Evan Clarke

This chapter presents an overview of the Neo‐Kantian movement in philosophy that spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that was concentrated geographically in Germany. Following a summary of the institutional and intellectual context surrounding Neo‐Kantianism, the chapter explores the core philosophical principles associated with the movement, attending in particular to the ways in which Neo‐ Kantian philosophers appropriate and depart from the core tenets of Kant's critical philosophy. After briefly surveying the context in which Neo‐Kantianism took shape, the chapter surveys the two major “schools” into which the movement crystallized around 1880: the Marburg School, comprised primarily of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer, and the Baden, or Southwest School, comprised principally of Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, and Emil Lask. Both schools of Neo‐ Kantianism are marked by a rich and fascinating process of internal conceptual development.

This essay examines the debate that arose immediately following the publication of the first volume of Edmund Husserl's Ideas regarding the model of concept formation that Husserl sketches in that work. After a brief overview of the relevant passages from the Ideas, I take up essay-length responses to Husserl by August Messer, Theodor Elsenhans, and Heinrich Gustav Steinmann. Reflecting a variety of empiricist commitments, all three authors are skeptical that concepts can be expected to embody the essence of a corresponding phenomenon. Subsequently, I review the responses to these critiques offered by Husserl, his then-assistant Edith Stein, and Paul Linke. For Linke, it is at least highly probable that certain concepts derive their content from an apprehension of essence. The empiricist alternative, he argues, is fatally unstable. Husserl and Stein, meanwhile, offer a more forceful defense of this position. Unless we allow that certain kinds of concepts can originate from a grasp of essence, they argue, we will be unable to explain how certain manifest cognitive accomplishments are possible.

Samantha Matherne has written an excellent, timely introduction to the thought of Ernst Cassirer, the brilliant polymath who was the last representative of the “Marburg school” of neo-Kantianism, and who is well-known for wrangling a wide range of cultural phenomena into a system of “symbolic forms.” Despite Cassirer’s recent rise in prominence in the English-speaking philosophical world, there is only one other single-volume survey of his thought in English, Edward Skidelsky’s Ernst Cassirer. Matherne’s book has the merit of helping to shore up this scholarly gap, and of providing a clear and succinct presentation of the philosophical system that...

This paper looks at the neo-Kantian response to Darwinism as a historical science. I distinguish four responses to this aspect of Darwin’s thought from within the neo-Kantian tradition. The first line of response, represented by August Stadler and Bruno Bauch, views Darwin’s model of historical explanation as a fulfilment of Kant’s criteria of scientific intelligibility. The second, represented by Otto Liebmann, regards historical explanation as intrinsically limited, because it cannot tell us why nature develops as it does. The third line of response questions whether we can give a historical account of qualitative change. Friedrich Lange expresses this scepticism in general terms, while Alois Riehl and Ernst Cassirer extend it to human beings specifically. A fourth line of response, represented by Heinrich Rickert, challenges the misperception that Darwinian explanatory principles such as natural selection have normative or socio-political significance.