Today we can hardly conceive how such a fundamental mix-up was possible, and how anyone could believe that we could understand anything about the logical structure of what is thought as such—the “thought”—by way of a psychological study of thinking. But the fact is that only a very few [51] managed to stay free of this mess. Or, to put it another way: Thought and thinking got mixed up together for the most part; but when psychologism was attacked, it could always appeal to the fact that it did not deny the absolute validity of the laws of thought (which it understood in a natural sense) while empirical scientific inquiry pressed to the fore its attitude toward the mind. Only the Marburg School, and [Wilhelm] Schuppe with his Erkenntnistheoretische Logik, remained relatively untouched by these opinions.²⁴ The Marburg School, by means of a particular interpretation of Kant, protected itself against psychologism’s invasion of the theory of consciousness, and therefore Natorp could legitimately say in a critique of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Kantstudien, 1901)²⁵ that the members of the Marburg School had been unable to learn very much from this critique of psychologism.

In fact, that is correct. But on the other hand, only Husserl’s critique opened the way by largely exposing the contradiction, clarifying it, and tracing it to its roots. And in that regard, we have to say that the Marburg School, as counter-position, did not clarify everything. Within the School’s position, the question about consciousness as distinct from the so-called mental has remained very questionable. That’s bound up with the fact that the Marburg interpretation of Kant never clarified to what degree in Kant himself a specific psychology or even anthropology constitutes the essential foundations of his critique of reason.

Hermann Cohen, founder of the Marburg School, says in his Logik²⁶ that this proximity to psychology is a great danger for logic, but he believed that the emergence of so-called phenomenology (which he somewhat maliciously dubbed a new scholasticism) increased rather than removed the danger. And he was right. The phenomenological critique of psychologism in fact increased the danger. That is, philosophy will be forced to confront the question about what really is the case [52] with this “mental.” Can we simply brush off the act of judging, its enactment, or the statement, as something empirical and mental, as contrasted with a so-called ideal sense? Or does an entirely different dimension of being

24. [Wilhelm Schuppe (1836–1913), Erkenntnisstheoretische Logik (Bonn: Eduard Weber, 1878).]

25. [Paul Natorp (1854–1924), “Zur Frage der logischen Methode. Mit Beziehung auf Edmund Husserls ‚Prolegomena zur reinen Logik‘,“ Kantstudien 6 (1901): 270–283.]

26. [Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), System der Philosophie, vol. 1: Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1902; 2nd edition, 1914; 3d edition, 1922).]