The concept and philosophy of culture in Neo-Kantianism

Abstract

Neo-Kantianism represents a third strain of modern Idealism, following Kant's transcendental and Hegel's absolute Idealism. It understood itself as a form of cultural-philosophical idealism and was the dominant academic philosophy in the German-speaking world from 1870 to 1920, indeed ‘the only philosophy of world significance’. People came from all over the world to study it, in both of the main schools, the Marburg school of Cohen, Natorp and Cassirer, as well as the south-west German school of Windelband, Rickert, Lask, Cohn and Bauch. Although it was by no means united in its substantive positions, it was held together by a basic framework and represented a new and highly promising type of philosophy. The basis of its predominance was an interpretation of Kant that addressed contemporary problems, and a further development of Kant's ideas that envisaged the working out of philosophical problems in all fields. Back to Kant The return to Kant entailed a desire for an idealism that differed from post-Kantian systems and was free from their encumbrances, and the search for a new foundation for a systematic philosophy that the decline in Hegelianism had discredited. It was above all in the natural sciences that systematic philosophy had been discredited, and where there was a strong anti-philosophical resentment. Idealism's speculative flights of fancy, its devaluation of the empirical, Hegel's philosophical claim to have presented the knowledge contained in the individual natural and human sciences scientifically (i.e. philosophically) had aroused protest in those sciences. Especially his philosophy of nature, but increasingly too his philosophy of history and art were seen by representatives of the specialist positive sciences as an assault. Hegel's philosophy was seen as scientifically inadmissible.