© 2008 The Author

ERNST CASSIRER AND THOMAS KUHN:

THE NEO-KANTIAN TRADITION IN HISTORY AND
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

MICHAEL FRIEDMAN

A central problem facing contemporary history and philosophy of science

derives from the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revo-
lutions in 1962. In particular, Kuhn applied lessons initially learned from early
20th-century work in the history of science to develop a strikingly new philo-
sophical picture of the nature of science. Directly confronting what he called the
development-by-accumulation model of scientific progress, Kuhn presented an
alternative conception according to which the development of science is fre-
quently punctuated by essentially discontinuous revolutionary transitions where
the dominant paradigm governing a particular stage of what Kuhn calls normal
science experiences a revolutionary transformation resulting in a succeeding para-
digm fundamentally incommensurable with the earlier one. Moreover, since the
two succeeding paradigms—the transition from Newtonian physics to Einstein’s
theory of relativity was one of Kuhn’s central illustrations—are incommensurable
(i.e., non-intertranslatable) with one another, the choice between them appears not
to be straightforwardly rational. Since the concepts and principles of the two
paradigms have radically different meanings, it is no longer clear that empirical
evidence can straightforwardly decide between them. Indeed, the very terms in
which the two paradigms describe the empirical phenomena may themselves have
radically different meanings.
One conclusion Kuhn drew from this picture is that there is no real sense in
which the evolution of science can be seen as a process of convergence to an
ultimate single truth about reality, where succeeding theories or paradigms appear
as ever better approximations to such a final truth.1 And this conclusion, in turn,

1
See especially Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: U of
Chicago P, 1970; original edition published in 1962): “There is, I think, no theory-independent way

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can easily be radicalized, resulting in a relativist and historicist conception accord-

ing to which there is no sense of scientific progress at all: Succeeding theories or
paradigms are simply different historically conditioned moments in a completely
directionless temporal process, and the only notion of truth then available is an
essentially relativized and historicized one. Kuhn himself strenuously resisted
these particular implications of his views, hoping to replace the development-by-
accumulation model and the ideal of intertheoretic convergence with an evolu-
tionary model of scientific progress whereby succeeding theories become
continually better adapted problem-solving tools without converging to a final
endpoint (cf. footnote 1). Nevertheless, this suggestion of Kuhn’s has not won
many adherents, and the problem dominating much of the post-Kuhnian work in
the history, philosophy, and sociology of science has been precisely the relativist
and historicist predicament just sketched: If succeeding paradigms, as Kuhn
taught, are really incommensurable, how can we possibly escape the conclusion,
in currently fashionable parlance, that “all knowledge is local”?
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the Marburg School
of Neo-Kantianism founded by Hermann Cohen, and later developed by Paul
Natorp and Ernst Cassirer, articulated a historicized version of Kantianism aimed
at adapting the critical philosophy to the deep revolutionary changes affecting
mathematics and the mathematical sciences throughout this period.2 In particular,
the development of non-Euclidean geometries appeared decisively to undermine
Kant’s original conception of the synthetic a priori character of our cognition of
space, and 19th-century developments in mathematical physics suggested that
Newtonian physics, in particular, may not be the final word. In response to these
developments, the Marburg School replaced Kant’s original “static” or timeless

to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and
its ‘real’ counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am
impressed with the implausibility of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics
improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving.
But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development” (pp. 206–07).
Earlier, in Chapter IX, “The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions,” Kuhn had considered
the transition from Newton to Einstein in some detail, arguing that no real sense can be made of the
claim that Einsteinian mechanics contains Newtonian mechanics as an approximate special case. We
shall return to this example later.
2
The main works of this school include Hermann Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (Berlin:
Dümmler, 1871); Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1902); Paul Natorp, Die
logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften (Leipzig: Teubner, 1910); Ernst Cassirer, Das
Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, 2 vols. (Berlin: Bruno
Cassirer, 1906–07); and Ernst Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (Berlin: Bruno Cas-
sirer, 1910). I shall here confine myself to Cassirer. For further discussion of Cassirer in relation to
Cohen and the Marburg School, see Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and
Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000).

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version of the synthetic a priori with what they conceived as an essentially

developmental or “genetic [erzeugende]” conception of scientific knowledge.
Since Kuhn, very late in his career, characterized himself as “a Kantian with
moveable categories,”3 one might naturally wonder about the relationship between
Kuhn’s own view and that of the Marburg School. The answer, as we shall see, is
both interesting and complicated.
In Cassirer’s version of the genetic conception of knowledge, most fully articu-
lated in Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, appearing in 1910, we begin with
the progression of theories produced by modern mathematical natural science in
its actual historical development. This progression takes its starting point, to be
sure, with Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics, but we now know, as Kant
himself did not, that this is only a starting point, not a rigidly fixed and forever
unrevisable a priori structure. Subsequent to the Euclidean-Newtonian paradigm,
in particular, there has been a developmental sequence of abstract mathematical
structures (“systems of order”), which is itself ordered by the abstract mathemati-
cal relation of approximate backward-directed inclusion—as, for example, the
new non-Euclidean geometries contain the older geometry of Euclid as a con-
tinuously approximated limiting case. We can thereby conceive all the theories in
our sequence as continuously converging, as it were, on a final or limit theory,
such that all previous theories in the sequence are approximate special cases of
this final theory. This final theory is only a regulative ideal in the Kantian
sense—it is only progressively approximated but never in fact actually realized.4
Nevertheless, the idea of such a continuous progression toward an ideal limit
constitutes the characteristic “general serial form” of our mathematical-physical
theorizing, and, at the same time, it bestows on this theorizing its characteristic
form of objectivity. For, despite all historical variation and contingency, there is,
nonetheless, a continuously converging progression of abstract mathematical
structures framing, and making possible, all of our empirical knowledge.
However, in full agreement with Kant’s original “critical” theory of knowledge,
convergence, on this new view, does not take place toward a mind- or theory-
independent “reality” of ultimate “substantial things” or “things-in-themselves.”

3
See, in particular, Thomas Kuhn, The Road since Structure (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000) 264.
Compare also Thomas Kuhn, “Afterwords,” World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of
Science, ed. P. Horwich (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993) 331–32.
4
Cf. Cassirer (1910): “The goal of critical analysis would be attained if it succeeded in establishing
in this way what is ultimately common to all possible forms of scientific experience, that is, in
conceptually fixing those elements that are preserved in the progress from theory to theory, because
they are the conditions of each and every theory. This goal may never be completely attained at any
given stage of knowledge; nevertheless, it remains as a demand and determines a fixed direction in
the continual unfolding and development of the system of experience itself ” (p. 357). (All transla-
tions from Cassirer’s writings are my own.)

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Rather, the convergence in question occurs entirely within the series of histori-
cally developed mathematical structures: “Reality,” on this view, is simply the
purely ideal limit or endpoint toward which the sequence of such structures is
mathematically converging—or, to put it another way, it is simply the series itself,
taken as a whole.5
It is not clear, at first sight, whether and how this conception of intertheoretic
convergence relates to Kuhn’s view of the matter. As we have said, Kuhn rejects
all talk of convergence to a final truth about a mind-independent reality, but so, as
we have just seen, does the Marburg genetic conception of knowledge. Moreover,
the situation becomes especially interesting (and complicated) when we observe
that Cassirer’s work in the history of science and philosophy—work which is
directly informed by the Marburg genetic conception of knowledge—is an impor-
tant part of the background to Kuhn’s own historiography.
Cassirer began his career as an intellectual historian, one of the very greatest of
the 20th century. His first major work, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie
und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, published (in two volumes) in 1906–07, is a
magisterial and deeply original contribution to both the history of philosophy and
the history of science. It is the first work, in fact, to develop a detailed reading of
the scientific revolution as a whole in terms of the “Platonic” idea that the
thoroughgoing application of mathematics to nature (the so-called mathematiza-
tion of nature) is the central and overarching achievement of this revolution. And
Cassirer’s work is acknowledged as such by such seminal historians as Edwin
Burtt, Alexandre Koyré, and E. J. Dijksterhuis, who developed this theme later in
the century in the course of establishing the discipline of history of science as we
know it today.6 Cassirer, for his part, simultaneously articulated an interpretation
of the history of modern philosophy as the development and eventual triumph of
what he calls “modern philosophical idealism.” This tradition takes its inspiration,
according to Cassirer, from idealism in the Platonic sense, from an appreciation of
the “ideal” formal structures paradigmatically studied in mathematics, and it is

5
Cf. Cassirer (1910): “The change must leave a determinate stock of principles unaffected; for it is
solely for the sake of securing this stock that it is undertaken in the first place, and this shows it its
proper goal. Since we never compare the totality of hypotheses in themselves with the naked facts
in themselves, but can only oppose one hypothetical system of principles to another, more compre-
hensive and radical system, we require for this progressive comparison an ultimate constant measure
in highest principles, which hold for all experience in general. The identity of this logical system of
measure throughout all change in that which is measured is what thought requires. In this sense, the
critical theory of experience actually aims to construct a universal invariant theory of experience and
thereby to fulfill a demand towards which the character of the inductive procedure itself ever more
closely presses” (pp. 355–56).
6
See Edwin Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (London: K. Paul,
Trench, Trubner and Co., 1924); Alexandre Koyré, Etudes Galiléenes, 3 vols. (Paris: Hermann,
1939); E. J. Dijksterhuis, De Mechanisering van het Werelbild (Amsterdam: Muelenhoff, 1959).

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distinctively modern in recognizing the fundamental importance of the systematic

application of such structures to empirically given nature in modern mathematical
physics—a progressive and synthetic process wherein mathematical models of
nature are successively refined and corrected without limit. For Cassirer, it is
Galileo, above all, in opposition to both sterile Aristotelian-Scholastic formal
logic and sterile Aristotelian-Scholastic empirical induction, who first grasped the
essential structure of this synthetic process, and the development of “modern
philosophical idealism” in the work of Descartes, Spinoza, Gassendi, Hobbes,
Leibniz, and finally Kant then consists in its increasingly self-conscious philo-
sophical articulation and elaboration. Thus, the main philosophical lesson of
Cassirer’s historical narrative (not at all surprisingly) is that the nature and char-
acter of modern mathematical physics as a whole is best represented by the
Marburg genetic conception of knowledge.
Das Erkenntnisproblem exerted a decisive influence on early 20th-century
history of science, especially in its more philosophically oriented guises. It was
especially important for such writers as Emile Meyerson, Léon Brunschvicg,
Hélène Metzger, Anneliese Maier, and Alexandre Koyré—and Koyré, in turn,
exerted an especially important influence on Kuhn.7 It is no wonder, then, that
Kuhn, in an Afterword (first published in 1984)8 appended to his book on Planck
and black-body radiation, states:9 “The concept of historical reconstruction that
underlies [this book] has from the start been fundamental to both my historical and
my philosophical work. It is by no means original: I owe it primarily to Alexandre
Koyré; its ultimate sources lie in Neo-Kantian philosophy.” Thus, Kuhn, toward
the end of his career, not only characterized his distinctive philosophical concep-
tion as a dynamical and historicized version of Kantianism (footnote 3), but also
explicitly acknowledged the background to his own historiography in Neo-
Kantian philosophy. Nevertheless, there were (at least) two different strands in this
early 20th-century historiographical tradition: a more Kantian strand associated
with Brunschvicg and Maier and what we might call a more “Cartesian” strand

7
In addition to Koyré book on Galileo cited in footnote 6, see Emil Meyerson, Identité et réalite
(Paris: Alcan, 1908); Léon Brunschvicg, Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique (Paris: Alcan,
1912); Léon Brunschvicg, L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique (Paris: Alcan, 1922);
Hélène Metzger, Les doctrines chimique en France du début du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris:
Les presses universitaires de France, 1923); Hélène Metzger, Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave et la
doctrine chimique (Paris: Alcan, 1930); Anneliese Maier, Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert
(Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1949). Kuhn was especially impressed by the new picture
of the transition from medieval to modern science (the so-called scientific revolution of the 16th and
17th centuries) that emerged from this body of work.
8
Thomas Kuhn, “Revisiting Planck,” Historical Studies in the Physical Studies 14 (1984): 231–52.
Reprinted as Afterword in Kuhn (1987).
9
Thomas Kuhn, Black Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912, 2nd ed. (Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1987) 361.

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 MICHAEL FRIEDMAN

associated with Meyerson and his student Metzger. Moreover, Meyerson is the
most important philosophical influence on Koyré’s historiography—Kuhn also
cites Meyerson as an influence, along with Brunschvicg, Metzger, Maier, and,
indeed, Cassirer himself10—and the philosophical perspective shared by both
Meyerson and Koyré is diametrically opposed, in most essential respects, to that
originally articulated by Cassirer.11
In the work of Cassirer and Meyerson, in particular, we find two sharply
diverging visions of the philosophical history of modern science. For Cassirer, this
history is seen as a process of evolving rational purification of our view of nature,
as we progress from naively realistic “substantialistic” conceptions, focusing on
underlying substances, causes, and mechanisms subsisting behind the observable
phenomena, to increasingly abstract purely “functional” conceptions, where we
finally abandon the search for underlying ontology in favor of ever more precise
mathematical representations of phenomena in terms of exactly formulated uni-
versal laws. For Meyerson, by contrast, this same history is seen as a necessarily
dialectical progression (in something like the Hegelian sense), wherein reason
perpetually seeks to enforce precisely the “substantialistic” impulse, and nature
continually offers her resistance in the ultimate irrationality of temporal succes-
sion. Thus, the triumph of the scientific revolution, for Meyerson, is represented
by the rise of mechanistic atomism, wherein elementary corpuscles preserve their
sizes, shapes, and masses while merely changing their mutual positions in uniform
and homogeneous space via motion, and this same demand for transtemporal

10
Cf. Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977) 107–08: “[The proper]
attitude toward past thinkers came to the history of science from philosophy. Partly it was learned
from men like Lange and Cassirer who dealt historically with people or ideas that were also
important for scientific development [. . .]. And partly it was learned from a small group of
Neo-Kantian epistemologists, particularly Brunschvicg and Meyerson, whose search for quasi-
absolute categories of thought in older scientific ideas produced brilliant genetic analyses of
concepts which the main tradition in the history of science had misunderstood or dismissed.” In
reference to the importance of properly understanding the transition from medieval to modern
science, in particular, Kuhn continues: “That challenge has shaped the modern historiography
of science. The writings which it has evoked since 1920, particularly those of E. J. Dijksterhuis,
Anneliese Maier, and especially Alexandre Koyré, are the models which many contemporaries aim
to emulate” (p. 108). Finally, in the Preface to the original edition (1962) of Structure, Kuhn (1970)
writes: “I continued to study the writings of Alexandre Koyré and first encountered those of Emile
Meyerson, Hélène Metzger, and Anneliese Maier. More clearly than most other recent scholars, this
group has shown what it was like to think scientifically in a period when the canons of scientific
thought were very different from those current today” (pp. v–vi). Thus, although Kuhn does not
explicitly mention “Neo-Kantian philosophy” here, we can trace the importance of its influence on
his historiography all the way back to Structure.
11
For a more detailed discussion of relationships among Meyerson, Cassirer, and Koyré, see Michael
Friedman, “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism,” Thomas Kuhn, ed. T. Nickles (Cambridge, UK: Cam-
bridge UP, 2003) 19–44.

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substantial identity is also represented, in more recent times, both by Lavoisier’s

use of the principle of the conservation of matter in his new chemistry and by the
discovery of the conservation of energy. Yet, in the even more recent discovery of
what we now know as the second law of thermodynamics (“Carnot’s principle”),
which governs the temporally irreversible process of “degradation” or “dissipa-
tion” of energy, we encounter nature’s complementary and unavoidable resistance
to our a priori logical demands.
It is by no means surprising, therefore, that Meyerson, in the course of consid-
ering, and rejecting, what he calls “anti-substantialistic conceptions of science,”
explicitly takes issue with Cassirer’s central claim, in Das Erkenntnisproblem,
that “[m]athematical physics turns aside from the essence of things and their inner
substantiality in order to turn towards their numerical order and connection, their
functional and mathematical structure.”12 And it is also no wonder that Cassirer, in
the course of a discussion of “identity and difference, constancy and change,”
explicitly takes issue with Meyerson’s views: “The identity towards which
thought progressively strives is not the identity of ultimate substantial things but
the identity of functional orders and coordinations.”13 Thus, in direct and explicit
opposition to the Meyersonian view, Cassirer’s whole point is that thought does
not require a “substantialistic” or “ontological” identity over time of permanent
“things” but merely a purely mathematical continuity over time formulated in
successively articulated mathematical structures.14
If I am not mistaken, this deep philosophical opposition between Meyerson and
Cassirer receives a very clear echo in Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions,
particularly with regard to the question of continuity and convergence over time.
Here Kuhn shows himself, in this respect, to be a faithful follower of the Meyer-
sonian viewpoint, for he consistently gives the question an ontological (“substan-
tialistic”) rather than a mathematical (“functional”) interpretation.15 Thus, for

12
See Emile Meyerson, Identity and Reality (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930) 388–89, translation from
3rd ed. (identical to 2nd ed., 1912), the quotation is from vol. 2 of Das Erkenntnisproblem. Compare
also Meyerson’s criticism of the “mathematical idealism” of the Marburg School on pp. 437–38,
and his reference to both Cassirer (1910) and Natorp (1910) on p. 423.
13
Cassirer (1910): 431.
14
Cassirer continues the passage quoted immediately above as follows (ibid): “But these [‘functional
orders and coordinations’] do not exclude the moments of difference and change but only achieve
determination in and with them. It is not manifoldness as such that is annulled but [we attain] only
a manifold of another dimension: the mathematical manifold takes the place of the sensible
manifold in scientific explanation. What thought requires is thus not the dissolution of diversity and
change as such, but rather their mastery in virtue of the mathematical continuity of serial laws and
serial forms.”
15
Here, once again, the main intermediary between Meyerson and Kuhn is Koyré: see especially
Alexandre Koyré, “Die Philosophie Emile Meyersons,” Deutsch-Französische Rundschau 4 (1931):
197–217, for an extended defense of Meyerson against Cassirer on precisely this point.

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example, when Kuhn famously considers the relationship between relativistic and
Newtonian mechanics, he rejects the notion of a fundamental continuity between
the two theories on the grounds that the “physical referents” of their terms are
essentially different, and he nowhere considers the contrasting idea, characteristic
of Cassirer’s work, that continuity of purely mathematical structures is sufficient.
Moreover, Kuhn consistently gives an ontological rather than a mathematical
interpretation to the question of theoretical convergence over time: The question
is always whether our theories can be said to converge to an independently
existing “truth” about reality, to a theory-independent external world.16
It follows, then, that Kuhn’s rejection of intertheoretic convergence cannot be
taken as a straightforward confutation of Cassirer’s position. For Kuhn simply
assumes, in harmony with the Meyersonian viewpoint, that there is rational
continuity over time only if there is also substantial identity. Since, as Kuhn
argues, the “physical referents” of Newtonian and relativistic mechanics, for
example, cannot be taken to be the same, we are squarely faced with the problem
of interparadigmatic incommensurability. Yet Cassirer, as we have seen, is just as
opposed to all forms of naïve realism (as well as naïve empiricism) as is Kuhn. He
instead proposes a generalized Kantian conception, emblematic of what he
himself calls “modern philosophical idealism,” according to which scientific ratio-
nality and objectivity are secured in virtue of the way in which our empirical
knowledge of nature is framed, and thereby made possible, by a continuously
evolving sequence of abstract mathematical structures.
It is for this reason, in fact, that Einstein’s general theory of relativity represents
the culmination of “modern philosophical idealism” for Cassirer. In particular, Zur
Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie, published in 1921, is devoted to explaining how
this theory—despite first appearances—represents a confirmation rather than a
rejection of the Kantian or “critical” theory of knowledge. Cassirer begins by
asserting that

[t]he reality of the physicist stands opposite the reality of immediate perception as a thoroughly
mediated reality: as a totality, not of existing things or properties, but rather of abstract symbols of
thought that serve as the expression for determinate relations of magnitude and measure, for
determinate functional coordinations and dependencies in the appearances.17

And it then follows that Einstein’s theory can be incorporated within the “critical”
conception of knowledge “without difficulty, for this theory is characterized from
a general epistemological point of view precisely by the circumstance that in it,
more consciously and more clearly than ever before, the advance from the copy

16
Cf. footnote 1. For the point about the differing “physical referents” of the terms of Newtonian and
relativistic mechanics, see Kuhn (1970): 101–02.
17
Ernst Cassirer, Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921) 14.

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theory of knowledge to the functional theory is completed.”18 Whereas it is true,

for example, that Kant himself had envisioned only the use of Euclidean geometry
in mathematical physics, the fact that we now employ a non-intuitive, non-
Euclidean geometry in the general theory of relativity by no means contradicts the
general “critical” point of view. For:

Kant also had emphasized decisively [that] this form of dynamical determination does not belong
any longer to intuition as such, but rather it is the “rule of the understanding” alone through which
the existence of appearances can acquire synthetic unity and be taken together [as a whole] in a
determinate concept of experience.19

Hence, the general theory of relativity continues to exemplify the fundamental

Kantian insight that the unity of nature as such can only be due to our
understanding.20
It is precisely at this point, however, that I find myself in deep disagreement
with Cassirer—and with the Marburg School more generally. For I believe that the
Marburg tendency to minimize or downplay the role of the Kantian faculty of pure
intuition or pure sensibility on behalf of the faculty of pure understanding repre-
sents a profound interpretive mistake.21 Kant himself, on the contrary, takes the
faculty of pure sensibility to have an independent a priori structure of its own—
given by the Euclidean structure of space and the Newtonian structure of time
(more precisely, space-time)—and this is the reason, for Kant, that all our sensible
or perceptual experience must necessarily be in accordance with these forms (and
it is not merely the case, for example, that we must always think or conceive nature
in this way). From this point of view, therefore, it is by no means true that the
general theory of relativity can be incorporated within the Kantian or “critical”
conception “without difficulty.”
Further, and this is still not as well known as it should be, the logical empiricists
basically agreed with Kuhn about the profoundly revolutionary character—from a
philosophical point of view—of the general theory of relativity. The most impor-
tant of their works, from our present point of view, was Hans Reichenbach’s

18
Ibid: 55.
19
Ibid: 109.
20
Cassirer continues (ibid): “The step beyond [Kant] that we now had to complete on the basis of the
results of the general theory of relativity consisted in the insight that in these determinations of the
understanding, in which the empirical-physical picture of the world first arises, geometrical axioms
and laws other than those of Euclidean form can enter in, and allowing such axioms not only does
not destroy the unity of the world—that is, the unity of our concept of experience of a total ordering
of the phenomena—but it truly first grounds this unity from a new point of view, in that in this way
the particular laws of nature we have to reckon with in space-time-determination all finally cohere
in the unity of a highest principle: precisely the general postulate of relativity.”
21
For more on this issue see Friedman (2000): 89–93.

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 MICHAEL FRIEDMAN

Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis Apriori, which appeared one year before

Cassirer’s book. According to Reichenbach (and the logical empiricists more
generally), Einstein’s new theory is so radically incommensurable with Newto-
nian theory that the Kantian critical philosophy itself needs also to be radically
revised: A new revolutionary form of scientific philosophy (logical empiricism) is
now required in the wake of Einstein’s revolutionary theory.22
I agree with Kuhn—and with the logical empiricists—that Einstein’s general
theory of relativity is in an important sense incommensurable or non-
intertranslatable with the Newtonian theory of universal gravitation it replaced.
Whereas Newtonian theory represents the action of gravity as an external
“impressed force” causing gravitationally affected bodies to deviate from straight
inertial trajectories (moving with uniform or constant speed), Einstein’s theory
depicts gravitation as a curving or bending of the underlying fabric of space-time
itself. In this new framework, in particular, there are no inertial trajectories in the
sense of the geometry of Euclid and the mechanics of Newton, and gravity is not
an “impressed force” causing deviations from such trajectories. Gravitationally
affected bodies instead follow the straightest possible paths or geodesics that exist
in the highly non-Euclidean geometry (of variable curvature) of Einsteinian space-
time, and the trajectories of so-called “freely falling bodies”—affected by no
forces other than gravitation—simply replace the straight inertial trajectories of
Newtonian theory (which are straight in the sense of both Euclidean space and
Newtonian (space-)time).
But why does it follow that Einstein’s theory and Newton’s theory are incom-
mensurable? After all, once Einstein’s theory is in place, we can then derive
Newtonian theory from it as an approximate special case (where, for example, we
consider relatively small spatial regions that are approximately Euclidean and
relatively low velocities in comparison with light), and we can thereby explain,
from the point of view of Einstein’s theory, why Newton’s theory works as well
as it does. Kuhn himself is perfectly clear about this, and he responds by insisting
that this point of view is post-revolutionary, and, in particular, it uses fundamental
mathematical and physical concepts that are simply unavailable from the point of
view of the earlier theory: What we derive as an approximate special case from
Einstein’s theory is therefore not Newton’s original theory.23 As a result, the real

22
For further discussion of Hans Reichenbach, Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis Apriori (Berlin:
Springer, 1920) and its influence on the logical empiricists more generally (especially Carnap), see
Michael Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1999) ch. 3.
It is noteworthy, in this connection, that Carnap served as editor for the original publication of
Structure in the Encyclopedia of Unified Science, and, in this capacity, he wrote to Kuhn enthusi-
astically expressing considerable sympathy with Kuhn’s viewpoint: cf. Friedman (2003).
23
This, in essence, is the conclusion about the fundamental divergence in “physical referents” referred
to in footnote 16.

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problem is to show how the fundamental mathematical and physical concepts of

the old theory (which are thus not intertranslatable with the new theory) can
nonetheless give rise to—can be replaced by—those of the new theory.
In my Dynamics of Reason,24 I put the point this way. It is clear, first of all, that
Einstein’s theory is not even mathematically possible from the point of view of
Newton’s original theory, for the mathematics required to formulate Einstein’s
theory—Bernhard Riemann’s general theory of geometrical manifolds or
“spaces” of any dimension and curvature (Euclidean or non-Euclidean)—did not
even exist until the late 19th century. Of course this point, by itself, is perfectly
compatible with Cassirer’s version of the Marburg conception, for, once the
necessary mathematics has been developed, we can then represent the earlier
mathematical structure as a special case of the later one, and this is all that
Marburg-style convergence requires.
However, and in the second place, even after the mathematics required for
Einstein’s theory was developed, it still remained fundamentally unclear what it
could mean actually to apply such a geometry to our sensible experience of nature
in a real physical theory. One still needed to show, in other words, that Einstein’s
new theory is empirically or physically possible as well, and this, in turn, only
became clear with Einstein’s own work on what he called the principle of equiva-
lence in the years 1907–12. This principle, as we now understand it, says that
freely falling bodies follow the straightest possible paths or geodesics in a certain
kind of four-dimensional (semi-)Riemannian manifold, and it thereby gives real
physical and empirical meaning, for the first time, to this kind of abstract math-
ematical structure. Einstein’s theory thus requires a genuine expansion of our
space of intellectual possibilities (both mathematical and empirical), and the
problem is then to explain how such an expansion is possible—since the new
theory, before the expansion in question, is not even physically possible (in Kant’s
terminology, it is neither logically nor really possible).25
I cannot develop this in detail here, but my second main point26 is that, in
addition to the necessary mathematical developments (the evolution of non-
Euclidean geometries, as unified and completed in Riemann’s work) and the
necessary physical developments (the discovery of the constancy and invariance

24
Michael Friedman, Dynamics of Reason (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2001) pt. 2, sect. 3.
25
In particular, my argument for conceptual incommensurability in this case relies on precisely the
Kantian distinction between logical and real possibility—which thereby replaces Kuhn’s concern
with “physical referents.” Like the Marburg School, therefore, I want to confine the discussion to the
conceptual realm and avoid ontology; unlike the Marburg School, however, I agree with Kuhn that
purely mathematical continuity and convergence is not sufficient. I set up the problem, accordingly,
by appealing to the relationship between (purely abstract) mathematical concepts and sensible
experience.
26
Friedman (2001): pt. 2, sect. 4.

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 MICHAEL FRIEDMAN

of the velocity of light, the numerical equality of inertial and gravitational mass
underlying the principle of equivalence), we still need a set of parallel develop-
ments in contemporaneous scientific philosophy to tie together the relevant inno-
vations in mathematics and physics and thereby effect the necessary expansion in
our physical or empirical possibilities.
In the case of Einstein’s theory, in particular, this process began with Kant’s
original attempt—in his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft,
and also in the first Critique—to provide philosophical foundations for Newtonian
theory.27 In the following 19th century these Kantian foundations for specifically
Newtonian theory were then self-consciously successively reconfigured, as scien-
tific philosophers like Ernst Mach (and others) reconsidered the problem of
absolute space and motion, and other scientific philosophers—especially Hermann
von Helmholtz and Henri Poincaré—reconsidered the empirical and conceptual
foundations of geometry in light of the new mathematical discoveries in non-
Euclidean geometry. Einstein’s initial work on the principle of equivalence—
which culminated, as we said, in 1912—then unexpectedly joined these two earlier
traditions of scientific thought together and thereby led to the very surprising and
entirely new empirical possibility that gravity may, after all, be represented by a
non-Euclidean geometry. The crucial breakthrough came when Einstein hit upon
the example of the uniformly rotating disk or reference frame—where, in accor-
dance with the principle of equivalence, we are considering a particular kind of
non-inertial frame of reference within the framework of special relativity. The
result was a non-Euclidean physical geometry as our novel representative of the
gravitational field, and Einstein was only able to arrive at this result (as he himself
later tells us in his celebrated lecture, Geometrie und Erfahrung, in 1921) by
delicately situating himself within the earlier philosophical debate on the empirical
and conceptual foundations of geometry between Helmholtz and Poincaré.28
If this is correct, however, we need a more far-reaching revision of Kantian
transcendental philosophy than Cassirer has suggested in this case. It is by no
means true, in particular, that Einstein’s general theory of relativity can be incor-
porated within transcendental philosophy “without difficulty,” since this philoso-
phy, in Kant’s original form, is unavoidably committed to the a priori necessary

27
Kant’s Metaphysische Anfangsgründe appeared in 1786, between the first (1781) and second (1787)
editions of the first Critique. For discussion see Michael Friedman, “ ‘Introduction’ to Immanuel
Kant,” Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, ed. Michael Friedman (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge UP, 2004) vii–xxx; Michael Friedman, “Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science,”
A Companion to Kant, ed. G. Bird (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2006) 236–48.
28
This story is developed in Friedman (2001): pt. 2, sect. 4, and, in even more detail, in Michael
Friedman, “Geometry as a Branch of Physics: Background and Context for Einstein’s ‘Geometry
and Experience,’ ” Reading Natural Philosophy, ed. D. Malament (Chicago: Open Court, 2002)
193–229.

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validity of both Euclidean geometry and the fundamental principles of Newtonian

mechanics.29 The only way forward, in my view, is to relativize the Kantian a
priori to a given scientific theory in a given historical context (following Reichen-
bach in 1920) and, as a consequence, to historicize the notion of transcendental
philosophy itself. Thus, for example, whereas Euclidean geometry and the New-
tonian laws of motion were indeed necessary presuppositions for the empirical
meaning and application of the Newtonian theory of universal gravitation (and
they were therefore constitutively a priori in this context), the radically new
mathematical and physical framework consisting of the Riemannian theory of
manifolds and the principle of equivalence defines an analogous system of nec-
essary presuppositions in general relativity. Moreover, what makes the latter
framework constitutively a priori in this new context is precisely the circumstance
that Einstein was only able to arrive at it in the first place by self-consciously
situating himself within the earlier tradition of scientific philosophy represented
(especially) by Helmholtz and Poincaré—just as this tradition, in turn, had earlier
self-consciously situated itself against the background of the original version of
transcendental philosophy first articulated by Kant.30
The fundamental idea of the Marburg School was that it is indeed possible to
continue the tradition of critical or transcendental philosophy—especially the
tradition of critical or transcendental philosophy of science—even in the wake of
quite radical revisions of the original Euclidean-Newtonian framework for modern
mathematical physics. I believe, as just explained, that this idea is still correct. In
order to see this, however, we need to historicize and relativize the notion of
transcendental philosophy itself. In particular, Kant’s own commitment to the
necessary a priori validity of Euclidean geometry and the principles of Newtonian
mechanics was an absolutely central part of his own solution to the Newtonian
problem of absolute space—and thus it was absolutely central, as well, to Kant’s
fundamental contention that the structures of mathematical, perceptual, and physi-
cal space are necessarily identical. Moreover, it was in precisely this way (as I have
argued in detail elsewhere) that Kant was able to replace the Newtonian conception
of space—infinite, three-dimensional, Euclidean space—as the sensorium of God
with the characteristically Kantian conception of this same space (infinite, three-
dimensional, and Euclidean) as the form of our (human) sensibility.31

29
Cf. footnote 21, together with the paragraph to which it is appended.
30
The point about necessary presuppositions for empirical application and meaning is just my
replacement for Kuhn’s appeal to “physical referents” (footnote 25), and it is developed in Friedman
(2001). The point about further historicizing transcendental philosophy by locating Helmholtz,
Poincaré, and Einstein within a broadly Kantian tradition, however, is new, and it is developed in
Michael Friedman, “Einstein, Kant, and the A Priori” (forthcoming a).
31
See Michael Friedman, “Newton and Kant on Absolute Space: From Theology to Transcendental
Philosophy” (forthcoming b).

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 MICHAEL FRIEDMAN

It was in precisely this way, finally, that Kant was thereby able to create
transcendental philosophy in the first place, by fundamentally transforming the
earlier metaphysical tradition he inherited in such a way that all consideration of
God and divine creation could then be eliminated from natural philosophy on
behalf of our human “transcendental subjectivity.” The later tradition of scientific
philosophy arising in the wake of Kant—including both the more narrowly Neo-
Kantian tradition of the Marburg School and the more broadly Kant-inspired work
of Helmholtz and Poincaré—simply took this point for granted, and their problem,
accordingly, was to reconfigure Kant’s original system in the light of later devel-
opments in both post-Kantian scientific philosophy and the sciences themselves.
This effort, I have argued, can indeed be brought to a successful conclusion, and,
when we do so, we also see, further, how the Kuhnian problem of understanding
the rationality of revolutionary transitions involving essentially discontinuous or
incommensurable scientific paradigms or conceptual frameworks can itself be
successfully resolved. We see, in particular, how Kuhn’s own favorite example of
such a revolutionary transition, the Einsteinian revolution, is characterized not
only by what we might call retrospective convergent rationality (convergence of
abstract mathematical structures, as viewed from the perspective of the later
paradigm) but, more importantly, by prospective convergent rationality as well—
from the point of view of the actual historical conceptual evolution, which, in fact,
made Einstein’s new theory physically or empirically possible in the first place.32

Stanford University

32
The distinction between retrospective and prospective rationality is drawn in Friedman (2001): pt.
2, sect. 3. The account of prospective rationality, in particular, is my response to the problem of
incommensurability as understood in the terms of footnote 25.

252