Neo-Kantianism
1870 – 1930
Back to Kant, meaning: stop building systems and ask instead what makes knowledge possible, and what makes value different from fact.
- Active
- 1870 – 1930
- Where
- Marburg and Baden
- Status
- extinct as a movement
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
Philosophy's business is the critique of knowledge, not metaphysics. It asks after the conditions of the sciences rather than competing with them, and it distinguishes the sciences of law from the sciences of value.
What it held
By the 1860s German idealism looked discredited and materialism looked philosophically thin. Back to Kant was a slogan for a third option: philosophy as the analysis of what makes the sciences possible.
The Marburg school — Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer — took mathematics and physics as the model and argued that the object of knowledge is not given but constructed by the methods that produce it. Cohen went further than Kant by dropping the thing in itself and treating even sensation as something thought produces.
The Baden school — Windelband, Rickert — was more interested in history and culture, and made the distinction that has outlasted everything else: nomothetic sciences seek laws, idiographic sciences describe individual cases, and neither is a defective form of the other. Weber's methodology comes straight from this.
Cassirer's late work broadens it into a philosophy of symbolic forms: myth, language, art, religion and science are each a way of shaping experience, none reducible to the others. His 1929 debate with Heidegger at Davos is often described as the moment two traditions parted.
How it argued
Analysis of the presuppositions of established sciences, and of the logical structure of value judgements.
What it was arguing against
Speculative metaphysics on one side and reductive materialism on the other, and later, phenomenology's claim to reach the things themselves.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether dropping the thing in itself keeps anything Kantian. Whether values can be objective without being facts, which the Baden school asserted and did not fully establish.
Common misconceptions
That it was a dull academic interlude. It trained Heidegger, Gadamer, Ortega, Pasternak and much of the Vienna Circle, and Cassirer's symbolic forms is a substantial original system.
How it began
Liebmann's 1865 book, each chapter of which ended with the refrain that one must return to Kant.
What became of it
Swept away by phenomenology, existentialism and logical positivism, and by the emigration of most of its remaining figures after 1933.
Lasting influence
Weber's social science methodology. The Vienna Circle's early formation. Cassirer on symbol and culture, which anthropology took up.
Why it still matters
The law-versus-case distinction is standard equipment in philosophy of social science, and Cassirer is being read again on symbol and meaning.
Put another way
A building inspector who declines to design houses and is very good at saying what holds one up.
Where to start
Windelband's address. It is short and the distinction it makes is still in use.
The surprising bit
The Davos encounter in 1929 between Cassirer and Heidegger was watched by an audience including Levinas and Carnap, and is treated by historians as the moment analytic and continental philosophy visibly separated.
In their own words
The nomothetic seeks the law, the idiographic the individual event.
Man is an animal symbolicum.
Connections
- Answers
- German Idealism
- Opposed by
- Lebensphilosophie, Phenomenology
- Influenced
- Vienna Circle
The verdict
The most influential philosophy nobody now claims to belong to.