Online research in philosophy

According to Michael Friedman, Ernst Cassirer’s “outstanding contribution [to Neo-Kantianism] was to articulate, for the first time, a clear and coherent conception of formal logic within the context of the Marburg School” (Friedman 2000, p. 30). In his paper “Kant und die moderne Mathematik” (1907), Cassirer argued not only that the new relational logic of Frege1 and Russell was a major breakthrough with profound philosophical implications, but also that the logicist thesis itself was a “fact” of modern mathematics. Cassirer summarizes his evaluation of Russell’s work: Here logic and mathematics have been fused into a true, henceforth indissoluble unity; and from this inner connection there arises for each ..

On the surface, Ernst Cassirer's and Martin Heidegger's discussion in Davos (1929) can be understood as confontation between Cassirer's neo-kantian Philosophy of Culture and Heidegger's phenomenological Analysis of Existence (Daseinsanalyse). This common understanding however neglects, that both contrahents try to overcome the same problem: though in totally different ways, they try to overcome the speculative (logical and metaphysical) problem concerning the Unity of (theoretical and practical) reason, that was set by their late teacher resp. colleague Paul Natorp.

I show why Michael Friedman’s idea that we should view new constitutive frameworks introduced in paradigm change as members of a convergent series introduces an uncomfortable tension in his views. It cannot be justified on realist grounds, as this would compromise his Kantian perspective, but his own appeal to a Kantian regulative ideal of reason cannot do the job either. I then explain a way to make better sense of the rationality of paradigm change on what I take to be Friedman’s own terms. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy and Moral Science, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, B‐9000 Ghent, Belgium; e‐mail: maarten.vandyck@ugent.be . The aim of our modified version of Kantianism … has nothing to do with certainty or epistemic security at all. It aims, rather, at precisely … universal rationality, as our reason grows increasingly self‐conscious and thereby takes responsibility for itself. (Friedman 2001 , 68).

One of the most important philosophical topics in the early twentieth century ? and a topic that was seminal in the emergence of analytic philosophy ? was the relationship between Kantian philosophy and modern geometry. This paper discusses how this question was tackled by the Neo-Kantian trained philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Surprisingly, Cassirer does not affirm the theses that contemporary philosophers often associate with Kantian philosophy of mathematics. He does not defend the necessary truth of Euclidean geometry but instead develops a kind of logicism modeled on Richard Dedekind's foundations of arithmetic. Further, because he shared with other Neo-Kantians an appreciation of the developmental and historical nature of mathematics, Cassirer developed a philosophical account of the unity and methodology of mathematics over time. With its impressive attention to the detail of contemporary mathematics and its exploration of philosophical questions to which other philosophers paid scant attention, Cassirer's philosophy of mathematics surely deserves a place among the classic works of twentieth century philosophy of mathematics. Though focused on Cassirer's philosophy of geometry, this paper also addresses both Cassirer's general philosophical orientation and his reading of Kant.

A description and critique of aspects of Michael Friedman's latter day NeoKantian program in the philosophy of science.

Biographical material.--Descriptive and critical essays on the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer.--The philosopher speaks for himself.--Bibliography of the writings of Ernst Cassirer.

Abstract. In Dynamics of Reason Michael Friedman proposes a kind of synthesis between the neokantianism of Ernst Cassirer, the logical empiricism of Rudolf Carnap, and the historicism of Thomas Kuhn. Cassirer and Carnap are to take care of the Kantian legacy of modern philosophy of science, encapsulated in the concept of a relativized a priori and the globally rational or continuous evolution of scientific knowledge,while Kuhn´s role is to ensure that the historicist character of scientific knowledge is taken seriously. More precisely, Carnapian linguistic frameworks, guarantee that the evolution of science procedes in a rational manner locally,while Cassirer’s concept of an internally defined conceptual convergence of empirical theories provides the means to maintain the global continuity of scientific reason. In this paper it is argued that Friedman’s neokantian account of scientific reason based on the concept of the relativized a priori underestimates the pragmatic aspects of the dynamics of scientific reason. To overcome this short-coming, I propose to reconsider C.I. Lewis’s account of a pragmatic the priori, recently modernized and elaborated by Hasok Chang. This may be<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>Keywords: Dynamics of reason, Paradigms, Logical Empiricism,Neokantianism, Pragmatism, Mathematics, Communicative Rationality.