Przemyslaw Parszutowicz

The article represents an attempt to determine the essence of critical philosophy in the light of Kantian distinction between aggregate and system. In order to achieve this, the article harks back to Kant’s work and to accomplishments of Marburg School of neo-Kantianism and particularly to Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy. Discrimination between aggregate and system as two possible types of knowledge representation rests on the precedent discrimination between substance and function and constitutes the main motive that determines the basic core of philosophical transcendental method in its opposition to the“dogmatic” method

The goal of the essay History of Philosophy as History of the Problem of Knowledge is to show how the history of philosophy was practiced in neokantian School in Marburg . Their method was based on the historical and genetic analysis. As a result of that analysis every particular philosophical conception, both historical and contemporary, is discussed as articulation and reiterated attempt to solve some of the perennial philosophical problems. The purpose of such reformulation, however, is not another description of particular epistemological standpoints. Is seeks – according to chief principals of the critical philosophy – the ultimate base for the possibility of their variety and thus apportion of the main function of the evolution of the epistemological issues

The article adumbrates the opposition between Aristotelian “metaphysical” meaning of the concept of substance and its critical relational meaning, strongly accentuated by the Marburg Neokantian School. Th is opposition was creatively developed by the aforementioned School. It starts with a critique of Aristotle and his concept of the “substance as being in itself” and proceeds to demonstrate with the reference to the Kantian transcendentalism that concept of the “substance as function” is one of the a priori rules of synthetic cognition. In the Marburg School, the history of the development of these two meanings takes the form of a history of two opposing directions of the thought: dogmatic philosophy – leaning toward the former meaning, and critical – based on the latter

The essey The concept of Reality is a part of the first systematic work of Ernst Cassirer, the alumnus of the Marburg school, titled Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. Untersuchungen über Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik . It developed certain position concerning the problem of reality, which is representative for this school. This conception, and especially the shift of cognitive perspective, from substantial to functional, contained in it, is crucial as far as the whole later Cassirer’s work is concerned and it comes as the foundation for the subsequent theory of symbolic forms

The essey The concept of Reality is a part of the first systematic work of Ernst Cassirer, the alumnus of the Marburg school, titled Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. Untersuchungen über Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik. It developed certain position concerning the problem of reality, which is representative for this school. This conception, and especially the shift of cognitive perspective, from substantial to functional, contained in it, is crucial as far as the whole later Cassirer’s work is concerned and it comes as the foundation for the subsequent theory of symbolic forms.

The article analyses systematically and historically the specific idea of transcendentalism developed in the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism. The unique line of the Marburg’s School interpretation of Kant’s critical philosophy consists in contrasting critical and dogmatic understandings of basic philosophical concepts. This line is characteristic of the Marburg School idealism, and it perfectly grasps Ernst Cassirer’s peculiar understanding of philosophy—as “the critique of knowledge.” The main thesis of this paper is the following one: the critical method understood as the method of searching for fundamental principles and conditions of possibility of objectiveness is a basic tool of analysis and investigations carried out by Cassirer.

The main goal of the paper is to show that Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms may be viewed as a culmination of efforts of those thinkers who at the turn of the 19 th and 20 th century were a part of the so called anti-positivist movement. The paper focuses fore and foremost on those philosophers who in their attempts of grounding and defining Geisteswissenschaften were following the initial idea of Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Cassirer’s symbolical monism is presented as an attempt of identifying that “original need of human mind”, an attempt which ultimately paved way for determining and establishing a distinctively different type of reflection than the one found in natural sciences, despite all the multifariousness of seemingly unreconcilable results arrived at by different thinkers. The author argues that Cassirer’s conception – unlike those found in the works of Droysen, Dilthey, Rickert or Windelband – strives to ground Geisteswissenschaften’s conditions of possibility not on the Kantian concept of determining judgment, but on a concept of reflective judgment, i.e., not on the Kantian concept of the scheme, but on concept of symbol which in turn makes it possible to establish a methodological and symbolic-cultural unity of both natural sciences and humanities.