Neo-Hegelianism

The Positivistic

View.—Among all the thinkers of the Neo Kantian movement, Riehl is the one who is most strongly in fluenced by the positivistic view of the nature and the task of philosophy. Scientific philosophy, in the strict sense of the word, is for him almost synonymous with pure epistemology and the methodology of the special sciences.

Hence, there remains no special field of study reserved as its proper domain ; rather it is merely the texture and the logical structure of knowledge, of science itself, with which philosophic reflection can be concerned. "Instead of things, it investigates the understanding which recognizes things; instead of nature, the science of nature; instead of phenomena, their presuppositions in the consciousness of man." However, through this confinement of philosophy to the pure science of knowledge, Riehl ends by allowing the theory of values to fall out of it entirely.

To be sure, Riehl admits that there must be a "teleology of human life" for which mere knowledge of nature is not sufficient; but he himself did not study systematically the problems of this teleology, especially the ethical and aesthetic problems and the philosophy of history; he touched upon them only occasionally. "Views of the world" (W eltanschauungen)—so he declares ex plicitly—are not a matter of mere understanding; and they are for that reason subjective in the main; they do not belong to science but to faith. This separation of knowledge from faith carried with it the danger that scientific value was attributed to natural knowledge exclusively, while the pure sciences of the mind (Geisteswissenschaften), the sciences of the historical reality of man's mental achievements, were deprived of their specific methodical foundation.

Windelband and Rickert.

Here lies the problem from which started that tendency of Neo-Kantianism which was founded by Wilhelm Windelband and carried on by Heinrich Rickert. The epochal works of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1912), especially his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883), had led the attention of 19th century German philosophy back to the foundations of the historical world in the sciences of the mind. In trying to present, and to solve, this problem in the spirit of the strictly critical philosophy, it was first of all necessary to draw a sharp line between the form of science exemplified by history and that represented by natural science.

This is the task which Windelband sets himself in his address : Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft. The pure "sciences of laws" are here contrasted with the "sciences of events," the "nomo thetic" procedure of natural science with the "ideographic" pro cedure of history. Rickert elaborates this distinction in his work, Die Grenzen der natztrwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, which he calls a logical introduction to the historical sciences (1896 1902, 2nd ed. 1913). In this justification, the isolated place which the pure science of knowledge had received with Riehl is abolished.

For Windelband and Rickert (cf. especially Rickert's Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, 1892, 2nd ed. 1904) the theory of knowledge, too, is included in the group of the sciences of values, because it is a science of "oughts," of the universally valid norms of truth. In this respect, it stands on the same level as the other studies of values, especially with ethics and aesthetics. Philosophy, as a general theory of values, as the science of the "consciousness of norms" (Normalbewustsein), is essentially a philosophy of culture. Its task may be said to consist in establishing a con nection between the realm of "reality" and the realm of values. It is only the concept of value that makes history possible as a science : for only through the values attached to culture can we obtain a definite principle of selection within the infinite manifold of the historical facts, and thus establish the conception of an historical individuality which is capable of description. If we now survey the path of the Neo-Kantian movement from its first beginnings to its present stage, we may say by way of sum mary that it has gradually encircled the total orbit of knowledge by trying to advance more and more from the "abstract" to the "concrete," from the general principles of knowledge to the specific content of mental culture. (E. CR.) NEOLITHIC : see ARCHAEOLOGY.