófica en Japón a partir de la época Meiji (1868). En la tarea de la edición literaria que acompaña a la traducción, el lector encontrará referenciadas de manera sistemática las muchas fuentes que cita Nakajima en su tesis doctoral, aunque, como signo de su tiempo, en el original lo haga sin una convención coherente y, en ocasiones, sin detalles suficientes. Así pues, al aportar al lector acceso a las referencias a los libros que manejó el filósofo, se contribuye a que el texto tenga, además, un interés histórico que se suma al eminentemente filosófico, con el objetivo de impulsar y potenciar estudios sobre la red de interacciones filosóficas que atraviesan el escrito del autor japonés. Por último, el libro se suma a las publicaciones que, en torno a la obra de Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), ganan relevancia filosófica en un momento en el que se está a las puertas de la celebración del 300 aniversario de su nacimiento. (shrink)

After two centuries, the Diltheyan idea of the incommensurability of the natural and social sciences remains hegemonic. Alternative visions have since been overlooked; in this regard, the Baden neo-Kantian school showed that any divergence concerns implied method and not the phenomenal object of studies. W. Windelband coined the terms “nomological” and “idiographic” to underline how each discipline can be explained as a science of both law and events. To begin, I will show how complex thinking can expand and institute a (...) general integrative frame that overcomes the assumed incommensurability. By “complex,” I mean an anti-reductionist approach to understanding and a consequent ability to reveal the phenomenal world in terms of nested self-organized systems. Social and natural systems are persistent coalescences of individual entities showing series of interduality such as unicity and multiplicity, top-down conservation and bottom-up inno- vation, constraint of law and freedom of agencies. The two instances are maintained together by the rejection of abstracted and isolated concepts and the embrace of a general principle of indeterminacy resolving the apparent contradiction within the parallelization of the extremes as two different moments of analyses rooted in the social and natural classical methods. This paper considers both a) the Positivist attempt in the XIX century to approach the study of social phenomena in terms of law and b) the emergence of a general social science embracing the principle of acasuality, adapted from the study of the subatomic phenomenal world in quantum theory. Finally, this paper sketches how complex methodology can address historical and social studies with system theory in order to overcome classical dualities such as determinism vs. freedom, social vs. individual, and top down conservation vs. bottom up innovation in the form of an integrative parallelization. (shrink)

In his early writings, Rădulescu-Motru acknowledged as a valuable gain the fact that psychology had emancipated itself from the tutelage of metaphysics. However, he believed that this progress could not lead to a scientific psychology unless its outcomes were integrated into the broader scientific understanding of nature. In the following, I will discuss Rădulescu-Motru’s ideas concerning the founding of psychology as a natural science. His project essentially involves three directions: (1) conceptual reconsideration, (2) uniformization, and (3) regulation of the soul. (...) I will also show that throughout this process, Rădulescu-Motru remained committed to methodological naturalism. (shrink)

The Latin American philosopher Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla published the first study of Kant's concept of nothingness in 1965. This translation of Mayz Vallenilla's ground-breaking work makes it available in English for the first time. -/- Mayz Vallenilla's interpretation is deeply informed by Heidegger's reading of Kant, against the background of the early 20th century neo-Kantian tradition. He offers a detailed interpretation and critique of “nothing” as it appears in the Amphiboly chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason and presents an (...) analysis of Kant's Table of Nothing which understands temporality as the horizon of all possible cognition, including cognition of real nothings. -/- Accompanied by translator's notes and a glossary, Addison Ellis' translation includes extensive commentary and an introduction providing historical context and references to the original sources in German. He preserves key terminology and phrasing from the original text and allows an often-neglected connection to be made between the Kantian tradition in Latin America and the tradition in the Anglophone world. (shrink)

IntroductionThis paper’s argument can be stated simply: first, the primary unacknowledged cause of modern warfare (that is, since the Great War of 1914–18) is neither “nationalism” nor “imperialism” (to name two popular bogeymen) but modern rationality itself, specifically the epistemological revolution embodied in the philosophy of the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804); second, the current Ukraine War is a case in point, one that interacts with contemporary transformations in Western culture (especially the abolishment of a sense of the objective reality (...) and meaning of male and female sexual differentiation) in ways that reveal the current Russia–Ukraine War as reprising—if it does not merely continue—the ideational conflict at the heart of the Great War, a conflict that emerges for the reasons set forth as the Ur-Krieg, or “source war,” of the historical era we inhabit. In making this argument, this paper will take its inspiration from the writings of the little-known Russian philosopher Vladimir Ern (1882–1917), and for this reason, we begin in a public lecture hall in Moscow in 1914. (shrink)

Kierkegaard, like Plato, though using different methods and conclusions, sought to ground knowledge in the ineffability of subjectivity. For Plato, knowledge comes subjectively (internally); for Kierkegaard, it comes by God's grace through faith. Socrates becomes the facilitator for the slave in the /Meno/, as does God for the man of faith. Again, Kierkegaard is also concerned with passion. "...the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion; a mediocre fellow" (p. (...) 37). The paradox is necessitated by the metaphysical nature of the inquiry. Only knowledge through faith can approach the paradox since it is by definition beyond our knowledge. Passion must accompany the leap of faith, since knowledge acquisition for the man of faith is guided by God. (shrink)

This chapter is about Grete Hermann, a philosopher-mathematician who productively and mutually beneficially interacted with the founders of quantum mechanics in the early period of that theory's elaboration. Hermann was a neo-Kantian philosopher. At the heart of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy lay the question of the conditions under which we can be said to know something objectively, a question Hermann found to be particularly pressing in quantum mechanics. Hermann's own approach to Neo-Kantianism was Neo-Friesian. Jakob Friedrich Fries, like Kant, had (...) understood critical philosophy to be an essentially epistemic project. Fries departed from Kant in his account of the elements involved in our cognition. In this chapter it is discussed how, beginning from a neo-Friesian understanding of critical philosophy, Hermann is led to conclude that quantum mechanics shows us that physical knowledge is fundamentally split; that the objects of quantum mechanics are only objects from a particular perspective and in the context of a particular physical interaction. It will be seen how Hermann's solution to the problem of objectivity in quantum mechanics is a natural one from a neo-Friesian point of view, even though it disagrees with those offered by more orthodox versions of Kantian doctrine. (shrink)

A central topic in Cohen’s Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls is the artistic representation of the human figure; in Cohen’s reflections on this topic, the nude has a fundamental importance. The first aim of this paper is to examine Cohen’s theses on the role of the nude in figurative arts, as well as his comments about sculptural and pictorial works representing nude figures. This will bring us to take into consideration Cohen’s judgement about eroticism in art. Some brief considerations about the (...) nude in contemporary art, and above all in photography, will be expressed in order to evaluate the topicality of Cohen’s aesthetics concerning this theme. These considerations, however, will make it necessary to rethink Cohen’s judgement regarding eroticism in art. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the following two related claims. First, the science of phoronomy from Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science is grounded in the duplication of space. Second, this duplication is made possible through the self-localization of the subject, as Kant shows in the "Gegnden-Schrift". The thesis of this paper is that the self-localization transforms space into an object that can be cinematically moved and that this action sets the ground for a science of phoronomy, which presupposes (...) the existence of at least two spaces. In the end, the other endpoint of the Kantian determination of space is discussed, namely space understood as an idea of reason. (shrink)

This paper deals with Natorp’s version of the Marburg mathematical philosophy of science characterized by the following three features: The core of Natorp’s mathematical philosophy of science is contained in his “knowledge equation” that may be considered as a mathematical model of the “transcendental method” conceived by Natorp as the essence of the Marburg Neo-Kantianism. For Natorp, the object of knowledge was an infinite task. This can be elucidated in two different ways: Carnap, in the Aufbau, contended that this endeavor (...) can be divided into two distinct parts, namely, a finite “constitution” of the object of knowledge and an infinite incompletable empirical description. In contrast, and more in the original spirit of Cohen and Natorp, the physicist and philosopher Margenau in The Nature of Physical Reality (Margenau. 1950) conceived the infinity of this “Aufgabe” as an infinite dialectical process, in which relative “data” and “conceptual constructs” determine each other. This dialectical process eliminates the dichotomy between Anschauung and Begriff that distinguished the Marburg Neo-Kantianism from Kantian orthodoxy, namely, the abandonment of the difference between intuition and concept. Finally, the paper deals with the non-Archimedean geometrical systems that played a central role in Natorp’s defence of Cohen’s “infinitesimal” metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper argues that in both Kant and Heidegger the relation between thought and the world is possible only by means of the transcendental mediation of time. Where is the difference, then, between Kant’s and Heidegger’s temporal ontology? Whereas for Kant the schema is a “product of the imagination”, and thus a product of a transcendental faculty of the subject, for Heidegger the three temporal ecstases of transcendence are simply a neutral, structural articulation of the relation between Dasein and world. (...) They are not a product of subjectivity – least of all can they be brought back to the transcendental constitution of a consciousness. (shrink)

Despite remarkable efforts, it remains notoriously difficult to equip quantum theory with a coherent ontology. Hence, Healey (2017, 12) has recently suggested that ‘‘quantum theory has no physical ontology and states no facts about physical objects or events’’, and Fuchs et al. (2014, 752) similarly hold that ‘‘quantum mechanics itself does not deal directly with the objective world’’. While intriguing, these positions either raise the question of how talk of ‘physical reality’ can even remain meaningful, or they must ultimately embrace (...) a hidden variables-view, in tension with their original project. I here offer a neo-Kantian alternative. In particular, I will show how constitutive elements in the sense of Reichenbach (1920) and Friedman (1999, 2001) can be identified within quantum theory, through considerations of symmetries that allow the constitution of a ‘quantum reality’, without invoking any notion of a radically mind-independent reality. The resulting conception will inherit elements from pragmatist and ‘QBist’ approaches, but also differ from them in crucial respects. Furthermore, going beyond the Friedmanian program, I will show how non-fundamental and approximate symmetries can be relevant for identifying constitutive principles. (shrink)

Le travail de Kurt Walter Zeidler n’est pas connu en France, mais il représente aujourd’hui la tentative la plus ambitieuse et la plus aboutie pour interpréter la philosophie critique à partir de son double héritage, postkantien et néokantien. Comme l’indiquent ici un grand nombre de ses collègues et de ses disciples, son œuvre très fournie part du constat que l’idéalisme transcendantal n’est pas vraiment parvenu à fonder la synthèse de la raison et de la réalité et à résorber le divorce (...) que le nominalisme a introduit entre le logos et le monde quand il a érigé le sujet en instance jugeante détachée de tout (p. 18, 574). Kant a fait le premier pas pour émanciper la logique du primat de la forme judicative (p. 67). Mais ni son contextualisme temporel, qui rapporte tout ce qui est su à la forme du temps (p. 345), ni les efforts de son continuateur Cohen pour fonder l’idéalisme critique sur un dépassement du psychologisme n’ont réussi à réconcilier la raison avec la réalité ou à rétablir son unité (p. 205). (shrink)

This paper defends the idea that Cassirer's methodology is idealistic in regard to validity claims and the structuralist views he holds and at the same time empiric in regard to the facts and genealogy of culture. This perspective is best to be unfolded along Cassirer's model of representation. The author does so by showing that Cassirer's triad of symbolic articulation (expressive, presentational, significative) and the triad of symbolic development (mimetic, analogical, symbolic) form a coherent and exhaustive theory of symbolic formation. (...) In order to defend this view, two main objections from the secondary literature against the consistency of this essential theory piece of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms have to be rejected. (shrink)

Book Review of Kenneth Westphal's Kant’s Critical Epistemology: Why Epistemology Must Consider Judgment First.

Hermann von Helmholtz hat als Naturforscher sowohl die Physik als auch die Physiologie um eine beeindruckende Anzahl grundlegender Erkenntnisse bereichert, ihr heutiges Selbstverständnis entscheidend mitgeprägt, ihre Verfahren auf neue Gegenstandsbereiche angewendet und war führend an ihrem institutionellen Ausbau zu Laborwissenschaften beteiligt.

I present the first systematic account in the literature of a Husserlian response to Natorp’s critique of Husserl’s account of the pre-givenness of both the absolute stream of lived-experience and its essencesEssences to reflectionReflections. My response is presented within the broader context of what I argue is Heidegger’s misappropriation of Natorp’s critique of the phenomenological limits of reflectionReflections in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenologyTranscendental phenomenology and the misguided French attempt to address Heidegger’s critique by introducing the dialectical notion of “pre-reflectivePre-reflective” consciousness to (...) phenomenology. My Husserlian response shows that Husserl’s account of reflectionReflections in Ideas I is able to rebut Natorp’s critical claims that transcendental phenomenologyTranscendental phenomenology cannot access the streaming of the stream of lived-experience without “stilling” its flow and that a gap in Husserl’s account of the transformation of the natural phenomenonPhenomenon of reflectionReflections into transcendental reflectionReflections provides justification for Natorp’s criticism of the ambiguity of Husserl’s account in Ideas I of the givennessGivennesses of the essenceEssences of lived-experience investigated by transcendental phenomenologyTranscendental phenomenology. (shrink)

Neo-Kantianism emerged over the course of the 1860s and it occupied a leading position in the German universities from the 1870s until the First World War. Demands for getting "back to Kant" had become common since the early 1860s, and these demands were discussed in the meetings of the Philosophical Society of Berlin (Philosophische Gesellschaft zu Berlin; PGB), which was the international organization of Hegelians. In this paper I address some reactions among the PGB members to the 1860s Kant revival. (...) The journal "Der Gedanke", the organ of the PGB, reported closely how Kant returned to the spotlight of German philosophy. The reactions of the PGB members to the Kant revival was not only critical. Over the course of the 1860s the interest on Kant among the members grew little by little. (shrink)

This chapter provides a brief history of Kantianism in Russia since the late eighteenth century and identifies the main themes of Kantianism in Russia. It considers the reasons for the uneven and intermittent spread of Kantianism, the main motives behind the fierce resistance to Kantianism within the framework of certain trends of Orthodox thought, and the ways in which this philosophical polemic was reflected in the Russian literature. The achievements of Russian Kantianism are analyzed with attention to both its undeniable (...) merits and its weaknesses and inconsistencies. In addition, the scope and scale of Russian Kantianism will be compared with Schellingism and Hegelianism in Russia. On the basis of this comparison, I will argue against the stereotype that Russian philosophy is resistant to Kant. (shrink)

My paper will analyze Cassirer’s logic of the cultural sciences as it developed in close engagement with work on logic, psychology, biology, and linguistics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The paper focuses on Chajim Steinthal, who sees the “expressive form” of language as a natural function of human engagement with the environment, developing independently of logic. When read in the context of his engagement with Steinthal, the biologist Uexküll, and the neuroscientist Kurt Goldstein, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (...) reimagines the role of logic and language in the construction of the cultural world. This provides a reading of what Cassirer means by the logic of the cultural sciences, and what he means by culture itself. My reading highlights the tension, which I argue stems from Steinthal’s earlier work, between the assertion that phenomena including linguistic expression, living beings, and consciousness develop independently of a unifying logic, and Cassirer’s assertion that we live in a common, objective human world. (shrink)

One of the most often explored, repeatedly interpreted, and recognized again and again as a valuable achievement of Kant’s philosophy, is his transcendental philosophy, a new methodological approach that – as Kant believed – will allow philosophy (metaphysics) to enter upon a secure path of science. In this paper, I explore Nicolai Hartmann’s reinterpretation and development of this methodology in both the historical and systematic context of his thought. First, I will deal with the Neo-Kantian’s understanding of the transcendental method (...) as a starting point of Hartmann’s own understanding of it. Then I will analyze in detail his only paper devoted entirely to the problem of the method, (Hartmann, 1912), to present how he understands the necessary development of this methodology. I will claim that despite the fact that Hartmann – following Kant – never denied that the real essence of philosophy is the transcendental method, he tried to show that this methodus philosophandi cannot be reduced to the Neo-Kantian’s understanding of it. He argued that the core of all true philosophical and scientific research is the transcendental method, but only insofar as it is accompanied by two other methods that are needed to complete it: descriptive and dialectical method. I will close by presenting the relations between these three methods. (shrink)

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg war einer der akademischen Lehrer Hermann Cohens und die Debatte zwischen Trendelenburg und Kuno Fischer über die Interpretation der transzendentalen Ästhetik gilt gemeinhin als Anlass für Cohens Kantstudien und seine Abwendung von der Völkerpsychologie und damit als Geburtsstunde des Marburger Neukantianismus. Über die nähere persönliche Beziehung Cohens zu Trendelenburg ist allerdings wenig bekannt und auch die Frage, ob und inwiefern Cohen als „Schüler“ Trendelenburgs bezeichnet werden kann ist nicht eindeutig zu beantworten, zumindest scheint Cohens Verhältnis zu Trendelenburg (...) eher distanziert gewesen zu sein und es ist nicht klar, ob nicht Cohens Trendelenburg gegenüber teilweise auch kritische Haltung in seiner Stellungnahme zur Kontroverse zwischen Trendelenburg und Fischer auch zum Scheitern seiner Habilitationsversuche in Berlin beigetragen hat. Andererseits wurde darauf hingewiesen, dass sich Cohen durch die von Trendelenburg aufgeworfene Frage, ob Kant die ausschließliche Subjektivität von Raum und Zeit bewiesen habe, vor das für seine Philosophie und Kantkritik zentrale Problem einer nicht bloß „subjektiven“ Begründung des Idealismus gestellt sah und diesbezüglich (in Abgrenzung von Kuno Fischer und Friedrich Albert Lange) im wesentlichen Trendelenburgs Absicht, „das Ideale im Realen zu befestigen“, weiterverfolgte (Klaus Christian Köhnke). Kurt Walter Zeidler hat diese These vor kurzem insofern zugespitzt, als er zu dem Schluss kommt, dass Cohen „seine eigene systematische Position – und damit die Grunddoktrin der Marburger Schule – an dem Leitfaden einer Kantinterpretation entwickelt, die Trendelenburgs latenten Platonismus, seine Lehre von der ursprünglichen Tätigkeit und konstruktiven Bewegung sowie den wissenschaftstheoretischen Ansatz seiner Logischen Untersuchungen gleichsam als Hebel einsetzt, um Kants Lehre von allen Anmutungen eines empirischen oder subjektiven Idealismus zu befreien.“ Diese These wird mit Blick auf Cohens frühe Kant- und Platon-Interpretation überprüft und der historische und biographische Kontext von Cohens Berliner Studienzeit skizziert. (shrink)

Kant’s investigations into so‐called a priori judgments of pure mathematics in the Critique of Pure Reason (KrV) are mainly confined to geometry and arithmetic both of which are grounded on our pure forms of intuition, space, and time. Nevertheless, as regards notions such as irrational numbers and continuous magnitudes, such a restricted account is crucially problematic. I argue that algebra can play a transcendental role with respect to the two pure intuitive sciences, arithmetic and geometry, as the condition of their (...) possibility. It follows that Kant’s schematism of the concept of magnitude ought to be quantitatively represented in algebraic formulas in general, and also undergo several modifications in order to suit continuities. (shrink)

In 1931, Evgeny Pashukanis, the distinguished Soviet jurist, author of “The General Theory of Law and Marxism”, following an invitation to celebrate the centenary of Hegel’s death, published an assay entitled “Hegel, the State and Law” (Гегель. Государство и право) aimed to demistify, through a brief retrospective of Hegelian’s philosophy, its specific use, something achieved through the bourgeois ideology which, at some point in history, abandoned Kantism and its followers to embrace Neo-Hegelianism as a philosophy of domination and social control. (...) In this unpublished text, Pashukanis reflects, from a Marxist and Leninist point of view, on the ability to use Hegel as a bourgeois defense tool, when a particular society, specifically the one from the 1920s to the 1930s, began to be affected by the fear of communism and by the crises that endanger its very survival. From this angle, the capitalist interest - following Pashukanisian interpretation of Hegel - will only develop in the terms of a scientific elimination of all those subversive potentials that the economic crisis is destined to produce, thus reformulating the notions of State and Law which, in between obedience, discipline and defense of the homeland, come to assert the official recognition of the inexorably crushed proletariat in a condition in which all relations of production and social reproduction are transferred to the realm of exploitation, as its definitive subsumption to capital. (shrink)

Some commentators on Hermann Cohen have remarked on what they take to be a puzzle about the origins of his mature anti-psychologism. When Cohen was young, he studied a kind of psychology, the Völkerpsychologie of Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, and wrote apparently psycholgistic accounts of knowledge almost up until the moment he first articulated his anti-psychologistic neo-Kantianism. To be sure, Cohen's mature anti psycholgism does constitute a rejection of certain central commitments of Völkerpsychologie. However, the relation between Völkerpsychologie and (...) Cohen's mature anti-psychologism is not one of straightforward opposition. This paper argues that Cohen had significantly less distance to travel than it appears to get from his early Völkerpsychologie to his mature anti-psychologism. In particular, this paper argues that Cohen always had an anti-psychologistic account of knowledge, even during the period when he was studying Völkerpsychologie, and further, that key features of his Völkerpsychologie partly shaped his mature account of knowledge. Finally, the paper identifies how Cohen’s views did change over the transition from his völkerpsychological period to his later anti-psychologism. It thus identifies what changes in Cohen’s views do need to be explained. (shrink)

Recent work in the history of philosophy of science details the Kantianism of philosophers often thought opposed to one another, e.g., Hans Reichenbach, C.I. Lewis, Rudolf Carnap, and Thomas Kuhn. Historians of philosophy of science in the last two decades have been particularly interested in the Kantianism of Reichenbach, Carnap, and Kuhn, and more recently, of Lewis. While recent historical work focuses on recovering the threatened-to-be-forgotten Kantian themes of early twentieth-century philosophy of science, we should not elide the differences between (...) the Kantian strands running throughout this work. In this paper, I disentangle a few of these strands in the work of Reichenbach and Lewis focusing especially on their theories of relativized, constitutive a priori principles in empirical knowledge. In particular, I highlight three related differences between Reichenbach and Lewis concerning their motivations in analyzing scientific knowledge and scientific practice, their differing conceptions of constitutivity, and their relativization of constitutive a priori principles. In light of these differences, I argue Lewis’s Kantianism is more similar to Kuhn’s Kantianism than Reichenbach’s, and so might be of more contemporary relevance to social and practice-based approaches to the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Cohen’s “Logic of Pure Knowledge” marks a transformation of transcendental philosophy through its new and radical interpretation of pure thinking. For Cohen, thought is in its essence creative and needs no external elements in order to produce knowledge. This study is an attempt to reconstruct the way in which Cohen understands how thinking can create its pure content from nothing. My thesis is that Kant’s distinction between the determinable and the determining I offers the theoretical context in which the productivity (...) of thinking in Cohen’s system can be understood. Thinking creates its pure content by questioning the nothing that stands before it. (shrink)

Diese Festschrift umfasst 22 nationale und internationale Beiträge zu Ehren des Jubilars, darunter von solch renommierten Autoren wie Werner Flach, Christian Krijnen, Ulrich Blau, Erhard Oeser, Hans-Dieter Klein, um nur diese zu nennen. – Sie enthält ferner eine Stellungnahme von K. W. Zeidler, wo dieser im Dialog mit den Beiträgern jeweilige kritische Punkte seiner Schlusslogischen Letztbegründung klar zu stellen sich bemüht. – Ein Siglen- und Abkürzungsverzeichnis sowie eine Bibliographie des Jubilars runden die Ausgabe ab. Kurt Walter Zeidler darf als einer (...) jener selten gewordenen Denker gelten, die in unermüdlichem Reflexionseinsatz seit Jahrzehnten sich für die seit längerem in Gefahr geratene klassische Philosophie auf einem ihrer Hochplateaus, der Transzendentalphilosophie, genauer noch: deren postneukantianischer Erscheinungsform einsetzen, dies im lebendigen Wechselgespräch mit einer Reihe von Meisterdenkern von Platon und Aristoteles an über Leibniz, die neuzeitliche Aufklärung hin zu Kant, dann über Fichte, Hegel, Schelling zu ausgewählten Neukantianern sowie z. T. auch polemisch zu den ‚Modernen‘ und dem neo-nominalistischen Zeitgeist weithin. – Die Position Zeidlers dem allen gegenüber ist im Grunde sehr einfach zu kennzeichnen: Es ist ein Denken einer ihre eigene Geschichte in ihren ‚großen‘ Gestalten einbeziehenden Vernunft, die in ihrem Prinzipien-Selbst als theoretischer wie praktischer Erst- und Gesamtgrund menschliche Würde wie auch diesheitliche Ganzheit zu fundieren und zu garantieren vermag. – Zeidler darf in diesem Panorama mit Fug und Recht als eine Art Leuchtturm im rasch wechselnden Gewölk modernen und nachmodernen Gedankenlebens erscheinen. (shrink)

This paper explores the Baden Neo-Kantian attempt to integrate hermeneutic ‘understanding’ into the formal philosophy of the historical sciences. It focuses primarily on Heinrich Ricker...

The neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen is famously anti-empiricist in that he denies that sensations can make a definable contribution to knowledge. However, in the second edition of Kant’s Theory of Experience (1885), Cohen considers a proposition that contrasts with both his other work and that of his followers: a Kantian who studies scientific claims to truth—and the grounds on which they are made—cannot limit himself to studying mathematics and logical principles, but needs to also investigate underlying presuppositions about the empirical element (...) of science. Due to his subjectivist approach, Cohen argues, Kant not only failed to explain how scientific observation and experiments are possible, but also misconceived the role of the ideas, particularly the idea of a system of nature. (shrink)

F.A. Trendelenburg's work "Logical Investigations" influenced greatly the decline of G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy in the early 1840s. In this work Trendelenburg challenged the very foundation of Hegel's system, his speculative logic. Somewhat twenty years later two leading late Hegelians, C.L. Michelet from Berlin and K. Rosenkranz from Königsberg, replied to Trendelenburg. Their common strategy was to show that Trendelenburg owes more to Hegel than he admits. At the same time, Trendelenburg has misunderstood Hegel's dialectics and in fact fallen into the (...) standpoint of empiricism. Michelet and Rosenkranz agreed on many problems of Trendelenburg's account, but their readings of Hegel differed in several respects. For example, they were apart on I. Kant's significance for Hegel. Partly because of this, I will argue, Rosenkranz has more affinity to Trendelenburg than Michelet. The debate between the three continued until Trendelenburg's passing in 1872. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to analyze what neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert designates by the term ‘chaos’. I argue that using this term Rickert means infinite manifolds of human life experiences, that philosophers have to convert into ‘cosmos’ of theories by using concept formation. Rickert thinks that cognition orders chaos. I show that Rickert’s version of ‘chaos’ is different from the ones that were expressed by I. Kant, J. G. Herder, F. W. von Schelling, F. von Schlegel, and F. Nietzsche. (...) I also argue that ideas of I. Kant influenced the formation of Rickert’s ideas on chaos. (shrink)

Riassunto: La fenomenologia, in virtù del suo stesso nome, pare rivendicare un diritto di prelazione sui fenomeni. È sufficiente, tuttavia, uno sguardo panoramico sulla storia della filosofia o, più generalmente, delle scienze per rilevare il vasto impiego che si va affermando, senza fenomenologia, del concetto di fenomeno. In cosa consisterebbe allora la specificità della comprensione fenomenologica dei “fenomeni”? Per rispondere a questa domanda, riconsidereremo il dibattito tra Edmund Husserl autore delle Logische Untersuchungen e Paul Natorp, filosofo neokantiano di Marburgo, le (...) cui tesi presentano un duplice interesse: l’avere, per un verso, sollecitato lo stesso Husserl a una precisazione della proposta fenomenologica; l’aver, per l’altro, anticipato alcuni tra gli argomenti di maggior rilievo nell’ambito delle scienze cognitive in merito ai vari tentativi di naturalizzazione della coscienza. Parole chiave: Fenomeno; Intenzionalità; Oggetto; Edmund Husserl; Paul Natorp Phenomena With or Without Phenomenology. An Open Dialogue: Phenomenology, by its very name, seems to invoke a priority claim on the study of phenomena. Yet a glance at the history of philosophy or, more generally, the sciences, suffices to demonstrate how widely the concept of “phenomena” has been used outside phenomenology. So, what exactly is unique to the phenomenological understanding of phenomena? In order to formulate a possible answer, we reactivate the debate between the Husserl of the Logische Untersuchungen and Paul Natorp, a neo-Kantian philosopher from Marburg. This debate is of interest on two fronts: first, because Natorp’s criticism directly forced Husserl to clarify his views on phenomenology; second, because the debate anticipated some of the most important arguments on naturalizing consciousness in the cognitive sciences. Keywords: Phenomenon; Intentionality; Object; Edmund Husserl; Paul Natorp. (shrink)

Francesca Biagioli’s Space, Number, and Geometry from Helmholtz to Cassirer is a substantial and pathbreaking contribution to the energetic and growing field of researchers delving into the physics, physiology, psychology, and mathematics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book provides a bracing and painstakingly researched re-appreciation of the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and Ernst Cassirer, and of their place in the tradition, and is worth study for that alone. The contributions of the book go far beyond that, however. (...) It is a clear, accurate, and deep account of fascinating and philosophically momentous implications of the move to relativity theory. (shrink)

Die Rezeption von Walter Benjamins Arbeiten ist von einer Paradoxie durchzogen: Obwohl Konsens darüber besteht, dass er seine Begriffe in ›enger Fühlung‹ mit dem jeweiligen Material entwickelt, werden seine Schriften häufig ohne ein eigenständiges Studium seiner Quellen gelesen, losgelöst vom jeweiligen Problem- und Debattenzusammenhang. Das verstärkt den Eindruck einer Esoterik seiner Texte und kann zu der Annahme verleiten, Benjamin entnehme Motive willkürlich aus seinem Material- und Quellenstudium und nutze sie als Vehikel eines an sich schwer in eine Tradition einzuordnenden Denkens. (...) Die Autorinnen und Autoren des vorliegenden Bandes legen das Gewicht auf Benjamins Material, sei es Literatur, Theater, Metaphysik, Rechts- und Moralphilosophie, Zeitschriftenprojekte, soziale Bewegungen oder Stadtarchitektur. Anhand von Texten unterschiedlicher Werkphasen untersuchen sie das Verhältnis von Material und Begriff aus beiden Blickrichtungen. Dieses Vorgehen ermöglicht es, auch Licht auf theoretische Beziehungen und Arbeitszusammenhänge zu werfen, die bisher eher unbeachtet blieben. (shrink)

The Kantovsky Sbornik is among the longest-established philosophical periodicals in Russia. Committed to academic excellence in Kant studies, the Kantovsky Sbornik earned a reputation as one of the most authoritative Russian philosophical journals. From 2018, each article will appear simultaneously in Russian and English or German. In addition, the journal adopts the supplementary English title — Kantian Journal. The Journal places special emphasis on contributions concerning the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in all of its aspects and across all philosophical disciplines, (...) the studies of Neo-Kantianism and of Enlightenment philosophy, including historical and current interdisciplinary scientific perspectives. (shrink)

This chapter offers a reassessment of the relationship between Kant, the Kantian tradition, and phenomenology, here focusing mainly on Husserl and Heidegger. Part of this reassessment concerns those philosophers who, during the lives of Husserl and Heidegger, sought to defend an updated version of Kant’s philosophy, the neo-Kantians. The chapter shows where the phenomenologists were able to benefit from some of the insights on the part of Kant and the neo-Kantians, but also clearly points to the differences. The aim of (...) this chapter is to offer a fair evaluation of the relation of the main phenomenologists to Kant and to what was at the time the most powerful philosophical movement in Europe. (shrink)