statement of knowledge. Neo-Kantians now took as their turf the task of
classifying various kinds of fields of knowledge by examining their conceptual
presuppositions.
Already at the height of controversy between Idealism and materialism in
the 1850s, Lotze, a medical researcher who had migrated into a chair of
philosophy, became the most famous German philosopher of his day by pro-
posing to adjust the disciplinary spheres. Rejecting Hegel’s superiority of
concepts over empirical findings, Lotze found the properly metaphysical terri-
tory not in ontology but in the distinction between a realm of value and the
value-indifferent: the task of philosophy is to confer meaning on the meaning-
less material world. Another border adjustment was proposed by Helmholtz,
a star researcher and laboratory-founding entrepreneur with network connec-
tions in the Idealist establishment. Helmholtz declared that philosophy and
science are harmonized because Kant’s a priori categories have been found built
into the human nervous system. Where Lotze had adjudicated philosophy’s
turf as that of values, another strategy was to make it the terrain of epistemol-
ogy. Zeller in 1862 promulgated the catchword Erkenntnistheorie (theory of
knowledge), endorsing the position that Kantian categories are vindicated by
the physiology of perception. Full-scale launching of the Neo-Kantian move-
ment followed in 1866, when F. A. Lange published his Geschichte des Mate-
rialismus, declaring that Idealism and materialism alike are metaphysics of the
thing-in-itself prohibited by the Kantian critique (Willey, 1978; Köhnke, 1991).
When psychology emerged as a research science, philosophy once again
adjusted its meta-position. Kant had made clear that his categories are prior
to all experience, but in the absence of a research science investigating con-
sciousness, it was easy to fall back onto a glib defense of the categories as
empirically justified. The border between epistemology and psychology sharp-
ened when Wundt founded his psychological laboratory at Leipzig in 1875.
Wundt was a former assistant of Helmholtz whose career in physiology was
blocked because the chairs were all filled by the previous cohort. Migrating
onto the more abundant job market in philosophy, Wundt proposed to turn
this archaic discipline into the empirical field of psychology, the scientific study
of consciousness (Ben-David and Collins, 1966). In the 1880s and 1890s
Wundt’s pupils, along with parallel chains emanating from Lotze’s students
Stumpf and G. E. Muller, and from Brentano, spread the experimental psy-
chology approach throughout the German-speaking universities; growth was
promoted especially successfully by foreign students who carried the method
to America.
The Neo-Kantian philosophers took the opposite tack. Cognitive constructs
per se are not to be confused with psychological operations; the latter exist on
an empirical level and are subject to investigation by empirical methods, while
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^691