Kant’s Theory of Experience

Introduction

Cohen published “Kants Theorie der Erfahrung” in 1871 and reworked it thoroughly in 1885; a third edition followed in 1918. Against readings that took Kant’s a priori as an innate equipment of the human mind, to be studied by psychology, he argued that it is the set of conditions that make experience – understood as scientific knowledge – possible. The second edition develops this as the “transcendental method”: philosophy starts from the fact of mathematical natural science and asks for the principles on which its objectivity rests; the principles of the understanding, above all the anticipation of perception with its concept of intensive magnitude, move to the centre. The book won Friedrich Albert Lange’s support, brought Cohen to Marburg and stands at the beginning of the Marburg school. In 1918 Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem read it together in Switzerland.

Connections

Builds on

• Critique of Pure Reason1781 · Immanuel Kant

More works by Hermann Cohen

• 1919Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism