This chapter traces the development of relativist ideas in nineteenth-century debates about history and historical knowledge. It distinguishes between two contexts in which these ideas first emerged. First, the early-to-mid nineteenth-century encounter between speculative German idealism and professional historiography. Second, the late nineteenth-century debate between hermeneutic philosophy and orthodox Neo-Kantianism. The paper summarizes key differences between these two contexts: in the former, historical ontology and historical methodology formed a unity, in the latter, they came apart. As a result, (...) the idea of universal history became increasingly problematic. In light of these differences, the paper seeks to (partially) explain why it was only towards the late-nineteenth century that historical relativism became an explicit concern. (shrink)

Review of Frederick Charles Beiser's "The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880".

The paper focuses on the problem of the “anthropological turn” in Russian Neo- Kantianism. There are three sources of this “anthropological turn”. The first one is the concept of man in German Neo-Kantianism which was developed on the basis of Kant’s ethics. The second one is the influence of Russian culture and history. The third is the state of Russian philosophy at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The Russian Neo-Kantians reflected (...) closely on the doctrine of Leo Tolstoi and on the existence of man in the contemporary historical changes and cataclysms. They conclude the freedom of man as his essence depends on the political state of society and its moral base. There is no genuine existence of man without social politics based on morality and the human ideal. (shrink)

Johannes Daubert he was an acknowledged leader, and in some respects the founder, of the early phenomenological movement, and was considered – as much by its members as by Husserl himself – the most brilliant member of the group. In Daubert’s unpublished writings we find a series of reflections on Lask, and on Neo-Kantianism, which form the subject-matter of this paper. They range over topics such as the ontology of the ‘Sachverhalt’ or state of affairs, truthvalues (Wahrheitswerte) and the (...) value of truth, negative judgments and the copula, and the relation between perception and judgment. (shrink)

This article concerns genealogy of ideas from the Marburg school of neo-Kantian philosophy in’s early works in the context of intellectual and educational tendencies in Europe and the Russian Empire at the turn of the 20th century. Yevhen Spektorskyi (1875–1951) is known as a prominent philosopher and lawyer, professor, and the last president at the Saint Volodymyr University. Analyzing his early works, which were strongly connected to his teaching and scientific activities at the law faculty of Warsaw University, the author (...) recognizes several key factors as the reasons for considerable development of the main neo-Kantian ideas of the philosopher. Firstly, Spektorskyi’s research interests were strongly influenced by the intellectual communication with his teacher, professor, and lawyer Oleksandr Blok (1852–1909), whose research was concentrated on the idea of classification of the sciences and its further substantiating. Secondly, we know that at the beginning of 20th century Spektorskyi was on several long-term educational secondments in European educational institutions, which allowed him to immerse into intellectual life of that time. In the article, the author focuses on analysis of Spektorskyi’s published works and unpublished manuscripts of the years 1903–1910. It is clarified that their main issues concern essential notions and arguments of critical idealism and its implications for the procedures of rational argumentation of sciences (mainly, social sciences) by setting ideal goals and clarification of regulative ideas for the social scientists in their research. The article also examines Spektorskyi’s logical structure of critique of the founder of the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism Hermann Cohen (1842–1918). The critique concerns the development of ethics as “mathematics of natural science” and argues for the creative and productive rethinking of neo-Kantian ideas by Spektorskyi. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the problem of anthropodicy in the philosophical system of Hermann Cohen and its interpretation by Jacob Gordin (1896—1947). Gordin was one of the last followers of Cohen in Russia. He developes his interpretation in the lecture “Anthropodicy”, which was given in the Philosophical Circle at the Petrograd University in December 1921. For the study of the problem of anthropodicy he was apparently inspired by the discussions at the Free Philosophical Association in 1919—1921. Gordin places Cohen’s concept (...) of man in the wide intellectual context given by the ideas of the Russian religious philosophy, German classical philosophy, Neo-Kantianism, and the West European and Jewish mysticism (cabbala). Gordin compares Cohen’s anthropodicy with Vladimir Soloviev’s one and shows that there is a similarity in their approaches. Both philosophers point out that the justification of man is possible only in form of the justification of humanity and not as for Berdyaiev in form of the justification of personality. But Gordin uses Soloviev’s concept of all-unity and Berdyaiev’s concept of creativity in order to “improve” Cohen’s conception and to reveal the contribution of a person to the justification of humanity. Stronger as Cohen Gordin connects the programm of anthropodicy with individuality and underlines the participation of the individual in creating culture. (shrink)

Introduction to the Special Volume, “Method, Science and Mathematics: Neo-Kantianism and Analytic Philosophy,” edited by Scott Edgar and Lydia Patton. At its core, analytic philosophy concerns urgent questions about philosophy’s relation to the formal and empirical sciences, questions about philosophy’s relation to psychology and the social sciences, and ultimately questions about philosophy’s place in a broader cultural landscape. This picture of analytic philosophy shapes this collection’s focus on the history of the philosophy of mathematics, physics, and psychology. The following (...) essays uncover, reflect on, and exemplify modes of philosophy that are engaged with these allied disciplines. They make the case that, to the extent that analytic philosophers are still concerned with philosophy’s ties to these disciplines, we would do well to pay attention to neo-Kantian views on those ties. (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)

Models are the coin of the realm in current philosophy of science, as they are in science itself, having replaced laws and theories as the primary strategy. Logical Positivism tried to erase the older neo-Kantian distinction between ideal constructions and reality. It returns in the case of models. Nowak’s concept of idealization pro- vided an alternative account of this issue. It construed model application as concretizations of hypotheses which improve by accounting for exceptions. This appears to account for physical law. (...) But it raises the problem of uniqueness: is the result unique, as physical law should be? Neo-Kantianism failed this test. Its solutions were circular justifications for claims of uniqueness. Nowak inherited the problem without resolving it. (shrink)

This essay examines the argumentative context in which early Neo-Kantian philosophers defined and defended "epistemology." The paper defends Richard Rorty's claim that the priority of epistemology influenced how the history of modern philosophy was written but corrects his story by showing that epistemology was defended mainly via antifoundational arguments. The essay begins with a few programmatic arguments by Kuno Fischer and Eduard Zeller but focuses mainly on Otto Liebmann's Kant und die Epigonen. I argue that Liebmann completes the agenda of (...) Fischer and Zeller by giving a detailed account of how a metaphysical system is impossible for anyone who begins with modest, Kantian epistemological principles. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to briefly present the philosophy of Hans Wagner (1917-2000) as belonging to the last phase of the development of the German transcendental philosophy. Hans Wagner’s philosophy is presented as an attempt to synthesize earlier positions developed on the basis of this tradition, namely the synthesis of (a) neo-Kantianism with post-neo-Kantianism, (b) Kant's philosophy with Hegel's philosophy, (c) neo-Kantian transcendentalism with Husserl's transcendentalism, (d) the philosophy of transcendental subject (Kant, neo-Kantianism, phenomenology) (...) with the philosophy of empirical subject (Hönigswald, Heidegger, Sartre). The main theoretical figure of Hans Wagner’s philosophy is the problem of two aspects of human thinking: its absoluteness and finiteness. According to Wagner development of the philosophical reflection, which we can observe on the example of the evolution of - originating from Kant - transcendental philosophy, leads to an explanation of the possibility to reconcile these two aspects of human thinking, and thus to answer the very question: how is it possible that our thinking can be both absolute and finished, and what are the consequences of this fact for the status of all cultural products of human thinking, such as science, morality or law. (shrink)

German supporters of the Kantian philosophy in the late 19th century took one of two forks in the road: the fork leading to Baden, and the Southwest School of neo-Kantian philosophy, and the fork leading to Marburg, and the Marburg School, founded by Hermann Cohen. Between 1876, when Cohen came to Marburg, and 1918, the year of Cohen's death, Cohen, with his Marburg School, had a profound influence on German academia.

One of the more striking aspects of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) is his use of psychological case studies in pathology. For Merleau-Ponty, a philosophical interpretation of phenomena like aphasia and psychic blindness promises to shed light not just on the nature of pathology, but on the nature of human existence more generally. In this paper, I show that although Merleau-Ponty is surely a pioneer in this use of pathology, his work is deeply indebted to an earlier philosophical study (...) of pathology offered by the German Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929). More specifically, I argue that Merleau-Ponty, in fact, follows Cassirer in placing Kant's notion of the productive imagination at the centre of his account of pathology and the features of existence it illuminates. Recognizing the debt Merleau-Ponty's account of pathology has to the Kantian tradition not only acts as a corrective to more recent interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's views of pathology (Dreyfus, Romdenh-Romluc), but also recommends we resist the prevailing tendency to treat Merleau-Ponty's philosophy as anti-Kantian. Instead, my interpretation seeks to restore Merleau-Ponty's place within the Kantian tradition. (shrink)

A volume dealing seriously with the influence of the major schools of Neo-Kantian thought on contemporary philosophy has been needed sorely for some time. But this volume of essays aims higher: it 'is published in the hopes that it will secure Neo-Kantianism a significant place in contemporary philosophical discussions' (Introduction, 1). The aim of the book, then, is partly to provide a history of major Neo-Kantian thinkers and their influence, and partly to argue for their importance in contemporary (continental) (...) philosophy. (shrink)

The subject of the article is a mass psychology of B.P. Vysheslavtsev. This is a socio-philosophical conception, which created by Vysheslavtsev through the synthesizing of German classical philosophy, neo-Kantianism, Russian religious philosophy and analytical psychology. He developed the mass psychology in close collaboration with C.G. Jung by his direct order. The mass psychology, despite the heterogeneity of its foundations, became an organic continuation of analytical psychology. Moreover, there is reason to suppose that Vysheslavtsev's socio-philosophical and religious ideas influenced (...) all of Jung’s later work. The main method used was a comparative analysis of the ideas of Vysheslavtsev and Jung, as well as a critical interpretation of the original sources, including unpublished archival materials — letters and manuscripts. The novelty lies in the fact that previously the mass psychology of Vysheslavtsev eluded the attention of researchers. This is primarily due to the inaccessibility of sources on this issue, since some of them are either not published and stored in archives, including the Bakhmeteff Archive (Columbia University in the City of New York) and C.G. Jung Papers Collection (ETH Zurich University Archive), or was published in rare foreign journals and not translated into Russian. At the same time, without these sources it is difficult to understand not only the evolution of Vysheslavtsev’s views, but also the logic and reasons for the development of Jung’s ideas from the 1940s to his death. Thus, this article is intended to partially replenish these gaps in the history of Russian and European philosophy and psychology. Предметом исследования данной статьи является созданная на основе синтеза немецкой классической философии, неокантианства, русской религиозной философии и аналитической психологии социально-философская концепция Б.П. Вышеславцева, названная им "массовая психология". Данная концепция разрабатывалась в тесном взаимодействии с К.Г. Юнгом, в том числе, по его непосредственному заказу. Массовая психология Вышеславцева, несмотря на разнородность её основ, стала органичным продолжением аналитической психологии. Более того, есть основания полагать, что социально-философские и религиозные идеи Вышеславцева оказали влияние на всё позднее творчество Юнга. В качестве основного метода использовался компаративный анализ идей Вышеславцева и Юнга, а также критическая интерпретация первоисточников, включая неопубликованные архивные материалы - письма и рукописи. Новизна заключается в том, что ранее массовая психология Вышеславцева ускользала от внимания исследователей. Обусловлено это, в первую очередь, труднодоступностью источников по данной проблеме, так как часть из них либо не опубликована и хранится в архивах, в том числе в Бахметьевском архиве Колумбийского университета (Нью-Йорк) и Архиве Юнга (Цюрих), либо была опубликована в редких иностранных изданиях и не переведена на русский язык. Вместе с тем, без данных источников трудно понять не только эволюцию взглядов Вышеславцева, итогом которой стал труд "Кризис индустриальной культуры", но также логику и причины развития представлений Юнга начиная с 1940-х годов и заканчивая его смертью. Тем самым, данная статья призвана отчасти восполнить указанные лакуны в истории русской и европейской философии и психологии. (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)

The aim of the article is to present an interpretation of the Kantian concept of transcendental idealism, which would make it possible to understand the status of things from the perspective of transcendental philosophy. The main claim of the article is that Kant’s standpoint can be situated beyond metaphysical realism and idealism, or, to use contemporary terms, beyond representationalism and constructivism. The standpoint in question can thus be regarded as an inspiration to reject the Cartesian dualism of substance and to (...) propose a new philosophical perspective. In addition, the author claims that the understanding of transcendental philosophy presented in the article has provided a basis for the new, pluralist and relationalist ontology advanced by Nicolai Hartmann. She also suggests considering this ontology as another, after neo-Kantianism, stage in the development of German transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

(2005). Hermann Cohen and the Renewal of Kantian philosophy2. Angelaki: Vol. 10, continental philosophy and the sciences the german traditionissue editor: damian veal, pp. 95-108.

Quine’s classical classic interpretation succinctly characterized characterizes Carnap’s Aufbau as an attempt “to account for the external world as a logical construct of sense-data....” Consequently, “Russell” was characterized as the most important influence on the Aufbau. Those times have passed. Formulating a comprehensive and balanced interpretation of the Aufbau has turned out to be a difficult task and one that must take into account several disjointed sources. My thesis is that the core of the Aufbau rested on a problem that (...) had haunted German philosophy since the end of the 19th century. In terms fashionable at the time, this problem may be expressed as the polarity between Leben and Geist that characterized German philosophy during the years of the Weimar Republic. At that time, many philosophers, including Cassirer, Rickert and Vaihinger, were engaged in overcoming this polarity. As I will show, Carnap’s Aufbau joined the ranks of these projects. This suggests that Lebensphilosophie and Rickert’s System der Philosophie exerted a strong influence on Carnap’s projects, an influence that is particularly conspicuous in his unpublished manuscript Vom Chaos zur Wirklichkeit. Carnap himself asserted that this manuscript could be considered “the germ of the constitution theory” of the Aufbau. Reading Chaos also reveals another strong but neglected influence on the Aufbau, namely a specific version of neutral monism put forward by the philosopher and psychologist Theodor Ziehen before World War I. Ziehen’s work contributed much to the invention of the constitutional method of quasi-analysis. -/-. (shrink)

This article discusses an interpretation of Kant's conception of transcendental subjectivity, which manages to avoid many of the concerns that have been raised by analytic interpreters over this doctrine. It is an interpretation put forward by selected C19 and early C20 neo-Kantian writers. The article starts out by offering a neo-Kantian interpretation of the object as something that is constituted by the categories and that serves as a standard of truth within a theory of judgment. The second part explicates transcendental (...) subjectivity as the system of categories, which is self-referential and constitutes objects, in order to then evaluate this conception by means of a comparison with Hegel's absolute subject. Rather than delineating the differences between neo-Kantian writers, the article systematically expounds a shared project, which consists in providing the ultimate foundation for judgments by means of an anti-psychologist and non-metaphysical interpretation of transcendental subjectivity. (shrink)

We seek to elucidate the philosophical context in which one of the most important conceptual transformations of modern mathematics took place, namely the so-called revolution in rigor in infinitesimal calculus and mathematical analysis. Some of the protagonists of the said revolution were Cauchy, Cantor, Dedekind,and Weierstrass. The dominant current of philosophy in Germany at the time was neo-Kantianism. Among its various currents, the Marburg school (Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer, and others) was the one most interested in matters scientific and mathematical. (...) Our main thesis is that Marburg neo-Kantian philosophy formulated a sophisticated position towards the problems raised by the concepts of limits and infinitesimals. The Marburg school neither clung to the traditional approach of logically and metaphysically dubious infinitesimals, nor whiggishly subscribed to the new orthodoxy of the “great triumvirate” of Cantor, Dedekind, and Weierstrass that declared infinitesimals conceptus nongrati in mathematical discourse. Rather, following Cohen’s lead, the Marburg philosophers sought to clarify Leibniz’s principle of continuity, and to exploit it in making sense of infinitesimals and related concepts. (shrink)

The professionalization of the study of history in the Nineteenth Century made possible a new way of thinking about the history of philosophy: the thought emerged that philosophy itself might be relative to time, historical culture, and nationality. The simultaneous demise of speculative metaphysics scattered philosophers’ confidence that the historical variance of philosophical systems could be viewed in terms of the teleological self-realization of reason. Towards the late Nineteenth Century, philosophers began to explicitly address the worry that all philosophical systems (...) might have only relative validity. This paper compares two key figures in late-nineteenth-century debates concerning historical relativism: Wilhelm Windelband and Wilhelm Dilthey. Beneath the deep disagreements between these two authors, it reveals their common concern to immunize philosophy from the threat of historical relativism. The paper traces how both philosophers sought to fend off relativism by defending the idea of an ahistorical and permanent stratum of philosophical thinking. And it argues that although they succeeded in blocking historical versions of relativism, they did so at the cost of incurring a relativism vis-à-vis philosophical systems. This relativism turned out to be rooted not in the historicity of philosophy but in the timeless essence of philosophical reasoning itself. (shrink)

Studies of the origins of Mikhail Bakhtin’s thought have tended to either follow a traditional intellectual history paradigm—where establishing the presence of an influence is taken to be a sign of Bakhtin’s identity as a thinker—or to view terminological and conceptual borrowings in Bakhtin’s work as mere veneer in which he dressed his own ideas to make them publishable or acceptable to his peers in a hostile political and intellectual environment. And while Bakhtin did absorb some genuine formative influences, and (...) did use some terms and ideas as mere masks, a much more interesting and unusual pattern of appropriating others’ voices is evident in, and typical of, Bakhtin’s writings. -/- In this talk I illustrate this pattern of appropriation by looking at three examples, all related to Bakhtin’s early philosophy (where the use of “masked” writing was not yet necessary), and both involving Kantianism and neo-Kantianism (cited by many as major influences, in the traditional sense, on Bakhtin). The first of these examples is the way in which Bakhtin reinterprets Kant’s “Copernican revolution”. The second is the way in which Herman Cohen’s account of God’s uniqueness in monotheism is reflected in Bakhtin’s early ethics. The third involves a passage in Paul Natorp’s book Sozial-Idealismus as anticipating Bakhtin’s views on language and dialogue, but within a philosophical context Bakhtin rejected. All these examples (and many others) demonstrate the way Bakhtin, from the outset, works with the voices and ideas of others. Bakhtin’s approach—I shall argue—is not so much that of a scholar examining the claims made by his predecessors, accepting some and rejecting others, but rather, is akin to that of a composer, who integrates and combines motifs and passages adopted from others’ works into the fabric of his symphony, where they acquire new meaning in a new context. (shrink)

The physiologist Johannes Müller’s doctrine of specific nerve energies had a decisive influence on neo-Kantian conceptions of the objectivity of knowledge in the 1850s - 1870s. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Müller amassed a body of experimental evidence to support his doctrine, according to which the character of our sensations is determined by the structures of our own sensory nerves, and not by the external objects that cause the sensations. Neo-Kantians such as Hermann von Helmholtz, F.A. Lange, (...) and Otto Liebmann took Müller’s doctrine to have far-reaching consequences for their epistemologies. Over the course of the 1850s - 1870s, these three neo-Kantians, each in his own way, argued that reflection on Müller’s doctrine ruled out a certain conception of the objectivity of knowledge. It ruled out the view that knowledge is objective in virtue of affording us information about objects in a mind-independent external world. -/- This paper traces how Helmholtz, Lange, and Liebmann developed their arguments for this view, and how each developed his own alternative conception of objectivity, according to which objectivity has nothing to do with a mind-independent world. Finally, the paper concludes by considering why these arguments modelled on Müller’s doctrine would have been so powerful against rival post-Hegelian conceptions of objectivity, especially those of scientific materialists like Ludwig Büchner. (shrink)

The received view has it that analytic philosophy emerged as a rebellion against the German Idealists (above all Hegel) and their British epigones (the British neo-Hegelians). This at least was Russell’s story: the German Idealism failed to achieve solid results in philosophy. Of course, Frege too sought after solid results. He, however, had a different story to tell. Frege never spoke against Hegel, or Fichte. Similarly to the German Idealists, his sworn enemy was the empiricism (in his (...) case, John Stuart Mill). Genealogically, this stance is not difficult to explain. Frege grew up as a philosopher in the context of the German Idealists. He was a member of Karl Snell’s “Sunday Circle” of university teachers in Jena. The group was influenced with Schelling and the German romanticists. The first Anglophone scholar to point out what Frege's thought owes to nineteenth-century Germany philosophy, Hans Sluga, argued that Frege followed the philosophical-logical tradition originating with Leibniz and Kant which Trendelenburg and Lotze developed significantly. About the same time, a philosophical historian writing in German, Gottfried Gabriel, did much to bring this tradition to light, casting Frege as neo-Kantian. Advancing beyond Sluga and Gabriel, the present paper reveals that through the mediation of Trendelenburg and especially of Lotze many elements of German idealism found their way into Frege's logic and philosophy. (shrink)

Critical realism is a frequently mentioned, but not very well-known, late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century philosophical tradition. Having its roots in Kantian epistemology, critical realism is best characterized as a revisionist approach toward the original Kantian doctrine. Its most outstanding thesis is the idea that Kantian things-in-themselves are knowable. This idea was—at least implicitly—suggested by thinkers such as Alois Riehl, Wilhelm Wundt, and Oswald Külpe. Interestingly enough, the philosophical position of the early Moritz Schlick stands in the critical realist tradition as well. (...) As will be outlined in the course of this paper, both Schlick’s magnum opus General Theory of Knowledge (1918) and his seminal Space and Time in Contemporary Physics (1917) are based on the assumption that the objects of science are relations and that relations have the status of Kantian things-in-themselves. By way of conclusion, I shall point out that this— more or less directly—leads to the current debate over ‘structural’ realism. (shrink)

Among the few publications which consider the Scholastic roots of Brentano’s thinking, an article by Dieter Münch stands out. In it, he claims that the Aristotelian studies of Brentano and his whole philosophical project are inspired by the German Neo-Scholastic movement. Münch presents the Neo-Scholastic tendency as an ultra-conservative and reactionary program against modernity. Now, such a description makes almost inexplicable the fact that Brentano, who was educated in this context, could have developed a wholly personal and independent philosophy. (...) To approach this framework objectively, I propose to pay attention to F.J. Clemens, a Neo-Scholastic who influenced Brentano’s way of thinking. It is true that Clemens puts faith above reason and affirms that any conclusion obtained through the power of reason must be discarded when it contradicts faith. However, this is not an ultramontane innovation but simply the traditional theological point of view. He also argues that St. Thomas should be followed as a guide to orient oneself in the process of rational inquiry. Nevertheless, he doesn’t want to understand philosophy as a repetition of Aquinas’ claims; on the contrary, he rather proposes an intelligent use of tradition, which allows us to delve deeper into philosophical truth. For this very reason, he does not discard modernity or condemn it altogether. This perspective is also reflected in the early writings of Brentano, where he showed discontinuity from the Neo-Scholastic school of thought. (shrink)

Vera Zasulich’s shooting of Trepov, a governor of St Petersburg who had ordered the flogging of a political prisoner, in January 1878, catapulted her to international fame as a revolutionary heroine, a reputation that she put to good use by becoming one of the five ‘founding parents’ of Russian Marxism that created the ‘Group for the Emancipation of Labour’ in 1883. But her act of self-sacrifice also triggered, to her dismay, the institutionalisation of individual terrorist tactics in the Russian Populist (...) movement with the creation of the ‘People’s Will’ (Narodnaya Volya) Party in 1879. The organisation went into decline after the killing of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and Populism itself was increasingly superseded by Marxism as the hegemonic force on the left with the rise of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). But individual terrorist tactics reappeared with the creation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1902, prompting Zasulich to write an article for Die neue Zeit, the theoretical organ of German Social Democracy, in which she both condemned the Neo-Populist tendency as deleterious to the rising labour movement and supported the organisational plans for the RSDLP sponsored by the Iskra group, developed at length by Lenin in his book What Is to Be Done?, published in March 1902. This article provides the background to Vera Zasulich’s article ‘The Terrorist Tendency in Russia’ (December 1902), setting it against the history of the Russian revolutionary movement from 1878 to 1902. (shrink)

The chapter replies to Paul Guyer’s (2020) account of the debate between Mendelssohn and Kant about whether humankind makes continual moral progress. Mendelssohn maintained that progress can only be the remit of individuals, and that humankind only “continually fluctuates within fixed limits”. Kant dubs Mendelssohn’s position “abderitism” and explicitly rejects it. But Guyer contends that Kant’s own theory of freedom commits him, malgré lui, to abderitism. Guyer’s risky interpretive position is not supported by examination of the relevant texts in their (...) intellectual context. I first identify the historical origins of the term abderitism, which here signifies the independence of individual progress from social conditions. By contrast, Kant argues that individual progress cannot be independent of the progress of the species, acting as a corporate agent. This arresting position, I argue, must be understood in light of the Stoic ethical-teleological presuppositions generally accepted in eighteenth-century German discussion of human progress. (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)

Neo-Kantianism is common conceived as a philosophy ‘from above’, excelling in speculative constructions – as opposed to the attitude of patient description which is exemplified by the phenomenological turn ‘to the things themselves’. When we study the work of Emil Lask in its relation to that of Husserl and the phenomenologists, however, and when we examine the influences moving in both directions, then we discover that this idea of a radical opposition is misconceived. Lask himself was influenced especially by (...) Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and Husserl, especially in his later writings, was in some respects closer to Kant than were the Neo-Kantians. The contrast between the two philosophers can be illustrated by looking at their view of the objects of judgment; for Lask, as for Kant, judgment can relate to the thing as such only in an indirect way. The world of judgment is a collection of ‘imitations holding a secondary position’. It is cut apart from the plain world of real things by what Lask calls a ‘chasm of artificiality and imagery’. For Husserl, in contrast, the object of judgment is a ‘Sachverhalt’ or state of affairs, something ontologically ‘positive’ in the sense that it is an entity in its own right and does not point beyond itself in the manner of a mere sign or proxy for something else. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the shifts in Wilhelm Windelband’s ‘critical philosophy of values’ as it developed hand in hand with his understanding of relativism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by analyzing the role that relativism played in his philosophical project, it seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Windelband's intellectual development in the context of historicism and Neo-Kantianism. On the other hand, by highlighting Windelband’s contribution to the understanding of relativism, it sheds light on an (...) important episode in the history of that problem. The paper distinguishes between three phases in Windelband’s thinking and shows that his views about relativism changed in close connection with his conception of history. The early Windelband thought that historicism was compatible with absolute validity because he was firmly convinced of historical progress. The mature Windelband rejected progress as a means for justifying validity and put the problem of relativism into sharp relief. In response to the failure of his mature philosophy to fend off relativism, the later Windelband strengthened the role of history again. The paper concludes that Windelband’s significance lies not in his arguments against relativism, but rather in having furthered philosophical understanding of the problems at stake. (shrink)

The subject of the paper is a polemic between Leonard Nelson and Ernst Cassirer mainly concerning the understanding of the critical method in philosophy. Nelson refutes the accusation of psychologism and attacks the core of the philosophy of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism. In response to those allegations, Cassirer feels obliged to defend the position of his masters and performs this task brilliantly. The present paper considers similarities and differences in the positions of both sides in this debate. I (...) try to evaluate the arguments of both sides and argue that they took basically the same positions, while the existing discrepancies did not justify such an intense polemic. If the disputing sides had approached the discussion in a less emotional way, it could have led to substantive and interesting conclusions. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to discuss primarily the epistemological theory of reflection as seen by Heinrich Rickert, the main representative of Neo-Kantianism Baden School. The most important arguments put forward by Rickert against taking the cognition as a reflection of the reality are being analysed. Rickert’s standpoint turns out to be moderate. He argues against the transcendental theory of reflection, but does not reject the idea of reflection as a model of cognition and takes the immanent theory (...) of reflection as relatively justified. The paper contains also a discussion of the standpoint of another representative of Baden School, Emil Lask, who has rejected the theory of reflection in favour of the after-image theory. (shrink)

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)

Cognitive scientists have been debating how the folk concept of intentional action works. We suggest a simple account: people consider that an agent did X intentionally to the extent that X was causally dependent on how much the agent wanted X to happen (or not to happen). Combined with recent models of human causal cognition, this definition provides a good account of the way people use the concept of intentional action, and offers natural explanations for puzzling phenomena such as the (...) side-effect effect. We provide empirical support for our theory, in studies where we show that people’s causation and intentionality judgments track each other closely, in everyday situations as well as in scenarios with unusual causal structures. Study 5 additionally shows that the effect of norm violations on intentionality judgments depends on the causal structure of the situation, in a way uniquely predicted by our theory. Taken together, these results suggest that the folk concept of intentional action has been difficult to define because it is made of cognitive building blocks, such as our intuitive concept of causation, whose logic cognitive scientists are just starting to understand. (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)

Historical evidence shows that mental symptoms were constructed in a particular historical and cultural context (19th Century alienism). According to the Cambridge model of symptom-formation, mental symptoms are mental acts whereby sufferers configure, by means of cultural templates, information invading their awareness. This information, which can be of biological or semantic origin, is pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic and to be understood and communicated requires formatting and linguistic collocation. Mental symptoms are hybrid objects, that is, blends of inchoate biological or symbolic signals (...) and cultural configurators. "Culture" plays a very deep role in symptom-formation because templates can attenuate or abolish the specificity of the biological signals involved. This means that signals from different brain sites can be configured as the same symptom and signals from the same site as different symptoms. Although always present, the neurobiological substratum is not fundamental in the understanding and management of mental symptoms. These can only be comprehended in relation to the manner of their construction and the cognitive and emotional biographies of each patient. Direct interference with the brain sites involved may dull mental symptoms but is unlikely to offer long-term cure. If the configuratory style and needs of the patient are not understood and dealt with, he is likely to keep re-constituting or replicating his symptoms in relation to other biological signals. In summary, mental symptoms are not passive happenings but genuine mental acts. Hence, the manner and motivation of their construction may be more important than the signal of brain distress that might have provoked them in the first place. (shrink)

This paper looks at the ways in which Mikhail Bakhtin had appropriated the ideas of Kant and of the Marburg neo-Kantian school. While Bakhtin was greatly indebted to Kantian philosophy, and is known to have referred to himself as a neo-Kantian, he rejects the main tenets of neo-Kantianism. Instead, Bakhtin offers a substantial re-interpretation of Kantian thought. His frequent borrowings from neo-Kantian philosophers (Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and others) also follow a distinctive pattern of appropriation, whereby blocks of interconnected (...) ideas are removed from their original context, and made to serve Bakhtin’s own—substantially different—philosophical purposes in the context of his own thought. Bakhtin’s thought thus remains original even as he is borrowing ideas from others. (shrink)

Analysing Cassirer's positions in the Nachruf dedicated to Natorp (1925) and in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929), I will try in this short paper to outline the core, merits, and limitations of Natorp's psychology in Cassirer's interpretation. In doing so, I will emphasise three elements: 1. the cornerstones of Natorpian psychology, which for Cassirer represent Natorp's main contribution to the history of ideas; 2. the thematic unity of Natorp's philosophical production; 3. the fundamental continuity between (...) Natorp's research and that of Cassirer. These three aspects are interwoven and belong in some way to the inner development of Marburg Neo-Kantianism. (shrink)

Voces de Carnaval: ritualidad festiva, resignificación cultural y mercantilismo, surge del interés de compartir experiencias de la ritualidad festiva en varias latitudes, especialmente latinoamericanas, para generar nuevos sentidos de encuentro cultural. Este espacio plural, motivado desde la Red Colombia Festiva junto con el Instituto de Estudios en Comunicación y Cultura de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia sede Bogotá, varias universidades públicas, la Universidad Politécnica Salesiana de Quito, a través de la carrera de Antropología, el grupo de investigación Filosofía de la (...) Educación GIFE y la editorial Abya-Yala, abrieron la puerta a esta polifonía de reflexiones analíticas y críticas que se decantan en este libro. El lector encontrará pensamientos diversos que re-crean la fiesta desde los cuerpos individuales y colectivos y sus formas de entender y sentir la ritualidad heredada, pero a la vez mediada por las necesidades emergentes de relacionarse y participar del goce y disfrute de la libertad como principal desinhibidor de colectivos sociales que reclaman su derecho a expresar lo que les es limitado, a través de las formas prohibidas fuera de la esfera ceremonial. (shrink)

In this paper the author shows that Emil Lask’s philosophy starts with considering of typical Neo-Kantian’s questions but at the same time it grounds a new philosophical perspective – Post-Neo-Kantianism. The origin of Lask’s research is Heinrich Rickert’s theory of judgment, however Lask finds many new solutions and initiates new ideas adopted from him by Martin Heidegger. The article discuss an innovative elements of Lask’s thought like: problem of the material side of cognition, logic of object, logos-immanency of object, (...) doctrine of the material determination of form, ontological theory of truth, problem of the individual subject. Although Lask does not create ontology, he makes transcendental philosophy to ask ontological questions. When we study his considerations it starts to be obvious that theory of cognition is not possible without ontology. (shrink)

The subject of the book is two twentieth-century ontological projects: the critical ontology of Nicolai Hartmann and the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger. The author presents their works as well in a historical as a systematical perspective. The book focuses on those contexts of their thoughts, which have been often overlooked. Hartmann and Heidegger’s ontology is presented first in their relation to Kant, secondly in reference to neo-Kantianism, and thirdly in relation to each other. One of the main thesis (...) of the book is that the most important difference between Hartmann and Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, and - in consequence - also between their own projects of a new ontology, results from the ambiguity of Kant’s notion of things in themselves, which they interpret and use in a different way. (shrink)

The paper deals with Gerold Prauss’s critique of cognition taken as reflection of the surrounding reality in the consciousness of the agent. The results of his critique are similar to the standpoint presented earlier by Neo-Kantians. Prauss’s original contribution to the debate on theory of reflection consists in distinction between materialistic and non-materialistic theories of reflection, as well as in his argumentation basing on the notion of clarity.