Natorp and Cohen on the Problem of Religion in Modernity

In this study Paul Natorpʼs writing Religion within the Limits of Humanity is interpreted as a treatment of the problem of religion in modernity, which takes up and transforms the impulses of Kant and Schleiermacher. Five aspects of this problem, which were already present in Schleiermacher’s Speeches on religion , are once again a subject of further processing in the medium of the Neo-Kantian discourse in Marburg encluding encounters with Hermann Cohen and Wilhelm Herrmann. One of the answers found here points ahead to Hans Blumenbergʼs St. Matthew Passion . The latterʼs late work at the end of the 20th century can be read within the horizon of these earlier discourses at its beginning as a variation of a musico-dramatic treatment of existential and religious fundamental questions in a general culture affected to change.