This paper explores a pair of puzzling and controversial topics in the history of late nineteenth-century philosophy: the psychologism debates, and the nature of neo-Kantianism. Each is sufficientl...

An understanding of the relationship between metaphysics and natural philosophy - or, as we might now say, between philosophy and science - is fundamental to understanding the rise of the "new science" of the seventeenth century. Twentieth-century scholarship on this relationship has been dominated by the thoughbt of Ernst Cassirer, E. A. Burtt, A. N. Whitehead, and Alexandre Koyre. These authors found a common core in the mathematization of nature, which they ascribed to a common Platonic or Pythagorean metaphysical presupposition, (...) on the part of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes, that the book of nature is written in mathematical characters. Taking Burtt as its primary stalking horse, this chapter challenges this view by finding significant differences in the relations to metaphysics of major actors such as those just named. It does this in part by recognizing that, in the seventeenth century, metaphysics was an intellectual practice that one engaged in wittingly. By contrast, Burtt adopted a historiographical approach in which metaphysics consists of the nonempirical presupposition of an age (a position advanced by R. G. Collingwood). That approach, although valid within its limits, distorts or omits from consideration the witting practice of metaphysics by figures such as Kepler and Descartes. And it makes metaphysicians of Copernicus and Galileo, who are better classified as a mathematical astronomer and a mathematical natural philosopher and writer on astronomy. The chapter ends with some reflections on purportedly aphilosophical history of science. (shrink)

The chapter places Kant's discussions of empirical and rational psychology in the context of previous discussions in Germany. It also considers the status of what might be called his "transcendental psychology" as an instance of a special kind of knowledge: transcendental philosophy. It is divided into sections that consider four topics: the refutation of traditional rational psychology in the Paralogisms; the contrast between traditional empirical psychology and the transcendental philosophy of the Deduction; Kant's appeal to an implicit psychology in his (...) taxonomy and theory of cognitive faculties throughout the Critique of Pure Reason; and his new definitions of and support for empirical and rational psychology in the Doctrine of Method. (shrink)

I said that the book is brilliant. This is not so much because of the conclusions eventually reached about the inadequacy of a purely naturalistic approach to mind. These conclusions are already familiar in the work of Donald Davidson and others. Rather, it is because of the accumulation of historical detail and insight on the basis of which these conclusions are reached. It is often said, for instance, that Kant is a watershed figure, in some sense synthesizing and then moving (...) beyond both empiricism and naturalism. Hatfield uses these terms. But he reinvests them with meaning and energy and in the process shows how radical Kant was in refocusing, by way of a sharp distinction between empirical and transcendental inquiries, the central questions of philosophy. (shrink)

It fills an important gap in intellectual history by being the first book to emphasize the enormous intellectual transformation in the eighteenth century, when...