Content area
Full Text
BEISER, Frederick C. The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism 1796-1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xiii + 624 pp. Cloth, £75.00-NeoKantianism began with an 1865 polemic entitled Kant und die Epigonen excoriating the metaphysical excesses of Naturphilosophie. With the rallying cry, Zurück zu Kant!, Otto Liebmann thus ushered in a spiritual rebirth of Kantianism, reestablishing philosophy as a sober epistemological reflection on empirical science.
Such, at least, is the received view; in fact, neo-Kantianism began over sixty-five years earlier, while Kant was still alive. When Liebmann penned his polemic-which did not contain the quotable slogan, but the less pithy, "Es muß auf Kant zurückgegangen werden"-neo-Kantianism was already a dominant philosophical force in German-speaking Europe. Nor did neoKantians abandon metaphysical, religious, moral, or existential questions for that dry "university philosophy" dismissed by Lebensphilosophen. While most neo-Kantians revered the empirical sciences and harbored critical attitudes toward Naturphilosophie, many defended metaphysical theses and critically engaged with Schopenhauer's pessimism. Some sought aesthetic foundations for morality and religion, following the romantics, while others tried to resurrect virtue ethics in a Kantian framework.
These are some of the many welcome correctives to conventional historical wisdom provided by Frederick Beiser's considerable new volume, which traces neo-Kantianism from the late eighteenth century t o its...