The Transcendental Method of Paul Natorp

In the historical-philosophical literature devoted to the neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School, not enough space is given to the thematisation of Paul Natorp’s transcendental method. Besides, it is of natural scientific interest to explicate the differences in the methods of Kant and the philosophers of the Marburg School. It is supposed that such differences are caused by the ‘incommensurability’ of the paradigms of science on which the philosophers orientated themselves. The aims of the article are (1) to explicate Natorp’s doctrine of the transcendental method; (2) to analyse the differences in Natorp’s and Cohen’s views on this transcendental strategy; (3) to demonstrate the divergence of Kant’s and the Marburgians’ views on method. For Kant, the critical method is a fundamental strategy of analysing the conditions of the possibility of a priori cognition, its essence and origin, scope and limits, principles and laws of application, tools and mechanisms. With Cohen, the transcendental method is not only a strategy of researching scientific experience, but also a genetic, generating tool of scientific thinking. Cohen’s method is oriented towards judgements rather than categories, as was the case with Kant. Natorp’s transcendental method is (1) a meta-method of research and justification of systematic scientific knowledge and (2) a genetic way of generating knowledge and then building a scientific system. The method is initially oriented to the ‘fact of science’ and provides justification of the conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge as a whole. The properties of the method include its critical, immanent, reflexive, and self-generating character. Natorp’s transcendental method works within the logic of pure cognition, but also in ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of consciousness. In doing so, it is oriented towards the genetic basic logical forms (and further, the generating categories) as the a priori tool for the production of science. This focus of Natorp’s method distinguishes it from Cohen’s logic, which focuses on judgements (the foundations of experience), and from Kant’s criticism, which concentrates on synthetic a priori categories.