Harry van der Linden\u27s contribution to The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

van der Linden, Harry

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Butler UniversityDigital Commons @ Butler UniversityScholarship and Professional Work - LAS College of Liberal Arts & Sciences1999Neo-kantianismHarry van der LindenButler University, hvanderl@butler.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papersPart of the Philosophy CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has beenaccepted for inclusion in Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Butler University. For moreinformation, please contact fgaede@butler.edu.Recommended Citation"Neo-kantianism." The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 524-525. CredoReference. Available from: digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers/520/neo-KantianismFrom "The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy" The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, © Cambridge University Press 1999The diverse Kantian movement that emerged within German philosophy in the 1860s, gained a strongacademic foothold in the 1870s, reached its height during the three decades prior to World War I, anddisappeared with the rise of Nazism. The movement was initially focused on renewed study and elaborationof Kant’s epistemology in response to the growing epistemic authority of the natural sciences and as analternative to both Hegelian and speculative idealism and the emerging materialism of, among others,Ludwig Büchner (1824-99). Later neo-Kantianism explored Kant’s whole philosophy, applied his criticalmethod to disciplines other than the natural sciences, and developed its own philosophical systems. Someoriginators and/or early contributors were Kuno Fischer (1824-1907), Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-94),Friedrich Albert Lange (1828-75), Eduard Zeller (1814-1908), and Otto Liebmann (1840-1912), whose Kantund die Epigonen (1865) repeatedly stated what became a neo-Kantian motto, “Back to Kant!”Several forms of neo-Kantianism are to be distinguished. T.K. Oesterreich (1880-1949), in FriedrichUeberwegs Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (“F.U.’s Compendium of the History ofPhilosophy”, 1923), developed the standard, somewhat chronological, classification:1. The physiological neo-Kantianism of Helmholtz and Lange, who claimed that physiology is “developed orcorrected Kantianism.”2. The metaphysical neo-Kantianism of the later Liebmann, who argued for a Kantian “critical metaphysics”(beyond epistemology) in the form of “hypotheses” about the essence of things.3. The realist neo-Kantianism of Alois Riehl (1844-1924), who emphasized the real existence of Kant’s thing-in-itself.4. The logistic-methodological neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School of Hermann Cohen (1842—1918) andPaul Natorp (1854—1924).5. The axiological neo-Kantianism of the Baden or Southwest German School of Windelband (1848-1915)and Heinrich Rickert (1863—1936).6. The relativistic neo-Kantianism of Georg Simmel (1858-1918), who argued for Kantian categories relativeto individuals and cultures.7. The psychological neo-Kantianism of Leonard Nelson (1882-1927), originator of the Göttingen School;also known as the neo-Friesian School, after Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773—1843), Nelson’s self-proclaimedprecursor. Like Fries, Nelson held that Kantian a priori principles cannot be transcendentally justified, butcan be discovered only through introspection.Oesterreich’s classification has been narrowed or modified, partly because of conflicting views on howdistinctly “Kantian” a philosopher must have been to be called “neo-Kantian.” The very term ‘neo-Kantianism’has even been called into question, as suggesting real intellectual commonality where little or none is to befound. There is, however, growing consensus that Marburg and Baden neo-Kantianism were the mostimportant and influential.Marburg SchoolIts founder, Choen, developed its characteristic Kantian idealism of the natural sciences by arguing thatphysical objects are truly known only through the laws of these sciences and that these laws presuppose theapplication of Kantian a priori principles and concepts. Cohen elaborated this idealism by eliminating Kant’sdualism of sensibility and understanding, claiming that space and time are construction methods of “purethought” rather than a priori forms of perception and that the notion of any “given” (perceptual data) prior tothe “activity” of “pure thought” is meaningless. Accordingly, Cohen reformulated Kant’s thing-in-itself as theregulative idea that the mathematical description of the world can always be improved. Cohen alsoemphasized that “pure thought” refers not to individual consciousess—on his account Kant had not yetsufficiently left behind a “subject—object” epistemology—but rather to the content of his own system of apriori principles, which he saw as subject to change with the progress of science. Just as Cohen held thatepistemology must be based on the “fact of science,” he argued, in a decisive step beyond Kant, that ethicsmust transcendentally deduce both the moral law and the ideal moral subject from a humanistic science—more specifically, from jurisprudence’s notion of the legal person. This analysis led to the view that the morallaw demands that all institutions, including economic enterprises, become democratic—so that they displayunified wills and intentions as transcendental conditions of the legal person—and that all individuals becomecolegislators. Thus Cohen arrived at his frequently cited claim that Kant “is the true and real originator ofGerman socialism.” Other important Marburg Kantians were Cohen’s colleague Natorp, best known for hisstudies on Plato and philosophy of education, and their students Karl Vorländer (1860-1928), who focusedon Kantian socialist ethics as a corrective of orthodox Marxism, and Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945).Baden SchoolThe basic task of philosophy and its transcendental method is seen as identifying universal values that makepossible culture in its varied expressions. This focus is evident in Windelband’s influential insight that thenatural sciences seek to formulate general laws—nomothetic knowledge—while the historical sciencesseek to describe unique events—idiographic knowledge. This distinction is based on the values (interests)of mastery of nature and understanding and reliving the unique past in order to affirm our individuality.Windelband’s view of the historical sciences as idiographic raised the problem of selection central to hissuccessor Rickert’s writings: How can historians objectively determine which individual events are historicallysignificant? Rickert argued that this selection must be based on the values that are generally recognizedwithin the cultures under investigation, not on the values of historians themselves. Rickert also developedthe transcendental argument that the objectivity of the historical sciences necessitates the assumption thatthe generally recognized values of different cultures approximate in various degrees universally valid values.This argument was rejected by Weber, whose methodological work was greatly indebted to Rickert.See also Cassirer, Cohen, Kant, Lange, transcendental argument, Windelband. H.v.d.L.

Neo-kantianism

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