Defining and Re-Examining Neo-Kantianism
Simply defined, neo-Kantianism, in a historical sense, was the movement in 19th-century Germany to rehabilitate Kant’s philosophy. Neo-Kantianism was the predominant philosophical movement in Germany in the final decades of the 19th century, and its influence spread far and wide, to Italy, France, England and Russia. The golden age of neo-Kantianism was from 1860 to 1914. During these decades, to be at the cutting edge of philosophy, to have a rigorous training in the discipline, meant studying Kant. In 1875, Johannes Volkelt, an up-and-coming neo-Kantian, gave witness to this new Zeitgeist: “With few negligible exceptions, all philosophers agree in the high estimation of Kant; all attempt to orient themselves around Kant, and all see in his philosophy more or less explicit indications of their own position.”1
Some hard statistical facts confirm the Kantian hegemony of these decades.2 From 1862 to 1881 the number of lecture courses on Kant trebled, and there were more lectures on Kant than all modern philosophers combined. Bibliographies show that, after 1860, the number of works on Kant increased geometrically every year. And, by 1870, every major German university had at least one neo-Kantian professor on its philosophy faculty, which was better representation than any other philosophical standpoint or tendency. Because of facts like these, Klaus Christian Köhnke, doyen of neo-Kantian scholars, has called these decades “the neo-Kantian period of German university philosophy”.3
Customarily, neo-Kantianism is divided into three main schools or groups: the Marburg school, whose chief protagonists were Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), Paul Natorp (1854–1924) and Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945); the Southwestern, Baden or Heidelberg school, whose major representatives were Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936) and Emil Lask (1875–1915); and the neo-Friesian school in Göttingen under the leadership of Leonard Nelson (1882–1927).4 The dominant neo-Kantian universities were Marburg, Göttingen, Strassburg and Heidelberg; Berlin too eventually became a centre of neo-Kantianism later in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Friedrich Paulsen (1896–1901), Alois Riehl (1844–1924) and Benno Erdmann (1851–1924) held chairs there.5
It is necessary to emphasize that these three schools do not define or exhaust neo-Kantianism. If one reads every article and every book by every member of all these groups, one would still be far from having an adequate knowledge of the movement. These groups came into being relatively late, between 1880 and 1904, decades after the core of the movement had been formed. All the founding figures of neo-Kantianism preceded them; and even later neo-Kantians fell outside their orbits. Among these “outsiders” were the Berliners Riehl, Paulsen and Erdmann, but also Johannes Volkelt (1848–1930), Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933), Erich Adickes (1866–1928), Arthur Liebert (1878–1946), Emil Arnoldt (1828–1905), and last, but certainly not least, Hermann Helmholtz (1821–1894). We too easily ignore these thinkers, some of whom played a crucial role in the movement, if we think of neo-Kantianism strictly in terms of schools.
The crucial formative decade for neo-Kantianism was the 1860s. Although there had been several neo-Kantian manifestos in earlier decades,6 they grew in number and coalesced into a single force only in the 1860s. It was in this decade that some of the most dynamic young philosophers in Germany wrote articles, essays and even whole books, championing the cause of Kant’s philosophy. There were five major figures who helped to re-establish Kant in this decade: Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), Otto Liebmann (1840–1912), Jürgen Bona Meyer (1829–1897) and Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–1875). Part II will examine each in some detail.
It has been a commonplace of older scholarship that neo-Kantianism began in the 1860s. The starting point of the movement has been seen as Otto Liebmann’s famous polemic Kant und die Epigonen, with its alleged mantra “Zurück zu Kant!”.7 But this commonplace, strictly speaking, is false. As Köhnke has argued, Liebmann’s book came at the end, not the beginning, of a series of neo-Kantian manifestos.8 Even Liebmann’s mantra, which never appeared in such a punchy and pithy form, had its precedents in earlier works. Still, there is some merit to the old commonplace: though not the beginnings of neo-Kantianism, the 1860s were a crucial formative decade.
It is a central thesis of the present work that the origins of neo-Kantianism go back to the 1790s, even before Kant’s death (1804).9 The founding fathers of the movement were Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843), Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) and Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798–1854). All defined themselves as Kantians, and all called for a return to the spirit of Kant’s teachings. They anticipated, and laid down the foundation for, defining doctrines of later neo-Kantianism: the importance of the Kantian dualisms between essence and existence, understanding and sensibility; the limitation of all knowledge to experience; the leading role of a critical and analytical method in philosophy; and the need for philosophy to follow rather than lead the natural sciences. The crucial role of Fries, Herbart and Beneke in founding neo-Kantianism, though ignored in recent neo-Kantian scholarship,10 cannot be underestimated, especially in view of the enduring and widespread influence of Fries and Herbart. Part I will be devoted to a close study of the intellectual development and major writings of these early neo-Kantians.
It might seem absurd to trace neo-Kantianism back to the 18th century. Neo- Kantianism by its very name, someone will protest, implies re-newal, re-habilitation, so that it can begin only after a period when Kant’s philosophy was in decline. Since that decline came during the era of German idealism—so the argument goes—neo-Kantianism could arise only at the end of that era, which came, at the earliest, with Hegel’s death in 1831. However widespread and plausible, this reasoning passes over two central facts. First, Kant’s reputation was already in decline in the early 1790s with the advent of Reinhold’s Elementarphilosophie and Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. For the young Romantic generation, Kant’s philosophy seemed to have been surpassed and was considered obsolete. The more orthodox defenders and expositors of Kantian doctrine—Ludwig Jakob (1759–1827), C.G. Schütz (1747–1832), Carl Christian Schmid (1761–1812) and Johann Schultz (1739–1805)—appeared to belong to an older generation, and they were duly pushed aside in the path of philosophical progress. Second, the reaction against Reinhold’s, Fichte’s and Schelling’s methods, and against speculative idealism in general, came later in the 1790s, in the fragments and notebooks of Hölderlin, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel,11 and not least in the early writings of Fries and Herbart.12 The most compelling critique of Reinhold, Fichte and Schelling came with Fries 1803 Reinhold, Fichte und Schelling, which is really the source book for neo-Kantianism. All this will happen before the rise in Hegel’s reputation; the neo-Kantian battle against Hegelianism will begin only in the 1820s, though it will largely reprise what had been said decades earlier during the campaign against Reinhold, Fichte and Schelling.
How do we explain the rise of neo-Kantianism? What made this movement such a powerful one in the second half of the 19th century?
There were two cultural forces, already apparent in the 18th century, that had a powerful influence on the emergence of neo-Kantianism. The first was German nationalism, that is, the belief and pride in a single German nation, which was still not a political reality in the 1860s and would become so only in 1871. Kant, it was generally recognized, was a major inspiration for the German cultural revival at the end of the 18th century. The Germans were proud of Kant because he was a thinker of international stature, the first German philosopher to have achieved such status since Leibniz. This nationalism took visible form in 1854 when the city of Königsberg erected a statue to commemorate its most famous resident. The second was German historicism, which encouraged reflection on, and recollection of, historical roots. For the historicist, self-awareness is a matter of knowing one’s origins, of retracing the past that made oneself. It was clear to all historically-minded philosophers in the early 19th century that Kant was the great revolutionary thinker dividing them from the intellectual life of the 18th century, and that he was the starting point of all modern German philosophy. Self-awareness therefore demanded understanding Kant, tracing the development of his views and seeing how his influence gave rise to contemporary philosophy. Such was the motivation behind much history of philosophy in the 1840s and 1850s, which gave pride of place to Kant.13 It was in this spirit that Karl Rosenkranz and Friedrich Wilhelm Schubert published the first collected edition of Kant’s works, which was finished in 1842.14
These were only general cultural forces behind the rise of neo-Kantianism. They explain why it became one intellectual current, but not why it became the predominant one. For an intellectual movement to gain hegemony, it has to justify itself philosophically, to legitimate itself with reasons or arguments, and it has to defeat its competitors in the intellectual market place. What, then, was the philosophical rationale or justification of neo-Kantianism?
Part of that rationale was purely negative, deriving from the misfortunes and inherent flaws of its competitors. First and foremost among these competitors was speculative idealism. But speculative idealism had collapsed by the middle of the 19th century, independent of any neo-Kantian attacks upon it. The demise of speculative idealism left an enormous vacuum in the German intellectual scene, leaving neo-Kantianism as a viable contender to fill it. The decline of speculative idealism began with Hegel’s death in 1831, but, because his spirit lived on through his many disciples, it would not dissolve until the end of the 1840s. There were two developments in the 1840s that doomed the Hegelian movement. First, the accession to the throne in 1840 of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, whose reactionary policies spelled the end of the Prussian Reform Movement, which had for decades sustained the political hopes and dreams of the young Hegelians. Second, on a purely intellectual level, the combined effect of the many assaults on Hegel’s philosophy. Though Hegel’s philosophy was already heavily criticized in the late 1820s and 1830s,15 the 1840s saw a much higher calibre of criticism. In his Logische Untersuchungen (1840) Trendelenburg launched a powerful attack on Hegel’s dialectic, whose devastating effect was conceded even by leading Hegelians.16 In his Metaphysik (1841), Lotze exposed relentlessly the hypostases and weak transitions of Hegel’s logic.17 And, finally, in Das Wesen des Christentums (1841) Feuerbach convinced many neo-Hegelians of the need to go beyond Hegel, whose philosophy now seemed to be an obsolete metaphysics, the last desperate stage of Christian apologetics.18 The net result of all these criticisms was to re-affirm the Kantian limitations upon knowledge, the inescapability of the dualisms between form and content, essence and existence, understanding and sensibility.
The other part of the rationale is more positive. Neo-Kantianism became so popular and prevalent in the 1860s because Kant’s philosophy, or at least some revised version of it, was widely seen as the only attractive solution to two major intellectual controversies of the mid-19th century. One of these controversies was the so-called “identity crisis of philosophy”; the other was the “materialism controversy”.19
The identity crisis of philosophy, which began in the 1840s, was the result of two factors: the decline of speculative idealism and the rise of the empirical sciences. Now that the empirical sciences covered every sphere of reality, and now that the old a priori methods of speculative idealism had proven themselves bankrupt, it seemed as if there was no place anymore for philosophy in the globus intellectualis. What, then, should philosophy be? What could it do? To many, it seemed as if philosophy were obsolete, as if it had nothing more to offer than the hocus-pocus of metaphysics. The neo-Kantians appeared to rescue philosophy from this imminent obsolescence and to give it a new mission and identity. Their solution to the crisis, which we will examine in more detail below,20 went by the name of “theory of knowledge” (Erkenntnistheorie), what we now call “epistemology”. It was a central and defining thesis of neo-Kantianism in the 1860s that philosophy could resurrect itself, and that it could find a definite place within the division of sciences, only as epistemology. The neo-Kantians had in mind a very specific conception of epistemology: the examination of the methods, standards and presuppositions of the empirical sciences. Though this conception would ultimately prove too narrow, it was very strategic when it was first advanced. For it not only aligned philosophy with the new natural sciences, whose dazzling success set the intellectual standards of the age, but it also gave philosophy a distinctive and definite task independent of them. Understood as epistemology, philosophy is no longer in danger of obsolescence because it determines “the logic of the sciences”, a logic that the sciences use and apply but never examine and discuss. What the sciences presuppose that philosophy brings to self-consciousness, so that science becomes self-critical.
The materialism controversy began in 1854 and raged for decades thereafter. The central question posed by that controversy was whether science is leading inevitably to materialism. The advance of the natural sciences in the first half of the century seemed to make the old beliefs in a personal God, immortality and freedom, which were so important for Christian dogma, into so much mythology. Like the famous pantheism controversy of the late 18th century, the materialism controversy confronted the philosopher with a dramatic and drastic dilemma: choose between either a rational materialism or an irrational leap of faith. The critical philosophy seemed to rescue philosophers from this dire dilemma, providing the true via media between its horns: the critical philosophy showed how it is possible to have both natural science and moral or religious faith. While it championed freedom of enquiry for the natural sciences, the right to investigate without limiting the causes of phenomena, it also stood for the autonomy and rationality of the moral and religious sphere. Kant’s famous statement that he had to deny knowledge for the sake of faith resonated as much in the 19th century as it did for the 18th. While neo-Kantian philosophers were highly critical of Kant’s doctrine of practical faith—his attempt to justify the beliefs in God, providence and immortality on the basis of morality—they still believed in the necessity of a moral or normative sphere above and beyond nature.
The triumph of the neo-Kantian philosophers in the materialism controversy went hand in hand with their victory over another major competitor in the 1860s: the materialists. Materialism had become a powerful intellectual force in Germany during the 1850s in the wake of the materialism controversy. The writings of Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899), Heinrich Czolbe (1819–1873), Karl Vogt (1817–1895) and Jakob Moleschott (1822–1893) had become popular,21 spreading the message far and wide that materialism is the new philosophy of the natural sciences. The Kantian counter-attack against materialism, which began in the 1860s in the works of Jürgen Bona Meyer and Friedrich Lange,22 effectively blocked the materialist advance. The neo-Kantians put forward two powerful arguments against the materialists: first, they could never bridge the chasm between matter and consciousness; and second, they were naive and dogmatic, simply assuming the reality of matter, as if it were a pure given, completely ignoring the physiological and intellectual conditions of knowledge of the world.
And so, by the 1870s, neo-Kantianism had seemingly triumphed. It had not only provided plausible solutions to the main controversies of its age, but it had also defeated two of its main rivals, speculative idealism and materialism. But intellectual hegemony never lasts long and it is always quickly contested. There was another major rival to neo-Kantianism in the 1860s, and its challenge would only grow in the decades thereafter. This was the strange rise of Arthur Schopenhauer, who, after being ignored for decades, had become the most famous philosopher in Germany during the 1860s. Schopenhauer was something of a neo-Kantian himself, given his great debts to Kant, and he had even claimed to be Kant’s sole legitimate heir. But he was still a potent challenge to the neo-Kantians because he had a competing solution to the identity crisis of philosophy. For Schopenhauer, philosophy is first and foremost reflection on “the puzzle of existence”, which for him meant the Hamlet question: “To be or not to be?”. The importance of this question, and its sheer popularity among the public, forced the neo-Kantians to redefine their own conception of philosophy in the late 1870s and 1880s, so that it is not only epistemology but also ethics, not only a science but also a worldview. Despite this redefinition, Schopenhauer, and the Lebensphilosophie he inspired, would continue to challenge the neo-Kantians until the beginning of World War I.23
Like any major intellectual movement, neo-Kantianism has been the subject of misleading preconceptions and prejudices. We do well to remove them here. Some of these preconceptions are popular, others more esoteric or scholarly.
One popular preconception is that neo-Kantianism was an essentially scholarly movement, an attempt to revive the historical study of Kant’s philosophy. Certainly, there is some truth to this view. The movement did give rise to new editions of his writings, to studies of his intellectual development as well as interpretations of his major ideas. The Akademie edition of Kant’s writings, still the authoritative edition today, is very much the product of the neo-Kantian movement.24 There was also a period of Kant philology at the turn of the century, in the works of Benno Erdmann, Erich Adickes and Emil Arnoldt, which gave rise to some of the best historical scholarship on Kant. Still, neo-Kantianism was more a philosophical than scholarly movement. It was the attempt to reaffirm the validity of Kant’s philosophy, and more specifically one crucial aspect of it: his conception of philosophy and its method. The neo-Kantians believed that Kant’s critical conception of philosophy, and his transcendental method for determining the necessary conditions of experience, are of enduring value, and that it is only by reviving them that philosophy can become a science.
Another popular misconception is that the neo-Kantians were epigoni, faithful disciples who would have to go without truth for a week if the mail coach from Königsberg broke down.25 Nothing could be further from the truth. Though all neo-Kantians were intent, in one way or another, on the rehabilitation of Kant’s philosophy, none were strict disciples of Kant. All were severely critical of Kant, and all used him for their own ends. Often they would appeal to a distinction between the “spirit” and “letter” of Kant’s philosophy; but the spirit “blew where it listeth”, taking on all shapes and forms depending on the philosopher.
One of the most prominent scholarly prejudices originated with Karl Löwith’s influential book on 19th-century philosophy, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche.26 Löwith saw neo-Kantianism as a scholastic academic philosophy, and attributed the real source of revolutionary thinking in the 19th century to the great outsiders, Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. It was these thinkers who were concerned with questions of existence and the meaning of life, whereas the neo-Kantians, ensconced in their ivory towers, had become entangled in abstruse questions about the logic of the sciences. Löwith’s image of 19th-century philosophy has been a remarkably persistent one, captivating scholars even in the 21st century. What Löwith fails to see, however, is that the neo-Kantians were themselves outsiders for a long time, and that most of them, unlike Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, were persecuted for their heterodox moral and religious doctrines. He also does not recognize that the neo-Kantians, beginning in the late 1870s and early 1880s, were concerned to overcome their own narrow epistemological conception of philosophy, and that they shifted their interest towards moral, political and aesthetic questions. Löwith tends to identify neo-Kantianism with the arid positivism that it repudiated.
Another more recent but no less powerful source of prejudice was Richard Rorty’s influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.27 Though Rorty wrote with an air of authority about neo-Kantianism, almost everything he said about it is false, confused or misleading. Neo-Kantianism played a crucial role in his narrative about modern philosophy and how it went astray. The neo-Kantians were for him the source of the modern conception of philosophy as a science and as a profession distinct from the positive sciences.28 While Rorty is certainly correct to ascribe a crucial role to neo-Kantianism in forming much 20th-century philosophy, he ascribes doctrines to the movement that reveal ignorance of its intentions and origins. He maintains that the neo-Kantian conception of epistemology went hand in hand with the theory of the mind as a mirror of nature29—though even a partial familiarity with neo-Kantian thinking shows that they decisively rejected that theory. He also states that the neo-Kantian conception of philosophy as epistemology is essentially foundationalist, that it is based on the idea that philosophy can provide grounds for the positive sciences.30 But the neo-Kantians, virtually without exception, rejected foundationalism. Their movement began with a reaction against the foundationalist tradition in epistemology, and it contested the idea that philosophy could provide a grounding for the empirical sciences. In the neo-Kantian view, the positive sciences are autonomous, and they no longer require, as the speculative idealists once held, a foundation from philosophy. We will see, in the following chapters, this anti-foundationalist stance appear again and again in the history of the movement.
1 Johannes Volkelt, Kant’s Kategorischer Imperativ und die Gegenwart (Vienna: Selbstverlag des Lesevereins der deutschen Studenten Wiens, 1875), p. 5.
2 These facts are taken from Klaus Christian Köhnke’s seminal study, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 314–317, 381–385.
3 Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, p. 385.
4 On the Marburg school, see Ulrich Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994). Unfortunately, there is no counterpart history for the Southwestern school. On the neo-Friesian school, see Arthur Kronfeld, ‘Geleitworte zum zehnjährigen Bestehen der neue Friesischen Schule’, in Das Wesen der psychiatrischen Erkenntnis (Berlin: Springer, 1920), pp. 46–65; and Erna Blencke, ‘Zur Geschichte der neuen Fries’schen Schule’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 60 (1978), 199–208. Though neglected by standard histories, the group surrounding Nelson was especially eminent. Among its members were the theologian Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), the psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld (1886–1941) and the Nobel prizewinner Otto Meyerhoff (1884–1951). The group published their own journal, Abhandlungen der Fries’schen Schule, Neue Folge, ed. Leonard Nelson (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1907–1937), 6 vols. Histories of the Southwestern and neo-Friesian schools are desiderata of future research.
5 On neo-Kantianism in Berlin, see Volkert Gerhardt, Reinhard Mehring and Jana Rindert, Berliner Geist: Eine Geschichte der Berliner Universitätsphilosophie bis 1946 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), pp. 179–193.
6 Among these earlier manifestos were Friedrich Beneke, Kant und die philosophische Aufgabe unserer Zeit (Berlin: Mittler, 1832); Christian Hermann Weiße, In welchem Sinn die deutsche Philosophie jetzt wieder an Kant sich zu orientiren hat (Leipzig: Dycke, 1847); and Carl Fortlage, ‘Die Stellung Kants zur Philosophie vor ihm und nach ihm’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, Heft IV (1838), 91–123.
7 Otto Liebmann, Kant und die Epigonen: Eine Kritische Abhandlung (Stuttgart: Carl Schober, 1865). Liebmann concluded several chapters with the declaration “Also muß auf Kant zurückgegangen werden.” He never used the more brief and punchy slogan.
8 Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, p. 264.
9 The reaction against speculative idealism began in the late 1790s. In the winter of 1796 the young Fries retired into his garret and sketched his programme for a revision of Kant’s philosophy. In the same year Herbart wrote several short essays critical of Schelling. See Chapter 1, Section 3 and Chapter 2, Section 2.
10 For this literature, see Part I Introduction, Section 3, note 7.
11 On the Romantic reaction against the foundationalism of Reinhold and Fichte, see Manfred Frank, »Unendliche Annäherung«, Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997). Frank finds a tendency towards “rekantianization” already in the early 1790s in the writings of Herbert, Erhard, Feuerbach and Forberg (pp. 502, 617, 705). They too could be regarded, then, as precursors of neo-Kantianism.
12 See Chapter 1, Section 3 and Chapter 2, Section 2.
13 See Ernst Sigismund Mirbt, Kant und seine Nachfolger oder Geschichte des Ursprungs und der Fortbildung der neueren deutschen Philosophie (Jena: Hochhausen, 1841); Carl Fortlage, Genetische Geschichte der Philosophie seit Kant (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1852); and Karl Rosenkranz, Geschichte der kantischen Philosophie (Leipzig: Voß, 1840).
14 Karl Rosenkranz and Friedrich Wilhelm Schubert, eds Immanuel Kant’s Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig: Voß, 1838–1842), 12 vols.
15 Among these were Carl Fortlage, Die Lücken des Hegelschen Systems der Philosophie. Nebst Andeutung der Mittel, wodurch eine Ausfüllung derselben möglich ist. (Heidelberg: Karl Groos, 1832); Otto Friedrich Gruppe, Antäus. Ein Briefwechsel über speculative Philosophie in ihrem Conflict mit Wissenschaft und Sprache (Berlin: Nancke, 1831); and Christian Hermann Weiße, Ueber den Gegenwärtigen Standpunct der philosophischen Wissenschaft: In Besonderer Beziehung auf das System Hegels (Leipzig: Barth, 1829). Fortlage, Gruppe and Weiße, as we shall see below, will later play an important role in preparing the neo-Kantian revival.
16 Adolf Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen (Berlin: Bethge, 1840), I, 23–99. On the effect of Trendelenburg’s criticisms, see Karl Rosenkranz, Die Modifikation der Logik abgeleitet aus dem Begriff des Denkens (Berlin: Jonas, 1846), p. 250; Karl von Prantl, Gedächtnisrede auf Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (Munich: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1873), pp. 10–11; and Hermann Bonitz, Erinnerung an Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (Berlin: Dümmler, 1873), pp. 22–23.
17 Hermann Lotze, Metaphysik (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1841).
18 Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christenthums (Leipzig: Wigand, 1841). On the influence of Feuerbach’s work on the young Hegelians, see Friedrich Engels classic statement in Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (Stuttgart: Dietz, 1888), p. 13.
19 I have provided a more detailed account of both controversies in After Hegel: German Philosophy from 1840 to 1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), Chapters 1 and 2.
20 See Chapter 6, Sections 2, 3 and 5; and Chapter 12, Sections 2 and 3.
21 On these figures, see Frederick Gregory, Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977).
22 See Chapters 8 and 9.
23 On Schopenhauer’s challenge to and influence upon the neo-Kantians, see Part II Introduction, Section 4, and Chapter 10.
24 Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1902f). This edition is still in progress. Among the neo-Kantians who worked upon it were Erich Adickes, Benno Erdmann, Paul Natorp, Karl Vorländer, Bruno Bauch and Wilhelm Windelband.
25 As Friedrich Schlegel once said. See his ‘Fragmente’, Athenaeum I (1798), 202.
26 Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des 19. Jahrhunderts (Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1941), pp. 135–136.
27 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
28 Rorty, Philosophy, pp. 131–136.
29 On the neo-Kantians as purveyers of the mirror metaphor, see Rorty, Philosophy, pp. 12, 163, 393.
30 See Rorty, Philosophy, pp. 4, 131–132.