Neokantianism and neo-Kantians

Abstract

This article complements another published in a previous issue and entitled “A Notion of Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945)”. It gave a general view of Cassirer's philosphy in the form of incellectual biography marked by a single characteristic: Neo-Kantism. Here a study of this term is offered, taking into account not only its content but also the philosophers identified with it. In order to define Neo-Kantism, one must consider the meaning of Kantism: the interpretation of Kantism in a wider or stricter sense will determine the scope of Neo-Kantism. The author reaches the conclusion that only the sensu stricto of both terms is efficacious, since the first could refer, to a greater or lesser degree, to many currents of contemporary philosophy. The philosophers belonging to Neo-Kantism sensu stricto may be divided into two groups: authors not linked to the school and those who are linked, with the intention of proving that the former do not necessarily precede the latter and that, rather, they are at times coetaneous. Nonetheless, the two divisions de overlap in certain cases. According to the particular Keo-Kantian focus, the group of authors not linked to the school is divided into three sub-groups: epistemologists, axiologists and psychologists. Epistemological Neo-Kantism has three facets: empiricism, realism and logic, the last of wich coincides with the Neo-Kantism of the Marburg School and, therefore, with Cassirer. All of these groups share the methodologica1 actitude of direct, systematic and rigorous study of Kant's texts, in addition to the interpretation of the Copernican Revolution not as an inversion of the reflex analogy of object to subject but rather as the definitive substitution of the substantialist paradigm by the functionalist paradigm. This means the adoption of the metaphysical itinerary of gnoseology to ontology, in addition to the evaluation of the history of metaphysics according to wether this is critically legitimate or critically illegitimate. Although less explicitly stated, the intention of this article is the same as that of the previous one: to stress the usefulness of reintroducing Neo-Kantism into contemporary debates.