Neo-Kantianism

At the end of the nineteenth century, various philosophers critical of Hegel's metaphysics, Nietzsche's vitalism, and Marx's materialism, proposed to return to Kant's epistemology, focusing on the problematic relationship between knowledge and reality, concepts and experience. This so-called neo-Kantianism was also prompted by the emerging social sciences, psychology and sociology in the first place, and their search for a logic and methodology that could match those of the natural sciences. Neo-Kantianism was an influential stream of thought and research until 1933 when the rise of Nazism put an end to it. After World War II, it was surpassed by French and German existentialism, Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy, and phenomenology.

Neo-Kantianism is a label for often vastly different currents of thought and research, but usually two main schools ...