Talks this year
February 28, University of California, Santa Cruz. Visit the UCSC colloquium site June 2008, Conference in Coswig (Anhalt), Germany: Hermann Cohen und die bildende Kunst (Hermann Cohen and the Graphic Arts) Click here for the CFP International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, Vancouver, June 2008 Click here for the conference program Articles, translations, and reviews
German supporters of the Kantian philosophy in the late 19th century took one of two forks in the road: the fork leading to Baden, and the Southwest School of neo-Kantian philosophy, and the fork leading to Marburg, and the Marburg School, founded by Hermann Cohen. Between 1876, when Cohen came to Marburg, and 1918, the year of Cohen's death, Cohen, with his Marburg School, had a profound influence on German academia. Recent scholarship examines the role of neo-Kantian theory in contexts such as the background to the development of relativity theory and the philosophy of Gottlob Frege. Our understanding of neo-Kantian thought would profit from a more comprehensive account of the philosophical context of the late 19th century. I argue that Cohen's contributions to the Trendelenburg - Fischer debate on Kant's theory of space and time in the late 19th century shed light on the implications of the turn “back to Kant” in German philosophy of science. “For Cohen, Kant's system answers the truly fateful question of philosophy in general: the question of the relation between philosophy and science. The reconstruction of this system from its original driving forces takes us into the midst of the historical debate over the continuation of philosophy itself. The value of Kant's doctrine is that the sharpest, most concise expression of this debate is found in his work: it is the quintessential revelation of his thought, the seminal significance of which is attached to no single time and no single school.” Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) participated in two of the most significant developments in physics and in the philosophy of science in the 19th century: the proof that Euclidean geometry does not describe the only possible visualizable and physical space, and the shift from physics based on actions between particles at a distance to the field theory. Helmholtz achieved a staggering number of scientific results, including the formulation of energy conservation, the vortex equations for fluid dynamics, the notion of free energy in thermodynamics, and the invention of the ophthalmoscope. His constant interest in the epistemology of science guarantees his enduring significance for philosophy. Despite his revisions to Kant's philosophy, Cohen argued that he and Kant both constructed systems of “critical idealism,”. But what impact do Cohen's revisions to Kant have on the philosophical project of critical idealism? Cohen re-interpreted Kant's epistemological a priori to accommodate changes in science. In his works on ethics and aesthetics, Cohen cites what he sees as two shortcomings with Kantian philosophy: the lack of an account of suffering and compassion in the ethics, and the lack of an account of humor to temper the inhuman ideal of the sublime in the aesthetics. Two recently published volumes tackle these central issues in Cohen's thought: a collection of essays, Hermann Cohen's Critical Idealism, edited by Reinier Munk, and a collection of Andrea Poma's essays, Yearning for Form and Other Essays on Hermann Cohen's Thought. Resources
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