Gregory Moynahan

Introduction "reading a mute history": Ernst Cassirer, the Marburg School and the crises of modern Germany -- The Marburg School and the politics of science in Germany -- The twentieth-century conflict of the faculties: the Marburg School and the reform of the sciences -- Cassirer and the Marburg School in the administrative and political context of the Kaiserreich -- "The supreme principles of knowledge": Cassirer's transformation of the tenets of Cohen's infinitesimal method (1882) and system of philosophy (1902-1912) -- Critical science and modernity -- Leibniz and the foundation of critical science: Leibniz's system in its scientific foundations -- Science and history in Cassirer"s substance and function -- Liberal democracy and law -- Liberalism and the conflict of forms: the knowledge problem (1906-1940) and freedom and form -- Law as science and the "coming-into-being" of natural right in Cohen, Cassirer and Kelsen -- Conclusion critical science, the future of humanity and the riddle of an essay on man.

Psychology was to be the capstone of Hermann Cohen’s never-completed System of Philosophy [1902 – 1912], encompassing his planned fourth volume and culminating his earlier critical studies of the transcendental logic of the natural sciences, ethics, and aesthetics. In opposition to empirical psychology, Cohen’s psychology was intended as a study of “the macrocosm of humanity in the microcosm of the cultural human.” It would reveal “the illusion of a closed unity of consciousness” even as it established a new “open” definition of the unity of humanity in relation to the future. As such, psychology depended on the critical work of his earlier volumes to avoid false definitions of substance in the natural sciences and of subjectivity in the ethical sciences and law. Psychology was the pivotal field for the most vexing problem of Cohen’s Marburg School, the relation of philosophy and science, and provides a lens for viewing the broader historical division of the natural sciences and humanities. The recent discovery of Ernst Cassirer’s notebooks from Cohen’s 1899 lectures on psychology allow us both to date Cohen’s planned psychology from the beginning of his late philosophy and to develop a clearer understanding of its reception.

: Few texts summarize and at the same time compound the challenges of their author's philosophy so sharply as Hermann Cohen's Das Prinzip der Infinitesimalmethode und seine Geschichte (1883). The book's meaning and style are greatly illuminated by placing it in the scientific, political, and academic context of late-nineteenth century Germany. As this context changed, so did both the reception of the philosophy of the infinitesimal and of the Marburg school more generally. A study of this transformation casts significant light on the political relevance of the philosophy of science in theWilhelmine era. As a means of following this development across time, Cohen's text is read through its changing reception in the philosophy of his closest disciple, Ernst Cassirer

This dissertation evaluates and resituates "culture" as an interpretative paradigm in the humanities and social sciences by examining an important phase of its history in early twentieth-century Germany. Focusing on the work of Ernst Cassirer in his career-long engagement with his teacher and colleague Georg Simmel , the study details the conflict between the functionalist definition of culture offered in Cassirer's writings and the definition of culture in the dominant "life-philosophy" [Lebensphilosophie] of the period. As advanced by figures such as the philosopher Ludwig Klages and later popularized by Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West , Lebensphilosophie claimed that different cultures were essential and perceptible entities. The method of studying culture was based on the model of biological morphology and, more precisely, a 'characterology' or 'physiognomy' derived from the physiognomic study of individuals. Cassirer sought to reformulate the basic assumptions of Lebensphilosophie through a functionalist theory of knowledge that he developed initially as a theory of natural science in his Substance and Function . Functionalism in Cassirer's sense was a type of process philosophy or philosophy of difference that sought to avoid substantive or 'thing-like' descriptions of the world in favor of relational descriptions . The challenge that the theme of culture posed to such a theory was how to explain form and the immediacy of personal experience relationally. Cassirer's response to this problem is highlighted in his writings on Simmel, a figure whose work occupies a middle ground between functionalism and Lebensphilosophie. As the means to orient this complex debate in its historical, scientific, and political context, Cassirer and Simmel's theories and methodologies for studying culture are explicated through their reformulation of a central trope of Lebensphilosophie: the problem of 'physiognomy' or, in its functionalist definition, the 'face-to-face' relation. By this methodological device, the development of the modern definition of culture can be seen to have been shaped by several apparently heterogenous debates, including those on 'holisitic thinking' in biology and politics, a political defense of democratic liberalism, a reaction against neo-Kantianism, and a redefinition of the problem of legal individuality

Few texts summarize and at the same time compound the challenges of their author's philosophy so sharply as Hermann Cohen's Das Prinzip der Infinitesimalmethode und seine Geschichte . The book's meaning and style are greatly illuminated by placing it in the scientific, political, and academic context of late-nineteenth century Germany. As this context changed, so did both the reception of the philosophy of the infinitesimal and of the Marburg school more generally. A study of this transformation casts significant light on the political relevance of the philosophy of science in theWilhelmine era. As a means of following this development across time, Cohen's text is read through its changing reception in the philosophy of his closest disciple, Ernst Cassirer

The ArgumentBiology, understood in turn-of-the-century Germany to include psychology, held a central but enigmatic place in the philosopher Ernst Cassirer's work. From his earliest studies with Hermann Cohen through his long engagement with the theoretical biology of Jakob von Uexküll and Adolf Meyer-Abich, Cassirer consistently used the history and practice of biology to examine and delineate a set of characteristic tensions between the natural and cultural sciences. This paper examines Cassirer's treatment of this theme by addressing two contrasting interpretations he gave — in hisPhilosophy of Symbolic Forms and in hisEssay on Man — to the benchmark case from empirical psychology of the “talking” horse “Clever Hans.” The original case involved the horse's ability to signal answers to remarkably complex questions by stamping its hooves, an ability that ultimately appeared to rest on a capacity to detect extremely minute unintentional movement cues in its auditors as it reached the appropriate answer. Due to both Cassirer's shifting description of the case within his philosophy and the case's inherent polyvalence, Cassirer's remarks provide a useful window onto the social, epistemological, and stylistic meaning of his “unified” philosophy of human culture and science.