Knowra Neo-Kantianism Neo-Kantianism Neo-Kantianism was a philosophical movement that revived and reinterpreted Kant’s critical philosophy, especially in German universities from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century.
Immanuel Kant : An eighteenth-century German philosopher whose critical philosophy examined the conditions and limits of human knowledge. Neo-Kantian thinkers made Kant’s critical project their shared starting point.
Hermann Cohen : A German philosopher who led the Marburg school and interpreted Kant through the exact sciences. His reading of Kant established the Marburg school’s distinctive orientation.
Positivism : A family of views that treats empirical observation and scientific methods as the primary sources of reliable knowledge. Neo-Kantians resisted reducing philosophy and knowledge to empirical science alone.
Philosophy of science : The philosophical study of scientific methods, concepts, explanations, and the status of scientific knowledge. Neo-Kantianism treated the sciences as a central test of critical philosophy.
Max Weber : A German sociologist whose work analyzed social action, bureaucracy, religion, and modernity. Baden Neo-Kantian debates on values and historical method shaped his methodological concerns.
Transcendental idealism : Kant’s view that experience depends on a priori forms and concepts supplied by the mind. Neo-Kantians reworked the claim that knowledge depends on conditions of cognition.
Paul Natorp : A German philosopher of the Marburg school who developed Neo-Kantian accounts of knowledge, psychology, and education. He extended Marburg’s critical method beyond its original focus on natural science.
German idealism : A philosophical tradition after Kant associated with figures such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Neo-Kantians returned to Kant partly against post-Kantian systems they saw as speculative.
Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften : A German distinction between natural sciences and the human or cultural sciences. Baden thinkers used this distinction to explain differences in scientific method.
Martin Heidegger : A German philosopher whose work on being and existence became a major alternative to Neo-Kantian epistemology. His early critique challenged the movement’s focus on knowledge and validity.
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