This week, I’ve been digging into the history of Kant commentary, and I’ve been struck by one thing: I can’t find much in the philosophy of science literature on the more “naturalist” commentators on Kant in the 19th Century. There’s plenty on the major schools of neo-Kantianism (Marburg and Southwest), but I can only find snippets here and there on some other major figures like Helmholtz, Wundt, Fechner, and Müller.
I ended up digging into this because of my Hilbert interests. For one, Leonard Nelson was very close to Hilbert, and he had started the neo-Friesian school. One of his major contentions was that Kant was right to distinguish his critical inquiry from the genetic inquiries of the past, but wrong that this inquiry must proceed transcendentally. (He attributes this insight to Fries.) In essence, he contends that a critical philosophy can and should be developed via scientific/empirical methods. (Note: this is a gistification from his later lectures. I suspect that this methodological point is already contained in his dissertation, since this is to be coming from Fries, but I haven’t verified this yet.) Müller was also on the faculty at Göttingen, and he is pretty well-known for having been something of a hardass when it came to methodology in experimental psychological research. Then, of course, there are the “founders” of modern psychology, Helmholtz, Fechner, and Wundt, each of whom were decidedly non-Kantian in believing psychology could be a science.
So my curiosity re: Hilbert is why we tend to paint his philosophy of math as a transcendental system, on par with the philosophies of Kant or the neo-Kantians, instead of as an adaptable investigation guided by genuinely empirical/scientific research on perception, attention, and learning (as well as a keen attention to how mathematics is researched and applied). As Wundt put it, the thought then among empirical philosophers was and should have been “beyond Kant!” instead of “back to Kant!” Put more broadly, my worry (with Wilson; see “Back to ‘back to Kant’ “) is that we’ve not learned the “right” lessons from Kant and commentary on his philosophy, and Hilbert’s philosophy of mathematics is one place that (I conjecture) this is apparently coloring other history and steering us away from the “right” lessons there, too.
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