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. (shrink)

최근 들어 마이클 프리드먼(M. Friedmann)은 과학이론의 구조와 변화에 대한 신칸트주의적인 설명을 발전시키고 있다. 나는 이 글에서 프리드먼의 신칸트주의 과학철학의 주요 골자를 집약하고, 과학철학의 새로운 관점과 방법으로서 그것의 가능성을 논의해 보려 한다. 아울러 캇시러의 철학이 쿤의 공약불가능성의 문제를 해결하는 데 도움이 되지 않는다는 프리드먼의 판단의 타당성을 검토하고자 한다. 이러한 논의를 통해서 나는 신칸트주의 과학철학이 i) 논리실증주의에 대한 새로운 평가에 바탕을 두고 있으며, ii) 칸트의 선험 개념을 역사화한 상대적 선험 개념, 과학적 지식에서의 구성적 선험 원리, 메타패러다임으로서의 철학 개념 등을 통해서 쿤의 공약불가능성의 (...) 문제와 자연주의적 전체론의 문제를 해결하고자 하였으며, iii) 캇시러의 과학사 및 철학사 연구를 모델로 하는 과학적 철학을 과학철학의 새로운 연구프로그램으로 제안하고 있음을 밝히겠다. 동시에 프리드먼이 당초 추구하고자 했던 쿤, 논리실증주의, 그리고 캇시러의 융합을 보류하고 주로 초기 라이헨바흐의 칸트주의 인식론을 도입하는 것은 그의 신칸트주의적 과학철학의 한계이자 난점이라는 점을 드러내고자 한다. 아울러 프리드먼이 과학철학의 난점에 대한 해결을 모색하면서 캇시러의 입장 대신에 에밀 메이어슨과 라이헨바흐의 입장을 도입하는 것은 캇시러의 과학철학에 대한 오해에서 비롯된다는 점을 밝히고자 한다. (shrink)

Reinhold's Letters on the Kantian Philosophy is arguably the most influential book ever written concerning Kant. It provides a helpful introduction to Kant's philosophy and a valuable explanation of how that philosophy can be understood as an appropriate Enlightenment solution to the 'pantheism dispute' which dominated thought in the era of German Idealism. The first edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was slow in gaining a positive reception, but after Reinhold's Letters appeared Kant's Critical (...) class='Hi'>Philosophy suddenly attained the central position which it has held to this day. The Letters also brought fame to Reinhold, who developed his own influential 'Elementary Philosophy' and was succeeded by the leading figures of German Idealism: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This English edition of Reinhold's work includes the original 1786–7 version as well as all the major additions and changes from the 1790 edition. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The main thesis of this paper is that Pap’s The Functional A Priori of Physical Theory (Pap 1946, henceforth FAP) and Cassirer’s Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics (Cassirer 1937, henceforth DI) may be conceived as two kindred accounts of a late Neo-Kantian philosophy of science. They elucidate and clarify each other mutually by elaborating conceptual possibilities and pointing out affinities of neo-Kantian ideas with other currents of 20th century’s philosophy of science, namely, pragmatism, conventionalism, and (...) logical empiricism. Taking into account these facts, it seems not too far fetched to conjecture that under more favorable circumstances Pap could have served as a mediator between the “analytic” and “continental” tradition thereby overcoming the dogmatic dualism of these two philosophical currents that has characterized philosophy in the second half the 20th century. (shrink)

This review of contemporary discussions of Kantian philosophy of mathematics is timed for the publication of the essay Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics. Volume 1: The Critical Philosophy and Its Roots (2020) edited by Carl Posy and Ofra Rechter. The main discussions and comments are based on the texts contained in this collection. I first examine the more general questions which have to do not only with the philosophy of mathematics, but also with related areas of (...) Kant’s philosophy, e. g. the question: What is intuition and singular term? Then I look at more specific questions, e. g.: What is the subject of arithmetic and what is the significance of diagrams in mathematical reasoning? As a result, the reader is presented with a fairly complete overview of modern discussions which can be used as an introduction to the problem field of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

The Kant-Hegel relation has a continuing fascination for commentators on Hegel, and understandably so: for, taking this route into the Hegelian jungle can promise many advantages. First, it can set Hegel’s thought against a background with which we are fairly familiar, and in a way that makes its relevance clearly apparent; second, it can help us locate Hegel in the broader philosophical tradition, making us see that the traditional ‘analytic’ jump from Kant to Frege leaves out a crucial period in (...) post-Kantian thought; third, it can show Hegel in a progressive light, as attempting to take that tradition further forward; fourth, it can help us locate familiar philosophical issues in Hegelian thought that otherwise can appear wholly sui generis; and finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, focusing on this relation can help raise and crystalise some of the fascinating ambiguities concerning Hegel’s outlook, regarding whether Hegel’s response to Kant shows him to have been a reactionary, Romantic, pre-critical thinker, who sought to turn the philosophical clock back to a time before Kant had written, or a modernist, Enlightened and essentially critical one, who remained true to the spirit if not the letter of Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

Robert Hanna's twelfth book, The Fate of Analysis, is a comprehensive revisionist study of Analytic philosophy from the early 1880s to the present, with special attention paid to Wittgenstein's work and the parallels and overlaps between the Analytic and Phenomenological traditions. By means of a synoptic overview of European and Anglo-American philosophy since the 1880s-including accessible, clear, and critical descriptions of the works and influence of, among others, Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Alexius Meinong, Franz Brentano, Edmund (...) Husserl, The Vienna Circle, W.V.O. Quine, Saul Kripke, Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom, and, particularly, Ludwig Wittgenstein-The Fate of Analysis critically examines and evaluates modern philosophy over the last 140 years. In addition to its critical analyses of the Analytic tradition and of professional academic philosophy more generally, The Fate of Analysis also presents a thought-provoking, forward-looking, and positive picture of the philosophy of the future from a radical Kantian point of view. (shrink)

Reinhold's Letters on the Kantian Philosophy is arguably the most influential book ever written concerning Kant. It provides a helpful introduction to Kant's philosophy and a valuable explanation of how that philosophy can be understood as an appropriate Enlightenment solution to the 'pantheism dispute' which dominated thought in the era of German Idealism. The first edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was slow in gaining a positive reception, but after Reinhold's Letters appeared Kant's Critical (...) class='Hi'>Philosophy suddenly attained the central position which it has held to this day. The Letters also brought fame to Reinhold, who developed his own influential 'Elementary Philosophy' and was succeeded by the leading figures of German Idealism: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This English edition of Reinhold's work includes the original 1786–7 version as well as all the major additions and changes from the 1790 edition. (shrink)

This article is an investigation of parallel themes in Heinrich Hertz's philosophy science and Kant's theory of schemata, symbols and regulative ideas. It is argued that Hertz's "pictures" bears close similarities to Kantian "schemata", that is, they are rules linking concepts to intuitions and provide them with their meaning. Kant's distinction between symbols and schemata is discussed and related to Hertz's three pictures of mechanics. It is argued that Hertz considered his own picture of mechanics as symbolic in (...) a different way than the force and energy pictures. In the final part of the article it is described how Harald Høffding soon after the publication of Hertz's Principles of Mechanics developed a general theory of analogical reasoning, relying on the ideas of Hertz and Kant. (shrink)

This article is an investigation of parallel themes in Heinrich Hertz's philosophy science and Kant's theory of schemata, symbols and regulative ideas. It is argued that Hertz's "pictures" bears close similarities to Kantian "schemata", that is, they are rules linking concepts to intuitions and provide them with their meaning. Kant's distinction between symbols and schemata is discussed and related to Hertz's three pictures of mechanics. It is argued that Hertz considered his own picture of mechanics (the "hidden mass" (...) picture) as symbolic in a different way than the force and energy pictures. In the final part of the article it is described how Harald Høffding soon after the publication of Hertz's Principles of Mechanics developed a general theory of analogical reasoning, relying on the ideas of Hertz and Kant. (shrink)

Despite our common self-conceptions, we philosophers have our myths, heroes, and guiding narratives. Our work may emphasize conceptual clarity and deductive arguments, but these more sober and discursive elements of our work always occurs within the context of a broader, often implicit, and frequently illusive orientation, within the scope of some particular vision of our vocation, our history, and our place within the contemporary world. These visions are meta-philosophical: they precede and frame philosophical work, and they engender the most intractable (...) philosophical disputes. Thus, for the sake of self-knowledge and rational discussion, we should constantly struggle to articulate and scrutinize these myths and narratives. Which predecessors do we continue to read? Why? What repeated stories and anecdotes generate our common and competing identities? What do past episodes in the history of philosophy mean, and how do they direct our current endeavors? Like every community, we philosophers sustain our collective work through stories, through the celebration of our heroes, and through repeated reference to paradigmatic arguments and texts. We should reflect upon these sustaining elements of our community, even if this requires modes of thought that lie beyond conceptual analysis, deductive argument, and the careful interpretation of canonical texts. -/- In this paper, I excavate and criticize the contours of one narrative that still guides us, the common celebration of Kant’s critical philosophy as a radical, farsighted, disruptive, irresistible, and irrevocable break with the religious and metaphysical dogmatism of its age. In Section 2, I briefly sketch two complementary versions of this narrative, the accounts provided by the Hegelian philosopher Eduard Gans and by the poet Heinrich Heine. Drawing various parallels with the French Revolution, these thinkers significantly overemphasize the skeptical, destructive, anti-metaphysical, anti-religious and historically discontinuous aspects of Kant’s critical philosophy, which they portray as the inauguration of a new and robust philosophical movement, one that rapidly vanquished its intellectually beleaguered and reactionary opponents. In Sections 2–4, I then turn to consider three of the more active and vociferous opponents of the Kantian movement: Basilius von Ramdohr, Friedrich Nicolai, and Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob. Contrary to the standard version of events, these men had little sympathy for metaphysics, religion, rationalism, and dogmatic certitude. In fact, they principally opposed the Kantian movement as the unwelcome resurgence of an outdated form of quasi-religious enthusiasm, as a form of philosophical Schwärmerei that threatened to appropriate the banner of reason and hinder the progress of enlightenment. -/- Drawing upon a wide range of late eighteenth-century German texts on the dangers and varied manifestations of Schwärmerei, I reconstruct Ramdohr’s, Nicolai’s, and Jakob’s vision of the Kantian movement. I argue that the charges of philosophical Schwärmerei highlight three meta-philosophical disputes that pitted these anti-Kantians against many proponents of the Kantian movement. These disputes involved: (a) the social role of the philosopher and her relation to the general public; (b) the place of internal and/or private experience within the open and polyphonic domain of public discourse; and (c) the merits of philosophical systematicity, technical neologisms, and more hermetic versions of semantic holism. -/- A consideration of these meta-philosophical disputes allows us to position Kant’s critical philosophy more accurately within its historical context, to highlight its significant continuities with the intellectual assumptions of the Berlin Enlightenment, those assumptions that largely inform Ramdohr’s, Nicolai’s, and Jakob’s attacks on the so-called Kantian movement. These continuities then reveal the meta-philosophical distance between Kant and “the Kantian movement”, between the texts of the critical philosophy and the projects of Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. This challenges the traditional account. We often celebrate Kant’s critical philosophy as a radical break with the past, as the inauguration of new and fundamentally modern assumptions, which were then developed and elaborated by the post-Kantian Idealists. By contrast, I argue for a series of complex, ambivalent, and often unintended breaks: while occasionally celebrating his intellectual achievements as an epochal “Copernican Revolution”, Kant largely remains true to the guiding assumptions and philosophical values of his age, only occasionally deflecting them in minor but portentous ways. By contrast, while Reinhold and Fichte at least initially proclaimed their fidelity to the “spirit” – if not the letter – of Kant’s philosophy, they nonetheless managed to release a new and strange philosophical spirit, a potent, quasi-secularized, and post-Enlightenment form of Schwärmerei. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 410 - 443 This article contends that despite Richard Rorty’s famous rejection of metaphysics, his work nonetheless offers a philosophy of history, and that his account mirrors that of Kant’s, a figure Rorty considered one of his primary conceptual adversaries. Although Rorty often presents his approach to history as a foil to Kant’s, his account has striking parallels to the latter’s regulative meliorism. In similar fashion, far from being a blind optimist, Kant (...) provides a critical, progressive vision of history as necessary for the purposes of social action. Properly understood, Kant buttresses rather than undermines Rorty’s aims, and had Rorty engaged his work on history more seriously, he might have avoided some of the more problematic elements of his own prophetic patriotism. Despite Rorty’s dismissal of his work as the apotheosis of the absolute, this article argues that Kant’s regulative philosophy of history is more pragmatically oriented towards concrete social change than Rorty’s. (shrink)

The paper discusses Arvi Grotenfelt's, professor of philosophy in Helsinki 1905 – 29, reading of Heinrich Rickert's philosophy of history. Rickert was one of the key figures of the so-called south-west German neo-Kantianism. In the center of attention of the south- west neo-Kantians was the topic that Immanuel Kant himself had omitted: how to philosophically establish the humanities and the social sciences and separate them from the natural sciences? Rickert's philosophy of history was essentially an attempt to (...) ground the historical knowledge in a strictly transcendental philosophy in the Kantian sense. His argumentation relied on his concept of value. Grotenfelt did not share Rickert's definition of values. According to his view, the fundamental foundation of our judgements of value is beyond scientific reasoning. I will also argue that Grotenfelt's standpoint has a general affinity to Wilhelm Dilthey's philosophy of world view. (shrink)

Constantine Zurayk, one of the most important Arab thinkers of the twentieth century, has examined and reflected on the principal political events and cultural crises of the period. His main philosophical theses are seen in relation to the "Kulturphilosophie" of turn-of-the-century German thinkers, in particular to the philosophies of life of Dilthey, Nietzsche, and Simmel and to the Neo-Kantian thought of Ernst Cassirer. Both the virtues and shortcomings of Zurayk's philosophy of culture, especially in the Arab context, are (...) seen in his distinction between, and elaboration on, the descriptive and normative approaches to culture. (shrink)

Every epoch possesses its proper Plato, its proper Thomas and its proper Kant. To interpret or to assimilate a doctrine does not merely consist in the knowledge of that which the author has literally taught but rather in representing to oneself one's own impression while reading. The new literature which has appeared since 1950 will in the future behave just like the preceding: the attempt will be made to re-think the authentic Criticism as well as to complete Kant's intellectual portrait (...) by carving out certain aspects of his thought which are little or not yet known. (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)

(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.

This chapter is about Grete Hermann, a philosopher-mathematician who productively and mutually beneficially interacted with the founders of quantum mechanics in the early period of that theory's elaboration. Hermann was a neo-Kantian philosopher. At the heart of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy lay the question of the conditions under which we can be said to know something objectively, a question Hermann found to be particularly pressing in quantum mechanics. Hermann's own approach to Neo-Kantianism was Neo-Friesian. Jakob Friedrich Fries, like (...) Kant, had understood critical philosophy to be an essentially epistemic project. Fries departed from Kant in his account of the elements involved in our cognition. In this chapter it is discussed how, beginning from a neo-Friesian understanding of critical philosophy, Hermann is led to conclude that quantum mechanics shows us that physical knowledge is fundamentally split; that the objects of quantum mechanics are only objects from a particular perspective and in the context of a particular physical interaction. It will be seen how Hermann's solution to the problem of objectivity in quantum mechanics is a natural one from a neo-Friesian point of view, even though it disagrees with those offered by more orthodox versions of Kantian doctrine. (shrink)

Resumo Não há dúvida que tanto Kant como Hegel viram os seus respectivos trabalhos, como contribuições para aquilo que consideravam ser a “metafísica”. No entanto, a autora argumenta, que isto só deve ser compreendido, tendo presente, as concepções de metafísica de cada um dos autores. A autora, começando pela distinção implícita entre metafísica geral e metafísica especial na Crítica da Razão Pura, argumenta que Kant, Fichte, Schelling e Hegel comprometeram-se com uma investigação que, até essa altura, era do domínio da (...) metafísica geral. A autora, concentrando-se na noção de sistema de razão pura, tal como aludido na Crítica da Razão Pura, mostra, que os sucessores de Kant, interpretaram erroneamente a distinção kantiana entre crítica e sistema, o que permitiu elaborarem um sistema completo de razão pura, contrário àquilo que era intenção de Kant. Palavras-chave : Fichte, Hegel, idealismo alemão, Kant, metafísica, sistemaThere is no doubt that both Kant and Hegel saw their work as contributions to what they considered metaphysics proper. Yet what they meant by this, I argue, can only be understood by taking into account their own conception of metaphysics. Starting from Kant’s implicit distinction between general metaphysics and special metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason, I argue that Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel engaged in the investigation that used to be carried out in general metaphysics. Focusing on the notion of a system of pure reason intimated in the Critique of Pure Reason, I show, moreover, that Kant’s successors, while misinterpreting the Kantian distinction between critique and system, elaborated a method that made it possible to produce a complete system of pure reason, albeit one that differed from the system Kant had in mind. Keywords : Fichte, german idealism, Hegel, Kant, metaphysics, system. (shrink)

Sebastian Luft explores the philosophy of culture championed by the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism. Following a historical trajectory from Hermann Cohen to Paul Natorp and through to Ernst Cassirer, he defends the attractiveness of a philosophical culture in the transcendental vein.

In this paper, I argue that Heisenberg's mature philosophy of quantum mechanics must be understood in the context of his epistemological project to reinterpret and redefine Kant's notion of the a priori. After discussions with Weizsäcker and Hermann in Leipzig in the 1930s, Heisenberg attempted to ground his interpretation of quantum mechanics on what might be termed a 'practical' transformation of Kantian philosophy. Taking as his starting point, Bohr's doctrine of the indispensability of classical concepts, Heisenberg argued (...) that concepts such as space, time and causality can be regarded as 'practically a priori', in so far as they remain the conditions for the possibility of experience and even of 'objective reality', though they are not universal and necessary in a strictly Kantian sense. We cannot avoid using classical concepts in the description of experiments in quantum theory, despite the fact that there are limits to their applicability. Such concepts are, for Heisenberg, historically contingent, yet indispensable in our time, because we have no other language through which we can describe and conceive of the interaction between 'object' and 'measuring device'. (shrink)

Recent work in the history of philosophy of science details the Kantianism of philosophers often thought opposed to one another, e.g., Hans Reichenbach, C.I. Lewis, Rudolf Carnap, and Thomas Kuhn. Historians of philosophy of science in the last two decades have been particularly interested in the Kantianism of Reichenbach, Carnap, and Kuhn, and more recently, of Lewis. While recent historical work focuses on recovering the threatened-to-be-forgotten Kantian themes of early twentieth-century philosophy of science, we should not (...) elide the differences between the Kantian strands running throughout this work. In this paper, I disentangle a few of these strands in the work of Reichenbach and Lewis focusing especially on their theories of relativized, constitutive a priori principles in empirical knowledge. In particular, I highlight three related differences between Reichenbach and Lewis concerning their motivations in analyzing scientific knowledge and scientific practice, their differing conceptions of constitutivity, and their relativization of constitutive a priori principles. In light of these differences, I argue Lewis’s Kantianism is more similar to Kuhn’s Kantianism than Reichenbach’s, and so might be of more contemporary relevance to social and practice-based approaches to the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Sebastian Luft presents and defends the philosophy of culture championed by the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism. Following a historical trajectory from Hermann Cohen to Paul Natorp and through to Ernst Cassirer, this book makes a systematic case for the viability and attractiveness of a philosophical culture in a transcendental vein, in the manner in which the Marburgers intended to broaden Kant's approach.

Michael Friedman has recently developed a neo-Kantian conception of science as a rival to holistic accounts. According to Friedman, the main virtue of his neo-Kantian philosophy is that it resolves the problem of incommensurability. A close reading of Friedman's work, however, indicates that his account surprisingly accomplishes the opposite of what he believes to have defended. This article will argue that the real virtue of Friedman's neo-Kantian account of scientific theories is not that it resolves the (...) problem of incommensurability but that it provides an elegant philosophical account much needed to substantiate Thomas Kuhn's historical thesis of incommensurability. -/- . (shrink)

This collection situates Deleuze's work and several of his most important concepts in the context of his post-Kantian predecessors, further illuminating both the breadth of his philosophical heritage and the manner in which he moves beyond it. Through a series of studies by leading scholars in the field, At the Edges of Thought sheds new light on key philosophical encounters with thinkers such as Maimon, Kleist, Hölderlin, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Feuerbach in Deleuze's texts. Readers are invited to join (...) with Deleuze as he traverses and transforms post-Kantian philosophy, taking it towards the very edges of thought. (shrink)