The origins of neo-Kantianism are shrouded in mystery. Neo-Kantianism arose from a tradition of philosophy that has been almost entirely forgotten.1 At the very end of the 18th century and the very beginning of the 19th century, a distinctive idealist tradition was formed in Germany by three young philosophers: Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843), Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) and Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798–1854). Though idealist themselves, they stood in self-conscious opposition to the idealist tradition of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Their tradition has been “lost”, however, because it was overshadowed by the speculative idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which is normally regarded as the sole form of idealism in this period. Yet it was from this lost tradition that neo-Kantianism arose. The neo-Kantian movement, which became fully visible and established only in the 1860s, has its fons et origo in the lost tradition.
Fries, Herbart and Beneke were separate, isolated spirits, working independently of one another. Although they knew one another, sometimes even met, and on one occasion even attempted to collaborate, they did not form an organized and self-conscious movement; there were also many important intellectual differences between them. Still, they had so many attitudes, values and beliefs in common that one is justified in regarding them as a distinct tradition. They shared an allegiance to transcendental idealism, a programme for reforming epistemology through psychology, a mistrust of rationalism and speculative metaphysics, a deep belief in the reliability of the methods of the exact sciences, an ethics based on aesthetics, and an antipathy to the speculative idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.
The reason this tradition has been lost has much to do with how the history of philosophy has been written since the early 19th century. We are often told that the history of philosophy after Kant consists chiefly in the emergence of an idealist tradition that begins with Reinhold, continues with Fichte and Schelling, and then culminates in Hegel. The source of this simple but powerful narrative was Hegel himself,2 who saw his own system as the telos of post-Kantian philosophy. His narrative was re-affirmed later in the 19th century by two neo-Hegelians: Johann Erdmann and Kuno Fischer;3 it was then revived in the 20th century by Richard Kroner and Frederick Copleston.4 What this history so tendentiously leaves out is its competition, the tradition of Fries, Herbart and Beneke. For self-serving reasons, Hegel had virtually written his opponents out of history, and his disciples gladly followed him.
The general fact obscured by Hegel’s history of philosophy is that there were two opposing idealist traditions in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. There was the rationalist-speculative tradition of Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and the empiricist-psychological tradition of Fries, Herbart and Beneke. These traditions were opposed in five fundamental ways.
– The rationalist-speculative tradition rejected, while the empiricist-psychological tradition accepted, Kant’s transcendental idealism in its original intended sense, that is, the limitation of knowledge to appearances and the distinction between appearances and the thing-in-itself. Rather than decrying the thing-in-itself as the great weakness of the Kantian system, as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had done, Fries, Herbart and Beneke regarded it as its great strength.
– The rationalist-speculative tradition employed a deductive or dialectical method, believing in the powers of pure thought or a priori reasoning to reach substantive conclusions; the empiricist-psychological tradition, however, stressed the importance of an empirical method, insisting that pure thinking alone could reach no substantial conclusions and that knowledge must receive its content from experience.
– In Schelling and Hegel, the rationalist-speculative tradition developed into an “objective” or “absolute idealism”, according to which all reality is the manifestation of the ideal, where these ideals are forms or archetypes existing independent of human consciousness; the empiricist-psychological tradition stuck to “subjective idealism”, protesting that there are no such ideals and that all knowledge is relative to human consciousness.
– The rationalist-speculative tradition attempted to surmount Kant’s dualisms between understanding and sensibility, essence and existence, form and content, through an organic concept of nature; the empiricist-psychological tradition, however, wanted to retain these dualisms, and disputed the constitutive validity of that organic concept.
– The rationalist-speculative tradition believed in the unity of reason, that is, that there is a single source of theoretical and practical reason; the empiricist-psychological tradition disputed that there is any such unity and stressed the fundamental divide between theoretical and practical reason.
Some of these conflicts are clear to us now only with the benefit of hindsight. But it would be wrong to assume that the existence of these two traditions is a mere post facto reconstruction, the product of the historian’s abstraction. For sometimes these differences became all too plain to these thinkers themselves. Fries, Herbart and Beneke were aware of their common opposition to the speculative-rationalist tradition; on these grounds, Beneke proposed collaboration with Herbart, and Herbart hoped for an accord with Fries. For their part, Reinhold, Fichte and Schelling were well aware of their differences with Fries, Herbart and Beneke, though they did not deign to write polemics against them. In the case of Hegel, however, opposition to Fries and Beneke became hostile, even political. He condemned Fries in the preface to his Philosophie des Rechts, and he has been accused of using his influence on the Prussian government to place a rescript against Beneke’s lectures in Berlin.5
It is a striking and perplexing fact that both these traditions, despite all the conflicts between them, would invoke the name and authority of Kant to justify themselves. Both claimed to represent “the spirit of the Kantian philosophy”, which pushed them in opposing directions. The source of all the conflicts between them lay indeed in their conflicting interpretations of Kant’s main project.
Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel read Kant’s philosophy as a foundationalist enterprise along Cartesian lines, that is, its aim is to provide a self-evident basis for knowledge, one completely immune from sceptical doubt. They maintained that Kant’s philosophy contains self-evident first principles—namely, the possibility of experience, the unity of apperception, the facts of consciousness, the concept of representation, subject–object identity—from which it could derive deductively all its central conclusions about the structure of human knowledge. It was often admitted that Kant did not provide a straightforward exposition of this foundationalist project, though it was still held to be implicit in his texts and his ultimate design. Formulating that exposition, realizing the true foundationalism inherent in Kant’s project, was the aim of Reinhold’s Elementarphilosophie, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and Schelling’s Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie.
The philosophers in the empiricist-psychological tradition, however, read Kant’s philosophy in a completely different light, though one that seemed no less sanctioned by Kant’s texts. For Fries, Herbart and Beneke, Kant’s transcendental philosophy was not a foundationalist but a psychological or anthropological project whose chief task was to describe human psychology and the basic workings of the human mind. Kant’s aim was to realize the old Enlightenment project for a science of human nature or anthropology. Although they conceded that Kant had not given a perfect exposition of that project, they still insisted that it was implicit in his texts. It would be their aim to make this project clear and explicit. No less than their rationalist-speculative counterparts, Fries, Herbart and Beneke wanted to put Kant’s philosophy on a solid foundation; but for them that foundation would lie not in deductive or dialectical reasoning but in the observation and experiment of the empirical sciences. Kant’s philosophy was to be placed on a sound empirical foundation, its psychology based upon solid “facts of experience”.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that each tradition had stretched one aspect of Kant at the expense of the other. They had pitted his rationalist and empiricist sides against one another. Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had taken hold of Kant’s rationalist side, namely, the value he placed on systematic unity, on a dogmatic method of demonstration, on a priori principles and reasoning. Fries, Herbart and Beneke, however, had grasped the empiricist side, namely, his insistence that the content of knowledge be given by the senses, that metaphysics should not transcend the limits of experience, that analysis of concepts cannot provide substantive knowledge. Both traditions knew that Kant’s intention was to synthesize empiricism and rationalism; but they could not bring both sides together. Thus Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel complained about Kant’s empiricism, which appeared in his lack of systematic rigour in deriving the categories. But Fries, Herbart and Beneke would grumble about the “remnants of scholasticism” in Kant’s philosophy, that is, his too rigid systematic sense, his artificial conceptual distinctions, his old-fashioned dogmatic method of analysis and demonstration. Summa summarum, for the rationalist-speculative tradition, Kant was too much of an empiricist; but for the empirical-psychological tradition, he was too much of a rationalist. For both traditions, Kant’s grand attempt to synthesize rationalism and empiricism seemed a hopeless delusion.
In the battle over Kant’s legacy, both traditions could put forward a strong case for why they alone were the true heirs. Fries, Herbart and Beneke could give several reasons. First, they advocated Kant’s transcendental idealism in its original form, especially its limitation of knowledge to appearances and its postulate of the thing-in-itself. Second, they upheld Kant’s regulative constraints upon teleology, which had been violated by Schelling and Hegel. Third, they banished appeals to intellectual intuition, which Kant had proscribed but which had been re-invoked by Fichte, Schelling and the young Hegel. Fourth, they dwelled in “the bathos of experience”, insisting that all knowledge be limited to experience. Fifth, they re-affirmed Kant’s dualisms, more specifically, those between understanding and sensibility, essence and existence, practical and theoretical reason, all of which are central to his critical teachings. For all these reasons, Fries, Herbart and Beneke believed they represented the true Kant, the spirit of his teachings. They called for a return to Kant in the early 1800s, decades before that refrain became widespread in the 1860s.
The rationalist-speculative tradition could also muster a strong case. In stressing the foundationalist side of Kant’s philosophy they were attempting to show how it could be a response to scepticism, which had been Kant’s intention all along. Had not Kant said that he was aroused from his “dogmatic slumbers” by Hume? And had he not made it plain that it was his intention to reply to the Scotsman’s scepticism? It was in Kant’s transcendental deduction, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel claimed, that one could find the true “spirit of the Kantian philosophy”, because the plain purpose of that deduction was to legitimate synthetic a priori knowledge against scepticism. Their demands for rigorous deductive or dialectical reasoning, for strict systemic form, and for a priori science, also seemed sanctioned by Kant himself. For Kant had often insisted that reason is by its very nature systematic, that a system should be organized around a single idea, and that all science involves a priori principles and reasoning.6 Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were well aware that, in some respects, they were revising Kant, namely, they were abolishing the thing-in-itself, postulating an intellectual intuition, and casting aside regulative constraints upon teleology. But they insisted that in doing so they were violating only “the letter” of Kant’s philosophy, and that for all these “infractions” of the letter they could find reason enough in the Kantian spirit. After all, they were only trying to make Kant’s philosophy consistent, to help Kant solve his own problems according to his own principles. Since it transcends the limits of possible experience, the thing-in-itself is an untenable postulate according to Kant’s own standard of knowledge. The concept of intellectual intuition, though contrary to the Kantian letter, seemed to be strongly suggested by Kant’s teaching in several places: it was implicit in his theory of mathematical construction, in his conception of the self-awareness of our own cognitive activity, and in the “fact of reason”. And as for the regulative constraints upon teleology, Schelling and Hegel insisted that Kant himself had to infract them, for it is only by giving constitutive status to the idea of the organism that it is possible to overcome the Kantian dualisms, which otherwise pose an insuperable obstacle to explaining synthetic a priori knowledge.
Fortunately, we need not decide here who were the rightful heirs of Kant’s legacy. The question is perhaps irresolvable. Both traditions had crucial texts in their favour, and both could claim that in dropping some aspects of Kant’s teaching they were only making it consistent. Both traditions could describe themselves therefore as “neo-Kantian”.
Yet, as history would have it, we now regard only one of these traditions as neo-Kantian. The battle to represent Kant’s legacy was won—whether rightly or wrongly—by the thinkers of the empiricist-psychological tradition. They won the battle simply because their arguments were later adopted by a slew of thinkers whom we now happen to call, for purely customary reasons, “neo-Kantians”. After the 1840s and the decline of neo-Hegelianism, the arguments of the rationalist-speculative tradition had lost their power to persuade. The first generation of neo-Kantians in the 1860s—Kuno Fischer, Eduard Zeller, Otto Liebmann, Jürgen Bona Meyer and Friedrich Albert Lange—reacted against the neo-rationalism of Schelling’s and Hegel’s metaphysics, much as Fries, Herbart and Beneke did decades earlier. These “neo-Kantians” were writing in an age even more dominated by the empirical sciences, and to them it seemed all the more necessary that philosophy give up its pretensions to legislate for the sciences; its only feasible task seemed to be the examination of their underlying logic. The position of the empiricist-psychological tradition seemed prescient, then, the best advice for philosophy to go forward in a more scientific age. These neo-Kantians also adopted other basic contentions of the empiricist-psychological tradition: that Kant’s philosophy should be interpreted in psychological terms; that philosophy should remain within the limits of experience; that Kant’s concept of teleology should remain regulative; that it is necessary to accept Kant’s dualisms between understanding and sensibility, essence and existence, form and content, as inherent limits of the human understanding. So, for better or worse, it was the empiricist-psychological tradition that triumphed in history, and that won out over its rationalist-speculative rival.
It is all the more surprising, therefore, that the empiricist-psychological tradition has been forgotten, slipping away into the mists of the past. Though it had paved the way for early neo-Kantianism, its powerful influence has been scarcely recognized. Some neo-Kantians acknowledged the importance of Fries, Herbart or Beneke, but later scholars of neo-Kantianism have virtually ignored them. Most of the standard works on the history of neo-Kantianism do not discuss them.7
There are several reasons for such neglect. First, there was the reaction against the psychological interpretation of Kant in the 1870s and 1880s by the later neo-Kantians, especially by Windelband and Cohen. The argument that Kant’s transcendental philosophy is epistemology and not psychology made it seem legitimate to leave out of account a tradition of interpretation that had stressed the psychological aspect of Kant’s project. For this reason, it is common to limit neo-Kantianism to the Southwestern and Marburg schools alone. Second, some scholarship remains fixed on the idea that the neo-Kantian tradition begins only when epistemology is made a sui generis discipline distinct from the empirical sciences, not least among them psychology. Third, though many scholars assume, correctly, that neo-Kantianism arose from a rejection of the methods and metaphysics of absolute idealism, they date that reaction much too late, placing it in the 1840s after the collapse of Hegel’s metaphysics. It is important to realize, however, that the reaction against speculative idealism took place much earlier, and indeed for very Kantian reasons. It arose in the early 1800s when Fries and Herbart criticized the methods and metaphysics of Fichte’s and Schelling’s idealism. If “neo-Kantianism” means a revival of Kant after his decline, then it is necessary to recall that Kant’s reputation fell into decline even before his death; he had lost his stature as a major innovator by 1800 in the eyes of the early Romantics and metaphysical idealists. The protest against his decline, the case for his rehabilitation, was made by Fries in the early 1800s in his Reinhold, Fichte und Schelling. This brilliant but much neglected book, as we shall soon see, was the first statement of the neo-Kantian programme.
By far the most important factor working against the rehabilitation of the empiricist-psychological tradition has been its association with “psychologism”. Since the work of Husserl and Frege at the beginning of the 20th century, “psychologism” has been regarded as a basic fallacy, the simple conflation of logical rules of inference with natural laws of thought.8 Because of their advocacy of empirical psychology, Fries, Herbart and Beneke were associated with this fallacy, and so they became widely discredited.9 Beneke’s work, especially, was regarded as “the most radical form of psychologism”.10 It is important to realize, however, that neither Fries nor Herbart nor Beneke are guilty of the fallacy of psychologism in the simple sense attributed to them. We will see in later chapters that they carefully made the distinction between the normative and the factual, between rules of inference and laws of thought. It was, however, an important question among them, given such a distinction, how far psychology is still relevant to epistemological and logical questions. On the whole, the tradition saw psychological and epistemological questions as distinct yet complementary. They believed that it is still necessary and important to have both perspectives while distinguishing between them. The blanket charge of psychologism simply begs questions against the subtle discussions of the interrelationship between epistemology and psychology that took place in the empiricist-psychological tradition.
Though Fries, Herbart and Beneke understood Kant’s project in psychological terms, it would be a mistake to think—as many neo-Kantians later did—that their intent was to read all epistemology out of Kant’s project. They did not reduce the quid juris? to the quid facti?, as Cassirer was later to complain; and they were perfectly aware of, and indeed insisted upon, the distinction between these kinds of questions. Rather than ignoring or abolishing epistemology, they understood it in very different terms from the rationalist-speculative tradition. Fries, Herbart and Beneke wanted to steer epistemology away from an ambitious foundationalism and towards a more modest examination of the logic of the sciences. They rejected the old conception of philosophy as a philosophia prima, whose aim is to provide a foundation for all the sciences, and they advocated instead a new conception of philosophy as the “underlabourer” of the empirical sciences, whose task is to investigate their methods and presuppositions. For Fries, Herbart and Beneke, empirical science is an autonomous activity that has already established its legitimacy and that stands in no need of a higher philosophical foundation; the philosopher need not, and should not, interfere with the sciences, attempt to anticipate their results or justify them from first principles. Since science is a fact, a fait accompli, the task of philosophy is to understand it and explain how this fact is possible. Fries, Herbart and Beneke were all critical, therefore, of the Naturphilosophie of Schelling and Hegel, which they regarded as an illegitimate intrusion of philosophy upon the domain of empirical science. The famous reorientation of philosophy around the empirical sciences, which is supposed to be a legacy of positivism or Trendelenburg, was really the work of Fries, Herbart and Beneke in the early decades of the 19th century.
The origins of the empiricist-psychological tradition lie in the early 18th century, in the project for “a science of human nature” that came originally from the Scottish Enlightenment. This new science, which was advocated by Hume, Smith, Home, Ferguson and Millar, was modelled on the methods of the new natural sciences. It would be, in Hume’s memorable phrase, “An Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.”11 What Newton had done for the physical cosmos, the Scottish philosophers intended to do for “the moral realm”. Their aim was to formulate precise laws about human nature based on natural history, whose facts were to be collected from introspection, observation, travel narratives and histories.12 Beginning in the middle of the 18th century, this project was imported into Germany through translations of the Scottish philosophers,13 and it soon found many devotees, among them Karl Friedrich Flögel, Ernst Platner, Jakob Friedrich Abel, Johann Georg Feder, Christoph Meiners, and, last but not least, the young Herder.14 The Germans word for this new science of human nature was “Anthropologie”, which was defined in a broad sense: “The doctrine of man, his parts and relations, in a theological as well as a physical and moral sense.”15 There was a naturalistic perspective behind anthropology, which saw human beings as parts of nature as a whole and therefore as subject to her laws. Following this perspective, anthropology would stress the interaction between the mind and nature (viz. geography and climate) and between the mental and physical aspects of a human being, striving to grasp man as a unity and whole. The old metaphysical mind–body problem, which had so troubled the great minds of the 17th century, was simply laid aside in favour of a kind of empirical interactionism. The aim was to show the intimate interaction between mind and body, regardless of the metaphysical basis for that fact.
There are some direct links between the anthropological and empirical-psycho logical traditions. It is no accident that Fries sometimes called his “new critique of reason” an “anthropological critique”, and that he had made anthropology into the basis of philosophy in his early System der Philosophie. As a student in Leipzig in 1796, Fries had attended the lectures of Ernst Platner, who was the foremost spokesman for anthropology in Germany; he later acknowledged Platner’s great importance for his own philosophy.16 The young Beneke called his psychology Erfahrungsseelenkunde, a very revealing term in pinning down his intellectual roots. Erfahrungsseelenkunde was an immediate offshoot of the anthropological tradition, whose precedent was Karl Phillip Moritz’s Erfahrungsseelenkunde, a project of the Berlin Aufklärung that flourished at the end of the 18th century.17 This project was pursued by two Kantian philosophers in Halle, J.C. Hoffbauer and L.H. Jakob, whose lectures Beneke attended when he was a student there.18
The triumph of Kant’s philosophy in the 1790s thwarted and interrupted the tradition of anthropology. Though Kant himself was an anthropologist in his pre-critical years, he had turned away from anthropology on the road to transcendental philosophy.19 Kant’s critique of the empiricist tradition, and his sharp separation between the quid juris? and quid facti?, meant a turning away from the empirical methods of anthropology. Kant had located the problem of knowledge in a place where it could not be solved by empirical methods; indeed, he had shown that following those methods to their ultimate conclusion, in the manner of Hume, could end only in scepticism. Accordingly, for the critical Kant, the method of philosophy is no longer empirical but transcendental, that is, it determines through logical analysis of concepts and discursive reasoning the necessary conditions of knowledge.20 The method of philosophy, Kant now taught, essentially consists in “rational cognition in concepts”, which involves discursive proofs.21 It is no wonder, then, that the champions of anthropology saw Kant’s methodology as a relapse into the old scholasticism, a vice for which their empirical methods were a remedy. It is also no surprise that they were more impressed by the “analytic method” of the young Kant’s Prize Essay, which they believed to be more in accord with the empirical sciences.
Despite this friction between transcendental philosophy and anthropology, there was still, in one important respect, a confluence of these traditions. Despite their naturalism, the anthropologists still had an anthropocentric view of the world. They would often stress how what we know depends on our powers of perception and organs of sense, so that the object of knowledge is not simply given to us; and they would often emphasize how what we value depends on our desires and emotions, so that the good does not exist in a Platonic realm beyond us. Since what we know and value depends crucially on our human powers and needs, the anthropologists made anthropology into their master science, the basis of, or key to, all the other sciences. Following Pope’s famous adage, they believed that “the proper study of mankind is man.” This anthropocentric tendency was an important shift in priorities away from the old Wolffian school philosophy, which had made ontology into philosophia prima. Rather than beginning with being in general, the anthropologists believed that we must first look at the man who knows being, given that all knowledge of being depends on him. It was this anthropocentric tendency of the anthropological tradition that eventually merged with the Kantian tradition, for it expressed the same direction of thought as Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Kant’s philosophy had given a powerful new rationale and epistemology to support the anthropocentric direction of anthropology. Hence, in this important respect, the critical philosophy was not a turn away from anthropology but a vindication of it. We can now understand why Beneke could claim that anthropocentrism was “the proper critical spirit of the Kantian philosophy.”22
Once we place Fries, Herbart and Beneke in the context of the anthropological tradition, we can begin to understand their early reaction to Kant. They were very ready to embrace the Copernican Revolution, which to them established in subtle and sophisticated ways the fundamental anthropological truth that all knowledge is conditioned by human psychology. Fries, Herbart and Beneke very much celebrated the Kantian critical enterprise, which they saw as a breakthrough for philosophy and as the final turning point against the old rationalist metaphysics that had dominated Germany in the past. Their task was now to carry through with that Revolution, though by using the modern tools and methods that they had learned in anthropology. They believed that Kantian epistemology had to be based on a new empirical psychology, one whose methods were akin to those of the natural sciences. They could not accept, therefore, Kant’s scholastic or rationalist methodology, which they saw as a relapse into the old scholastic methods. Still less were they ready to adopt Kant’s psychology, whose archaic doctrine of faculties seemed to come straight out of Wolff’s Psychologia empirica. All that would be done away with in making the critical philosophy a new kind of anthropology.
It should be plain by now that the thinkers of the lost tradition are of the first importance for understanding the genesis of neo-Kantianism. For that reason we will now embark upon a examination of the early writings of Fries, Herbart and Beneke, the writings that established them as major thinkers in the neo-Kantian movement. Since these writings have been largely forgotten, we will introduce and expound their basic doctrines, all the while setting them in their original context. I follow their intellectual development only up to their discovery of Kant and the first formulation of their neo-Kantian doctrines. I make no attempt here to provide a complete account of the philosophy or intellectual development of these thinkers. That goes far beyond our business here: the story of the genesis of neo-Kantianism.
1 The only scholar who came close to recognizing the existence of an antithetical idealist tradition was Kuno Fischer in his Die beiden kantische Schulen in Jena (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1862). Fischer’s argument is that there were two traditions active in Jena in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the “metaphysical” tradition of Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel and the “anthropological” tradition of Fries. However, Fischer does not mention Beneke, and he places Herbart in the “metaphysical” tradition. The anthropological tradition, on his reckoning, consists only in Fries and his followers. We will see below that there are strong reasons for placing Herbart in the opposing tradition and for questioning his so-called “realism”.
2 G.W.F. Hegel, ‘Neueste deutsche Philosophie’, in volume III of his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden, eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), XX, 314–462.
3 Johann Erdmann, Die Entwicklung der deutschen Spekulation seit Kant, volume 5 of Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Darstellung der Geschichte der Philosophie (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1977), first published 1834; and Kuno Fischer, Vols V–VIII of his Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (Heidelberg: Winter, 1872–1877).
4 Chapter 1, Sections 3 and 7.
6 Kant, KrV, B 502, 673, 708, 862.
7 Among these works are Hans-Ludwig Ollig, Der Neukantianismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979); Thomas E. Willey, Back to Kant (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1978); Gerhard Lehmann, Geschichte der nachkantischen Philosophie (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931); Klaus Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986); Ulrich Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994); L.W. Beck, ‘Neo-Kantianism’, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), V, 468–473; and H. Holzhey, ‘Neukantianismus’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 1984), VI, 747–754. Of all these authors only Lehmann gives some importance to Fries and Herbart; and only Köhnke recognizes Beneke.
8 On the charge of psychologism and its many meanings and associations, see Martin Kusch, Psychologism (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 95–121.
9 For how many times exactly, see Kusch, Psychologism, who documents all the instances, p. 97.
10 Wilhelm Windelband, Die Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, sixth edition (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1919), II, p. 423.
11 From the subtitle of the first edition of A Treatise of Human Nature (London: John Noon, 1739).
12 On the methods of Scottish anthropology, see Aaron Garrett, ‘Anthropology: the ‘original’ of human nature’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 79–93.
13 On the dates of these translations, see Max Wundt, Die deutsche Schulphilosophie im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Tübingen: Mohr, 1945), pp. 270–271, n.1.
14 Eighteenth-century German anthropology has recently become the subject of intensive investigation. See especially the recent studies by John Zammito, Kant, Herder & the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 221–254; and Michael Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 222–247. See also Mareta Linden, Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegriff des 18. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Lang, 1976); and Karl Fink, ‘Storm and Stress Anthropology’, History of the Human Sciences 6 (1993), 51–71. See also these anthologies: Der ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schings (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992); Anthropologie und Literatur um 1800, eds Jürgen Barkhoff and Eda Sagarra (Munich: Iudicium Verlag, 1992); and Anthropology and the German Enlightenment, ed. Katherine M. Faull (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell, 1995).
15 See Johann Christian Adelung, Grammatisch-Kritische Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart (Vienna: Bauer, 1811), p. 392.
16 See Jakob Friedrich Fries, Handbuch der Psychischen Anthropologie (Jena: Cröker, 1820), I, ‘Vorrede’ (unpaginated).
17 See Karl Phillip Moritz, Gnothi sauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenlehre als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte (Berlin: Mylius, 1783–1793), 10 vols. There is a large literature surrounding Moritz’s Erfahrungsseelenkunde. Two good introductory accounts: Hans Joachim Schrimpf, ‘Das Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde und sein Herausgeber’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 99 (1980), 161–187; and Martin Davies, ‘Erfahrungsseelenkunde: Its social and intellectual origins’, Oxford German Studies 16 (1985), 13–35.
18 This is pointed out by Otto Gramzow, Friedrich Eduard Benekes Leben und Philosophie (Bern: Steiger, 1899), p. 15. See, for example, Johann Christoph Hoffbauer, Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Seelenkrankheiten und eine Klassification derselben (Halle: Hahn, 1802) and Naturlehre der Seele (Halle: Renger, 1796). See also, Ludwig Heinrich Jakob, Grundriß der Erfahrungs-Seelenlehre (Halle: Hemmerde und Schwetschke, 1791).
19 On that story, see Zammito, Kant, Herder & the Birth of Anthropology, pp. 255–307.
20 KrV, B 750, 762.
21 KrV, B 741, 762.
22 See F.E. Beneke, Das Verhältniß von Seele und Leib (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1826), p. vii.