Journal of the History of Philosophy

Frederick Beiser’s book is a valuable contribution to the revival of neo-Kantian studies characterizing the past few years: a trend that is blowing the dust off this important, yet hitherto neglected chapter of the history of philosophy. The quality of Beiser’s writing is excellent throughout, showing mastery of an impressive range of sources and treating with equal competence a variety of topics in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of religion.

In part 1, Beiser advances his most original historical claim about neo-Kantianism. He argues that the movement has its origin in what he calls the “lost tradition” (11), that is, the empirical-psychological approach to Kant’s transcendental philosophy developed by Jakob Friedrich Fries, Johann Friedrich Herbart, and Friedrich Eduard Beneke in the early nineteenth century. In spite of doctrinal differences, these thinkers share both a rejection of speculative idealism, and the belief that transcendental philosophy ought to look at the empirical sciences (in particular: psychology) to articulate its standpoint consistently. The importance attributed to the lost tradition leads Beiser to significantly backdate the beginning of the neo-Kantian movement and argue that the “first statement of the neo-Kantian programme” (17) and one of its “foundational works” (29) is Fries’s Reinhold, Fichte und Schelling, published in 1803, when Kant was still alive. This is an intriguing proposal; however, it remains unclear whether Beiser wants to defend the strong claim that the lost tradition is as such already part of the neo-Kantian movement or the weaker claim that neo-Kantianism proper is a later “transfiguration” (177) of the lost tradition. This would have been important to clarify because, if according to Beiser neo-Kantianism stretches back to the years when Kant was alive and active, the prefix ‘neo’ should probably be dropped, and we should either simply talk about ‘Kantianism’ (thereby inevitably raising the question of what tradition deserves that exclusive label) or come up with an entirely new historical category.

After an informative chapter about “The Interim Years,” where Beiser introduces the key themes of materialism and the identity crisis of philosophy in the wake of the rise of empirical science in mid-nineteenth century, in part 2, we learn about the work of Kuno Fischer, Eduard Zeller, Otto Liebmann, Jürgen Bona Meyer, and Friedrich Albert Lange. Beiser’s treatment of these thinkers (more traditionally recognized as neo-Kantians) reveals the growing complexity of the movement. Both Fischer and Zeller, for example, have a complicated relationship to Hegel that cannot be reduced to outright rejection; Liebmann jettisons Kant’s thing-in-itself and rehabilitates metaphysics to avoid materialism; and Meyer and Lange endeavor to rekindle the original spirit of critical philosophy by showing how materialism as a form of metaphysics is as indefensible as idealism. In Beiser’s narrative, this first wave of neo-Kantianism is characterized by the dominance of a psychological reading of Kant and the idea that philosophy should have the same methodological outlook as the empirical sciences (245–46, 276, 336–41). With the exception of Liebmann, who begins to question the widespread claim that psychology could provide the foundation for epistemology (312), the purely normative reading of Kant was yet to be developed.

In part 2, Beiser turns to consider the rise of the normative reading of Kant in the work of the young Hermann Cohen, Wilhelm Windelband, and Alois Riehl. All three thinkers are characterized by a psychological beginning and a progressive turn to a conception of transcendental philosophy as a science of norms (as Windelband puts it, 502–6), concerned with the a priori, formal conditions of scientific thinking (as Cohen establishes in his acclaimed Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 482–89) and not with facts about the human cognitive apparatus.

The distinction between a psychological phase and an epistemological phase in the reading of Kant among the neo-Kantians is certainly correct, as it is correct to point out the originality of Cohen’s and Windelband’s normative approach...