Emil Lask
Lask held that philosophy is the science of validity, and that its central problem is how the irrational given of experience can be grasped in concepts without being dissolved into them.
Placement
Neo-Kantian who studied with Windelband and Rickert and developed a logic of philosophy: validity has its own forms, and the problem is how the irrational given can be grasped in concepts; an early influence on Lukács.
Key ideas
- Philosophy as the science of validity
- The gap between irrational reality and rational concept
Teachers: Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert
Influence
Influenced by 2
Wilhelm Windelband studied with
studied with
Lask studied under Windelband in Heidelberg and later habilitated there. SEP “Neo-Kantianism” (J. Heis), §3
Evidence: AI draft
Wilhelm Windelband › 1848–1915
Heinrich Rickert studied with
studied with
Lask wrote his dissertation on Fichte under Rickert at Freiburg in 1902. SEP “Neo-Kantianism” (J. Heis), §3
Evidence: AI draft
Heinrich Rickert › 1863–1936
Influenced 2
Max Weber
influenced
Weber met the neo-Kantian problem of bridging irrational reality and rational concept in the form Lask gave it, and his methodological writings turn largely on that problem. SEP “Max Weber” (S. H. Kim), §2.1 (Lask named with Windelband and Rickert as the Baden School through which Weber found his epistemological template)
Evidence: AI draft
Max Weber › 1864–1920
Georg Lukács
influenced
Lukács’s early philosophy of art in Heidelberg rests on a neo-Kantian framework in which Lask’s influence is especially strong. SEP “Georg Lukács” (T. Stahl, rev. 2023), §1 and §2.2, citing Kavoulakos 2014
Evidence: AI draft
Georg Lukács › 1885–1971
Criticism
Criticized by 1
Martin Heidegger
criticised by
Heidegger’s 1919 lecture course likewise made Lask’s version of the philosophy of value a target of phenomenological critique. SEP “Hermann Lotze” (D. Sullivan, rev. 2024), §5.3
Evidence: AI draft
Martin Heidegger › 1889–1976
Works
Lask’s dissertation of 1902, written under Rickert in Freiburg, on Fichte’s idealism and its relation to history; his first major work, nine years before the logic of philosophy.
Develops philosophy as the science of validity: Lask asks how sensory, irrational content can be matter for conceptual form without being reduced to it, and names validity and objectivity as the two kinds of form; one of the main works of the Southwest German School.
Position
Lask is on the map as the most influential and philosophically sophisticated student of Windelband and Rickert, in the words of the SEP entry on neo-Kantianism. Like his teachers he held that philosophy is the science of validity, but he worried that the stress on the objectivity of the valid and on the split between the factual and the normative could harden into a two-world metaphysics. In The Logic of Philosophy and the Doctrine of Categories (1911) he turned this into a two-element view: the form of a sense is validity, the form of an object is objectivity, and sensory content can be matter for conceptual form without being reduced to it. The Doctrine of Judgment (1912) added a primary object between the content of a judgment and the object judged. The problem of the irrational given, which Lask posed in this form, was taken over by Max Weber, who names him with Windelband and Rickert as a source of his epistemology; it also shaped the young Georg Lukács. Heidegger’s lecture course of 1919 made Lask’s philosophy of value a target of phenomenological critique, and Lask criticised Rickert’s view that natural science and historical individualisation are equally legitimate.
Life & context
Emil Lask was born in 1875. He studied with Wilhelm Windelband in Heidelberg and with Heinrich Rickert in Freiburg, under whom he wrote his dissertation Fichte’s Idealism and History (1902). He later habilitated at Heidelberg, where he became a professor. He died in 1915 in the First World War.
Further main works
- The Doctrine of Judgment (Die Lehre vom Urteil, 1912)
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