The Development of the Marburg Critique from F. A. Lange to Cassirer

That Cohen's work would principally be received as part of a broad reform project and not, as his detractors would have it, solely as a recondite theory of physics or, conversely, even a form of “mysticism” (Nelson) is evident if we place it in the earlier context of the Marburg school. The same reception history also casts light on the meaning of Cassirer's works, which were written and presumably read during his life with this context in mind, but which in themselves rarely alert the present-day reader to this background. Against a reading of Cassirer or the Marburg school as aloof from practical concerns, their work proves to be consistently inflected by politics and social pressures. In confronting them, Cohen and Cassirer apparently acted in close consultation with one another.

The theoretical foundations of the Marburg school began with Lange's influential History of Materialism (1861), by far the most – indeed, in many ways the only – popular text of the Marburg school. The young Nietzsche, for instance, was characteristic of his intellectual generation in reading Lange's work numerous times. He went so far as to write a friend that Lange's was “the most important philosophical work of recent decades” and that all the young philologist needed for his education was “Kant, Schopenhauer, and this book of Lange's.”