Neo-Kantianism and Epistemology: On the Formation of a Philosophical Discipline in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Abstract

Viewed first purely philosophically and not yet going further into the history of science, the emergence of epistemology as a separate philosophical discipline, even foundational discipline, took place with Neokantianism in Germany. Epistemology became increasingly independent of traditional formal logic, on the one hand, and connected with the theory of science that developed later, on the other. It was in no way identical with the far longer international history of epistemological standpoints; nor can we reduce the characterization and history of Neokantianism, as one of the dominant post-classical philosophical currents in the second half of nineteenth-century Germany in general, solely to the elaboration of a philosophical theory of knowledge in this period. (Incidently, it has a pre- and post-history just as long again.) Nevertheless that direct relation of Neokantianism and epistemology does exist, though it will here be sketched only in its main points; it is simply not explicable from the history of philosophy alone, above all not without far-reaching concrete history of science research as well as horizons of reference to social ideology.