Paul Natorp

Dzieła

• 1903Platos Ideenlehre (Nauka Platona o ideach)

  Główne dzieło Natorpa: odczytuje idee Platona jako hipotezy metody naukowej, a nie jako odrębne byty, i znajduje tym samym u Platona wczesną postać idealizmu.

• 1912Allgemeine Psychologie nach kritischer Methode (Psychologia ogólna według metody krytycznej)

  Psychologia krytyczna: bezpośredniego doświadczenia nie można obserwować wprost i dociera się do niego tylko pośrednio, przez metodyczne cofanie się od uprzedmiotowionych wyników nauki; Natorp przenosi w ten sposób metodę transcendentalną do psychologii.

Stanowisko

Natorp is on the map as the second voice of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism beside Cohen. He explained and developed Cohen’s work on Kant and the theory of science and carried the transcendental method into psychology, ethics, politics and pedagogy. Philosophy is for him critique of the conditions of scientific knowledge and, more widely, of culture; science advances through hypotheses, which he treats as active positings, and thinking is functional and synthetic. In Plato’s Theory of Ideas (1903), his major work, he reads Plato’s Ideas as hypotheses of a scientific method rather than as separate beings, finding in Plato an early idealism. His Social Pedagogy (1899) belongs to this extension, and in the General Psychology According to the Critical Method (1912) he argues that immediate experience can be reached only indirectly, by reversing from the objectified results of science. Cassirer was his student, and Gadamer wrote his dissertation under him; Natorp reported that reading Lange led him into philosophy.

Życie i kontekst

Paul Natorp was born on 24 January 1854 in Düsseldorf. He began with classical philology under Hermann Usener in Bonn and continued in Strasbourg before turning to philosophy under the influence of the Marburg reading of Kant. In 1881 he habilitated in Marburg under Hermann Cohen with a study of Descartes’ theory of knowledge, and he stayed in Marburg for the rest of his career, becoming a professor in 1893. Late in life he helped to secure Martin Heidegger’s appointment as associate professor at Marburg; Heidegger later held his chair. He died on 17 August 1924.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Social Pedagogy (Sozialpädagogik, 1899)
• Plato’s Theory of Ideas (Platos Ideenlehre, 1903)
• The Logical Foundations of the Exact Sciences (Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften, 1910)
• General Psychology According to the Critical Method (Allgemeine Psychologie nach kritischer Methode, 1912)