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Neo-Kantianism was a movement in the history of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy that shaped the philosophy of culture and philosophy of education in Germany and the rest of the world. The philosophers prominent in Neo-Kantianism were primarily concerned with transcendental arguments, and asked questions such as how is knowledge and history possible. Another intellectual theme of Neo-Kantianism, as related to epistemological arguments, was the theory of concept formation in the human, social, and cultural sciences.
The philosophy of Neo-Kantianism treated almost all knowledge as a science. Accordingly, there were the human sciences that philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey examined in Berlin, the social sciences that sociologist Max Weber pioneered in Heidelberg, and the cultural sciences that philosopher Ernst Cassirer focused on studying in Marburg. One of the major intellectual projects of Neo-Kantianism was the forming and articulation of a philosophy of culture (Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Four Volumes [Volume Two, Mythical Thought], An Essay on Man: An Introduction of a Philosophy of Human Culture; The Logic of the Cultural Sciences; Language and Myth, translated by Susan Langer, author of Philosophy in a New Key; Edward Skidelsky. Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture, 2008; Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, 2000; Peter Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, 2010). The philosopher Emil Lask proposed a Neo-Kantian legal philosophy (Lask, Legal Philosophy, 1905, reprinted in The Legal Philosophies of Lask, Radbruch, and Dabin, 1949) as did Rudolf Stammler before him. Weber focused on developing a philosophy of social science. Georg Simmel was concerned with philosophical culture, writing essays such as ‘The Stranger’, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, the book The Philosophy of Money, and cultural critiques such as ‘The Crisis of Culture’, ‘The Tragedy and Concept of Culture’ and ‘On the Essence of Culture’, the latter which were his contribution to German cultural pessimism, and all of which are reprinted in Simmel on Culture, 1997. The Southwest School of Neo-Kantianism, comprised of philosophers Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband, and Lask, concerned itself with approaching philosophy through the arts and humanities. The Marburg School, comprised of philosophers Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Cassirer, concerned itself with approaching philosophy through the natural sciences and mathematics. Both schools of Neo-Kantianism were concerned with asking philosophical questions about history (proposing and elaborating a philosophy of history), such as how is historical knowledge possible. A culture concept, including the aforementioned project of a philosophy of culture, was elaborated by both schools of Neo-Kantianism. In regards to his reconstruction and connection with the great schools of legal thinking, Cassirer had contacts with the Scandinavian realists while in Göteborg.
Neo-Kantianism had a great impact on the Sein und Sollen distinction in continental philosophy of social science and its connection to the legal philosophy, with ramifications for the epistemology of law, ontology of law, and for a range of practical matters for philosophers of law. Neo-Kantianism also came to play an important role in the development of the continental critical traditions of sociology of law, in the wake of Dilthey and Rickert. Tönnies’ conception of the community and society distinction was quite important for different aspects of philosophy of law, including discussions pertaining to institutionalism. We would be much more interested in understanding Hart and the post-Hartian debate to the epistemological assumptions of Neo-Kantian discussions of the nature of law.
Ernst Troeltsch elaborated a religious theology that was informed by the philosophy of Neo-Kantianism. Commentators in continental philosophy such as Frederick Beiser have turned their focus in scholarship on Neo-Kantianism at times to aid them in delineating a Historicism in German intellectual history (Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 2012; The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880, 2015). Other commentators such as Sebastian Luft have been preoccupied with the theme of philosophy of culture in the movement’s various works, as well as how the movement relates to early phenomenology and other trends in continental philosophy (Luft, The Space of Culture: Towards a Neo-Kantian Philosophy of Culture, 2015; The Neo-Kantian Reader, 2015; Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy, 2009). The notion of value was one of the central concerns of Neo-Kantianism as a philosophical movement, and comprised a significant component in its intellectual project of an ethics. Sociologist Gillian Rose incorporated Neo-Kantianism in her scholarship, as related to social theory. In addition to broad concerns with values, the various philosophers of Neo-Kantianism also proposed a distinct ethics, as the case with Nicolai Hartmann and Hermann Cohen. Other forms of value theory elaborated by Neo-Kantian philosophers included aesthetics and the philosophy of history, in addition to the aforementioned philosophy of law and philosophy of culture. Social scientist Ferdinand Tönnies developed sociology with the methodology of Neo-Kantianism along with Weber. Works of Weber’s that were explicitly Neo-Kantian included his Critique of Stammler and Roscher and Knies. French Neo-Kantianism also played a significantly role in developing the social sciences as distinct from philosophy, with Émile Durkheim (Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, 1953) (Durkheim, On Institutional Analysis, 1978) further developing the Neo-Kantian themes of philosophers Émile Boutroux and Charles Bernard Renouvier.
In the Neo-Kantianism of Lask’s ‘Legal Philosophy’ (Lask, [1905]1949), the German Southwest thinker provides a conceptual framework that includes a substrate (substratum), and a fact/value distinction, the latter as related to objectivity in law. In the Neo-Kantianism of Kelsen’s ‘Pure Theory of Law’ methodology and its ‘Grundnorm’ (Ground Norm, or Basic Norm), he works top-down in the manner that an individual cannot start with a direct accessing of the ‘Grundnorm’ of society, an universalizable collective representation to work down from, one that she or he would be able to make sense of in its lower hierarchies of further constructed collective and individual representations. This ‘Pure Theory of Law’ methodology described, which is conceived to be followed by the jurist, is Kelsen’s Neo-Kantian attempt at a purification of concepts, and is how is explains normativity in his philosophy of law.
The model for Marburg School Neo-Kantianism was physics, and the larger movement of Neo-Kantianism treated all knowledge as a science, with many Neo-Kantian thinkers attempting to distinguish the Natural Sciences from the Human Sciences, and the Human Sciences from the Cultural, or Social, Sciences. The Southwest School’s Rickert was concerned with concept formation between these different sciences and philosophers that reacted to Neo-Kantianism such as phenomenologist Edmund Husserl attempted to study all of philosophy as a ‘rigorous science’. This theme of scientism derived from the philosophy of Neo-Kantianism is what would go on to inform the analytic/continental divide in 20th century philosophy. In this vein, Cassirer and other Neo-Kantians studied Einstein’s theory of relativity, as well as that of Renaissance science.
In addition to philosophy, scholarship on Neo-Kantianism has also appeared by scholars working in the history of ideas. In contemporary analytic philosophy, philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell have developed Neo-Kantian themes in their work, as related to aspects that Cassirer studied and juxtaposed with science, such as myth, which appears in Sellars work as the Myth of the Given. Michel Foucault has explicitly elaborated a Neo-Kantian philosophy, one that rests on Immanuel Kant’s essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and which reinterprets the discursivity of traditional Kantian concepts into that of discursive practices.
Detecting traces of Neo-Kantian thinking in contemporary scholarship and worldviews among the philosophy of education is not an easy task. It appears that Critical Pedagogy scholarship has been influenced by Neo-Kantian philosophical thought. The theoretical foundations of critical pedagogy have been informed by the cultural sciences, human sciences, and social sciences that Neo-Kantian thought was preoccupied with, especially Max Weber’s social thought from Heidelberg and the Southwest (Baden) School of Neo-Kantianism in Germany, and Durkheim’s French Neo-Kantian social thought as related to education and pedagogy, namely moral education. Durkheim’s had a joint academic appointment in the French University System among Sociology (from a Philosophical point of view) and Education (Pedagogy), which gave him the opportunity to articulate a Neo-Kantian philosophy of culture and education.