Neo-Kantian ideas of history

The two main groupings of German neo-Kantians, the Baden or Southwest School of Windelband and Rickert, and the Marburg School of Cohen, Natorp, and Cassirer, see history as a central philosophical problem. For Windelband and Rickert, it is a "logical" problem of the unity of human knowledge or science (Wissenschaft). On the face of it, the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) obviously differ in subject matter, method, and style from the sciences of human history and culture, the so-called Geisteswissenschaften or sciences of the spirit (Geist). But how do they differ? Are the natural sciences to be taken as models for the Geisteswissenschaften? If so, how can the latter accommodate themselves to the natural-scientific form, since their subject matter clearly cannot be reduced to nature without at the same time destroying the very notion of a distinct branch of knowledge concerned with spirit or mind? The Southwest School sees these unresolved questions regarding an important and undeniably real epistemic activity - historiography - as indicative of a theoretical crisis that the sciences themselves lack the resources or perspective to resolve. Only philosophical critique can hope to elucidate the so-called logic of the historical or cultural sciences, and thus clearly define both the respective subject matter and methodology of the Natur-and Geisteswissenschaften. In this way, a critique of the "fact" of the historical sciences can expose the rational organization of all branches of human knowledge, of Wissenschaft as a whole. This "critical"enterprise is simply a continuation of Kant’s project as we see it stated in the Prolegomena, where he addresses such questions as "How is pure science of nature possible?" Rickert and Windelband now ask, in effect: "How is the science of history possible?" By contrast, the Marburg School approaches history in a way at once more oblique and profound than Windelband and Rickert’s.