Psychological Roots of Neo-Kantian Anti-Psychologism. Problem Statement

Abstract

The present text is a supplement to the article “Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy of Mathematics, or What is Wrong with the Marburg Method” published in “Vo­prosy filosofii” (Vol. 2, 2023). That article examined a special form of interpreta­tion of mathematical functions formulated in Herbart’s mathematical psychology and Fechner’s psychophysics and their adjustment as transcendental dominants in Cohen’s epistemology. The purpose of this article is to provide a more rigor­ous justification for the hypothesis that Cohen’s infinitesimal is not a collective notion of natural-scientific construction, but an adaptation of precisely that form of mathematical inference that was briefly fundamental to the philosophical pro­gram of psychology. The way we propose to work with the text is to model the epistemological mechanics, and to analyze the theoretical result to which it leads. The author is not trying to present Cohen’s philosophy as a strictly psy­chological concept or as a complement to Fechner’s psychophysics. Neverthe­less, it seems to be important to achieve clear understanding of precisely at what theoretical level and time span the psychological foundations of Neo-Kantianism are indisputable and at what time span they are not. The author’s research posi­tion is that convergence with psychological theory is typical of the entire Neo-Kantian movement at its early stage of development, and the value of the failed result of Cohen is to demonstrate the fact that the dereification of substantiality must be followed by the denaturalization of the means by which it is carried out.