filter experience. Suddenly the atmosphere turned unsympathetic. Instead of
allowing Neo-Kantians to broaden their stance, Schlick began to invoke a more
rigorous standard. The narrower interpretation of the Kantian categories had
been proved wrong, while Cassirer’s wider interpretation could not be allowed
because Neo-Kantianism’s adaptability showed it to be a slippery, unscientific
philosophy, unfalsifiable by experience. New rules of the game were imposed:
previously it would not have been expected that a philosophy, especially one
concerned with the grounds of experience, should be testable in the same way
as a research science.^25
Historical comparisons show that a school can find intellectual resources
to defend itself indefinitely against criticism; it is never external criticism alone
that kills a position.^26 Neo-Kantianism ceased being a vital contender for the
center of attention; even those who owed much to it now turned against it.
There are other signs of the loss of identification among the Neo-Kantians
themselves: Natorp after 1910 abandoned the logical foundations of exact
science for a metaphysics approaching Platonic religious mysticism; Cohen’s
student Nicolai Hartmann in the 1920s reversed the Neo-Kantian priority of
epistemology over ontology; others became existentialists. The same thing
happened with Brentano’s school: despite the attention Meinong got around
1904, later pupils preferred to style themselves phenomenologists or logicians.
The law of small numbers was operating: as new movements discovered
resources to wield in the attention space, there was an accelerating rush to takeFIGURE 13.4. NEO-KANTIANS AND THE VIENNA CIRCLE720 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths