of its contents by the growth of autonomous specialties? The death of philoso-
phy has often been proclaimed on just these grounds. The anti-Hegelians of
the 1840s declared philosophy to be failed science, just as the logical positivists
of the 1920s were willing to replace it with a branch of mathematics, and the
ordinary language philosophers of the 1950s would replace it with a science
of language use. Nevertheless, philosophy has prospered in the world of the
disciplines. It has been able to create new meta-positions by taking the stance
of looking down on the disciplinary strife from above. And disciplines have
provided a social mechanism for creativity within philosophy: the migration
of individuals from one field to another, often between tight and soft spots
within the academic labor market.
Since Germany underwent the university revolution two generations before
the other university systems, German philosophy experienced the disciplinary
breaks and repercussions that much sooner. The first wave, the 1820s through
the 1840s, centered on theology; out of this came the split of Left and Right,
Old and Young Hegelians, who churned up first religious reform and then
political radicalism (see Figure 13.1). On the heels of this wave came another,
the battle between Idealist Naturphilosophie and the differentiating scientific
research disciplines. Philosophers in Hegel’s generation were still teaching
courses in astronomy and mathematics; and although the medical faculty
provided an independent base for some researchers, it was not until the 1860s
that a separate faculty for natural science split off from the philosophical
faculty. As the height of the struggle for independence in the 1850s, anti-Ide-
alism was rife among the leaders of the new laboratory researchers; the most
extreme of their public spokesmen, Moleschott and Büchner, trumpeted reduc-
tionist materialism as a liberation from philosophical religion. Several other
struggles splashed their waves in this basin: history versus philosophy—the
oldest and most prestigeful of the social sciences against the Hegelian Idealism
which claimed history for its own turf—and psychology versus philosophy, the
first major disciplinary split inside the traditional philosophical terrain.
Neo-Kantianism was the omnibus movement of philosophy in Germany
from the 1860s onward because it adjudicated such border disputes: theology,
natural science, history, psychology, and more to come. Neo-Kantianism made
every disciplinary question into an opportunity for creating a corresponding
philosophy. Attacks on philosophy were converted from death threats into
growth industries.
Neo-Kantianism repudiated Idealism, with its ontological claims as a relig-
ion of reason, so offensive to old guard theologians, and its a priori scientific
theories, offensive to empirical researchers. “Back to Kant” became the slogan
following the death of the Idealist systems, precisely because Kant epitomized
the reflexive tools of epistemology: the study of what is presupposed in any
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^689