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At the turn of the twentieth century, Helm and Ostwald were the most prominent supporters of so-called 'energetics', which aimed to unify all physics by employing the sole concept of energy, without relying on mechanical models. This paper argues that Cassirer's interest in the history of the energy principle and the energetic controversy is entangled with the main themes of his philosophy of physics up to the 1920s: the opposition between the a priori and the a posteriori and the substance-concept and the function-concept. These interwoven motifs are not always easy to disentangle. The paper suggests that Cassirer's interpretation of the energy principle can serve as a guiding thread that runs through Cassirer's philosophy of physics up to the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paul Natorp argues that the problem of method is the fundamental question of philosophy. However, this representative of Neo-Kantianism proposes two apparently irreconcilable methodological requirements: a) philosophy should be a fi rst science that is independent of any other and, b) philosophy must start from the fact of science. The aim of this paper is to clarify how these two methodological requirements are combined in Natorp’s system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the role played by Fechner's psychophysics--the new science meant to measure sensation as a function of the stimulus--in the development of Marburg Neo-Kantianism. It will show how Cohen, in the early 1870s, in order to make sense of Kant's obscure principle of the Anticipations of Perception, resorted to psychophysics' parlance of the relation between stimulus and sensation. By the end of the decade, Cohen's remarks encouraged the early 'Cohen circle' (Stadler, Elsas, Müller) to pursue what were often sophisticated analyses of the problem of the measurability of sensation. This paper argues that in reaction to these contributions, Cohen shifted his interests towards the history of the infinitesimal calculus in his controversial 1883 monograph, Das Princip der Infinitesimal-Methode. This book, with its characteristic amalgam of transcendental philosophy and history of science, paved the way to what, around 1900, would become the "Marburg school" (Natorp, Cassirer, Görland and others). However, it also interrupted a promising discussion in Marburg on the problem of measurability in science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper offers an introduction to Hermann Cohen's Das Princip der Infinitesimal-Methode (1883), and recounts the history of its controversial reception by Cohen's early sympathizers, who would become the so-called ‘Marburg school’ of Neo-Kantianism, as well as the reactions it provoked outside this group. By dissecting the ambiguous attitudes of the best-known representatives of the school (Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer), as well as those of several minor figures (August Stadler, Kurd Lasswitz, Dimitry Gawronsky, etc.), this paper shows that Das Princip der Infinitesimal-Methode is a unicum in the history of philosophy: it represents a strange case of an unsuccessful book's enduring influence. The “puzzle of Cohen's Infinitesimalmethode ,” as we will call it, can be solved by looking beyond the scholarly results of the book, and instead focusing on the style of philosophy it exemplified. Moreover, the paper shows that Cohen never supported, but instead explicitly opposed, the doctrine of the centrality of the ‘concept of function’, with which Marburg Neo-Kantianism is usually associated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the ways in which Mikhail Bakhtin had appropriated the ideas of Kant and of the Marburg neo-Kantian school. While Bakhtin was greatly indebted to Kantian philosophy, and is known to have referred to himself as a neo-Kantian, he rejects the main tenets of neo-Kantianism. Instead, Bakhtin offers a substantial re-interpretation of Kantian thought. His frequent borrowings from neo-Kantian philosophers (Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and others) also follow a distinctive pattern of appropriation, whereby blocks of interconnected ideas are removed from their original context, and made to serve Bakhtin's own-substantially different-philosophical purposes in the context of his own thought. Bakhtin's thought thus remains original even as he is borrowing ideas from others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics offered a sustained criticism of Hermann Cohen's foundations of neo-Kantianism, evoking a radical rethinking of the basis of Marburg thought by Cohen's student, Ernst Cassirer. Russell's criticisms were directed at the understanding of the concepts of the differential calculus, which grounded the objectivity of scientific thought in Cohen's effort to resurrect the Kantian transcendental project. On the basis of Russell's criticisms, Cassirer abandoned Cohen's foundations and instead drew on the general relational form, borrowed from Russell's work in mathematical logic, to serve as the a priori source of objectivity. However, Cassirer's reliance on Russell's thought was limited, for he rejected Russell's Logicism, the principal philosophical thesis of his Principles. Instead, Cassirer specified that the serial relation, as defined by the Formalist mathematicians, was the source of objectivity of the advanced mathematical sciences. The result was a structuralist epistemology, which was not only founded on distinctively Marburg premises, but deepened and enriched its traditional doctrines, like the genetic conception of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I argue that the contemporary normative analysis of EU foreign policy is predominantly Kantian. This, I argue, is highly problematic, because at the heart of Kantian and neo-Kanitan accounts of ethics is a moral universalism that ought not to animate EU foreign policy unless that foreign policy desires to be neo-colonial. I set out why this is the case by developing an account of ethics derived from the writings of Alasdair Maclntyre. Maclntyre's account of ethics is both critical of Kantian universalism and provides a constructive alternative for evaluating moral behaviour and I use both sets of insights to evaluate neo-Kantianism in EU studies and liberal universalism as a suitable foundation for an ethical foreign policy of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 toward 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work is an attempt to systematically read the "crisis articles" of Matvei Kagan (1889-1937), a Russian philosopher of Jewish origin who was a student and follower of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer, and a close friend of Mikhail Bakhtin during his early, constitutive participation in the Nevel Circle (1918-1920). The articles are discussed in the context of Kagan's main realm, the philosophy of history; however, they present Kagan as a philosopher of culture and religion. In these works, Kagan defines the origins of the European cultural crisis of the 1910s and 1920s in the terms of Jewish monotheism, and finds the source for its solution in the core model of jewish community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to outline Hans Kelsen's pure theory of law as one of those theoretical achievements that follow the method of Marburg School. Kelsen defends the autonomy of law and its purity as warranted by the transcendental possibility of its grounding. Law according to Kelsen has its origin in the law itself or, to be more precise, law rises from transcendentally comprehended obligation (Sollen). Kelsen's theory of law is essentially methodological: its sole goal is to answer the question "what is the law and what are its features", not to answer the question how exactly the law should look like and how it is supposed to emerge. The specificity of law-constructed reality is best seen while scrutinizing the conception of legal person. Legal person is a theoretical construction and bears no resemblance to a real person whatsoever. Therefore, the concept of will in law is purely conceptual construction that is utterly diff erent from the real psychological act of volition. The law creates a certain non-causal and non-teleological relation, that Kelsen qualifies as Zurechnung - to hold somebody responsible for something. The law is a dynamic system of norms in which one norm is obligatory because emerges from some higher norm. The basic norm is an obligation in the normative sense; basic norm and obligation are relativ apriorische Kategorie. The article endeavors to present other fundamental aspects of Kelsen's theory in their relation to the learning of Marburg School. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the fate of sociolinguistics during the years of communist rule in East Germany, and in particular follows the discipline as practiced at the Karl-Marx-Universität in Leipzig, Germany. The author argues that East Germany had a unique attitude to sociolinguistics, both traditional and open to new horizons. He discusses the traditions inherited from the pre-war period, mentioning the Marburg philosophical school as an important influence. The communist government's special interest in the social aspects of language and their role in communication led the discipline to focus on these topics, leading to certain innovations.

This paper concerns the reception of the new logic and logicism of Frege and Russell among the German Neo-Kantian philosophers of the Marburg school. Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer both object to Frege's and Russell's conception of the ground, nature, and demarcation of logic. This objection depends on the distinctive Marburg school philosophy of logic, first articulated by Hermann Cohen: that "formal" logic (in Kant's sense) depends on a logical investigation of the principles that make mathematical natural science possible. Nevertheless, Cassirer thought that the new logic had profound philosophical implications. First, the new logic provides a technical vindication of some Neo-Kantian theses concerning space and time and mathematical proofs. Second, Cassirer thinks that the new logic allows for a conception of mathematics as the study of relational structures. This conception, in concert with a Kantian notion of objectivity and objecthood, makes possible a justification of modern mathematics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper claims that the argument Heidegger leveled at Husserl in his Marburg lecture courses trades on a confusion. Heidegger confused neglecting the question of being with presupposing an answer to the question of being. No reasons have been given for thinking that the former is objectionable, and the latter is only as objectionable as the thing presupposed. This paper does not, thereby, show Heideggerian phenomenology is inferior to Husserlian phenomenology; but it does show that Heidegger's so-called “immanent critique of Husserl” was anything but, and hence that Husserlian phenomenology was not (as Heidegger claimed) “unphenomenological”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Neo-Kantian tradition in history and philosophy of science. The author discusses the lessons applied by Thomas Kuhn during the 20th century whose work in the history of science developed a new philosophical image of the nature of science. By the end of the 19th century, the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism formulated a version of Kantianism which aim is to adapt the critical philosophy with changes affecting mathematics and the mathematical sciences throughout the period. It also highlights Ernst Cassirer's version of the genetic conception of knowledge which appeared in 1910.

This paper examines the history of the neoclassical theory of consumer demand from 1871 to 1971 by bringing into play the knowledge theory of the Marburg School, a Neo-Kantian philosophical movement. The work aims to show the usefulness of a Marburg-inspired epistemology in rationalizing the development of consumer analysis and, more generally, to understand the principles that regulate the process of knowing in neoclassical economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Davos-debate between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger at Davos in 1929 has proved a landmark in the history of twentieth century philosophy. The debate not only marked the end of the heyday of continental Neo-Kantian philosophy, but influenced, although in implicit ways, legal and political theory as well. At various levels of discourse, philosophical, moral philosophical, and that of legal and political philosophy, in the first half of the twentieth century Cassirer acted as the advocate of what remained of the old European humanist tradition. Heidegger, on the contrary, acted as the exponent of the emerging existentialist, anti-humanist movement that would soon supplant the old tradition in significance and force. This is an account of an imaginary encounter between two traditions, so that the clash of their opposing forces may shed sparks on a (still) dark era in Western philosophical history. The conclusion sums up the lessons or wisdom to be learned for political and legal theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay deals with the current discussion about modernity versus post-modernity and tries to extract the criteria which are said to be valid for modernity by analysing the theories of modernity by R. Münch and J. Habermas. Both of them declare the theories of post-modernity for illegitimate and give an interpretation of "post-modern" phenomena as of pre-modern or even anti-modern. The essay tries to demonstrate that the theories of Münch and Habermas are constructed in a way that makes a concept of post-modernity impossible. The basis of Münch's sociology of change of the occidental culture is a neo-Kantian philosophy of values. These values have an independent existence and are for Münch the basic values of Enlightenment. Habermas connects a theory of modernization of the "Lebenswelt" with a philosophy of the rational structures of communication. So rationality of communication and rational ideas of the Enlightenment are of the same type. So for Münch post-modernity is Impossible because the ultimate values of modernity are eternal while for Habermas post-modernity is impossible because rationality of modernity is the rationality of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]