This is a translation of the excerpts published in Naturwissenschaften of Grete Hermann’s 1935 essay on philosophy of quantum mechanics, recently translated into English. Her main thesis, in line with her natural-philosophical training and neo-Kantian commitments, is to argue that quantum mechanics does not refute the principle of causality. Quantum mechanics cannot be completed by, hidden variables, because it is already causally complete (albeit retroductively). In establishing this provocative thesis, she makes important use of Bohr’s principles of correspondence and complementarity and of Weizsäcker's version of the gamma-ray microscope, arguing that the lesson of quantum mechanics is the impossibility of an absolute description of nature independent of the context of observation.

This chapter critically reviews dualism, as developed by Heinrich Triepel, and monism, mainly formulated by Hans Kelsen. It argues that these theories can no longer comprehensively explain the relationship between international and EU or EU and national law and that, due to their emergence almost a century ago, these theories must be understood in their historical context. Historically, dualism was progress as the separation of international and national law helped international law become independent. Thus, dualism liberated international law from being understood as “external State law,” and was even referred to as a “cleansing thunderstorm” by the monist Alfred Verdross. The main characteristic of monism is the assumption of a single unified legal system. Kelsenian monism must face the criticism of having a highly fictitious understanding of the world: nothing less than the “unity of the legal world order” is proclaimed. To depict the most important assumptions of Kelsenian monism, this chapter looks into the Kelsenian adherence to neo-Kantian epistemology, and shows that this understanding refers to a very specific philosophical position, which has been rightly criticized by many philosophers.

Along with the third chapter, this chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant is informed by the successes and failures of previous interpretations. Heidegger does not bring idiosyncratic concerns to Kant’s text, but rather carries forward an interpretive tradition that began with the German Idealists and continued with the Marburg Neo-Kantians: a tradition that attempted to unify Kant’s dual faculties of sensibility and understanding, and to therefore ground the metaphysical principles that depend on their unification. The Neo-Kantians unify the faculties by insisting that human cognition is understanding through and through; Kant was wrong to think we have a separate faculty of sensibility. This interpretation erases the signature discursivity of Kant’s position, the idea that two qualitatively different faculties are required for us to cognize. This chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation does not have this result, even though it prioritizes the faculty of imagination. Heidegger’s central thesis in his Kant book – that, on the best version of Kant’s argument, the imagination has priority as the source of cognition – rests crucially on the claim that the imagination is both receptive and spontaneous. Thus, Heidegger’s interpretation maintains Kant’s discursivity thesis, while inquiring more deeply into the unified receptivity and spontaneity that characterizes the human being.

This essay interprets Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism of 1951 by situating the book within the Marburgian tradition of neo-Kantian philosophy. To do so, Panofsky’s relation to Marburgian neo-Kantianism is first contextualized and explicated, specifically by way of his well-known relationship to Ernst Cassirer and his own programmatic statements about art historical method. With this foundation in place, Panofsky’s specific claims in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism are positioned as an attempted art-historical translation of the Marburgian commitment to ground knowledge on underlying structures of knowledge. Panofsky’s effort in this regard is shown to relate to nomological traditions of scholarship, wherein covering laws are an express and essential aim of research. Interpreting Panofsky’s argument in this way helps clarify the book’s uneven reception in the humanities, wherein an ideographic approach focusing on historical specificity for its own sake is a more accepted norm.

Bakhtin's work is difficult to interpret because it amalgamates so many different intellectual strains and influences.His early interest in Neo-Kantian philosophy and phenomenology, the first largely mediated through his friend M. I. Kagan, structured his ideas permanently. His interest in and commitment to Christian thought, and Russian Orthodox thought specifically, was important but is often over-emphasised. Bakhtin's further intellectual development was spurred by encounters with Russian Formalism, linguistics (particularly early versions of sociolinguistics), and the Marxist literary debates of his time. Far from maintaining a saintly distance from the diputes around him, Bakhtin was fully engaged by and tried to participate in debates about the role of style in literary writing and the idea of realism and the positive hero.

This chapter analyses Simmel’s worldview during his early period (until ca. 1900). It argues that Simmel held an unusually optimistic view regarding the contradictions of modernity at that time, subscribing to the idea that modern differentiation leads to a comprehensive unity which naturally emerges from variety. This claim is supported by an analysis of Simmel’s writings of the period, starting from his early monograph on Dante and ending with his early sociology and his interpretation of Kant’s philosophy. In respect of sociology, it is argued that the young Simmel subscribed to a kind of reductionist sociologism in the spirit of the founders of Völkerpsychologie, Lazarus and Steinthal. In respect of Kant, it is argued that the young Simmel conceived of his thought as the ultimate philosophical solution to the problems of modernity, and that he distanced himself from Kant once he began to doubt the possibility of reconciling the contradictions of modernity.

Two questions should be considered when assessing the Kantian dimensions of Kuhn’s thought. Was Kuhn a Kantian? Did Kuhn have an influence on later Kantians and neo-Kantians? Kuhn mentioned Kant as an inspiration, and his focus on explanatory frameworks and the conditions of knowledge appear Kantian. But Kuhn’s emphasis on learning; on activities of symbolization; on paradigms as practical, not just theoretical; and on the social and community aspects of scientific research as constitutive of scientific reasoning are outside the Kantian perspective. Kuhn’s admiration for Kant is tempered by his desire to understand the processes of learning, initiation into a scientific community, experimentation using instruments, and persuasion, drawing on the work of Piaget, Koyré, Wittgenstein, and others. Both Kuhn and Kant were interested in the status of science, and the role of the scientist in its development and justification. But Kuhn presents science in a much more messy, historically contingent, and socially charged way than Kant does. The paper’s conclusion evaluates Kuhn’s reception among researchers including Richardson and Friedman, assessing the prospects for future work.

This chapter explains the crucial role that science plays in the framework of the philosophy of symbolic forms. On the one hand, Cassirer’s functionalistic understanding of scientific knowledge is intimately tied with the history of self-liberation from the concept of substance that began with Galileo’s scientific revolution and that resulted in the focus of contemporary physics on purely mathematical symbols. On the other hand, for Cassirer science has broad cultural significance because it is at once the pivotal point of modern culture and remains influenced by other symbolic forms such as myth, language, and art, and ways of world understanding in general. In showing how science represents the 'theoretical self-awareness" of a new era of Western civilization, Ferrari emphasizes not only Cassirer's remaining commitment to Neo-Kantianism but also the continuity between his early epistemological view and broader philosophy of culture.

Pragmatism arose in response to the dominant philosophical ideas of the time, one of which was neo-Kantianism. Present approaches in cognitive science often derive from basic neo-Kantian ideas, notably the notion that social life and language depend on shared “frames.” Pragmatism rejected these neo-Kantian ideas, and instead relied on an extended notion of habit. But the extension required a response to some core neo-Kantian concerns. Pragmatism provided some psychological thinking, especially in William James, and in the critique of the reflex arc concept. This was paralleled and extended by Russian psychologists. They developed a research program which supported alternative accounts of the key problematics of neo-Kantianism, such as the nature of categories and of abstraction. This bears directly on social theory, which uncritically adopted ideas of shared frameworks as an explanatory shortcut, without providing a psychological or cognitive account of how this kind of sharing was possible.

This chapter develops a theory of domination, one that helps discern the normative potential of welfare institutions for democratic social movements. It critically appraises three existing approaches to domination: neo-republican approaches that focus on direct domination, neo-Kantian approaches that focus on structural domination, and post-structuralist approaches that focus on abstract domination. In each case, the chapter shows that the distinctive understanding of domination produces a different picture of the welfare state-both in terms of how we should understand the functioning of welfare institutions as well as how such institutions can overcome or reinforce structures of domination. The chapter argues that domination exists in three worlds-the objective, the intersubjective, and the subjective – each corresponding to a different "face" of power. Advocates of these three perspectives fail to recognize these distinctive levels of analysis or worlds and so overgeneralize from one level of analysis. These three theories, then, offer important insights into the nature of domination – but they are only the building blocks of a theory of democracy, domination, and the welfare state.