The Crisis of Philosophy in the 1930s

Principal Investigator (Swiss team): Guillaume Fréchette
FAPESP-SNSF 2025-2028

GENERAL PRESENTATION

The “identity crisis” of philosophy is a large-scale phenomenon beginning in the 19th century and extending throughout the entire 20th century, following us even today: many of the questions that were raised in the 19th century are still relevant today: is there a place for philosophy in the development of science? What is the relationship between philosophy and science? To assess such a large-scale phenomenon and its effects on contemporary thought, we need to investigate first its main turning points. Perhaps the most decisive turning point of this phenomenon is the crisis that affected philosophy in the 1930s, especially in Germany, as the result of a conjunction of various political, intellectual and historical factors: the end of the Weimarer Republic and the beginning of Nazi Germany with Hitler as Reichskanzler, the book burning of May 1933, highly symbolic for the fall of culture that came with the Machtergreifung of the NSDAP, and the deprivation of rights of many citizens that came with it. Such factors had a direct impact on the development of philosophy, which can be measured particularly well based on four cases: Husserl, Heidegger, Carnap and Cassirer. This project proposes a unified account of the identity crisis of philosophy in the 1930s through the lens of these four philosophers and of the four philosophical movements they created, shaped, or influenced: phenomenology, hermeneutics, logical empiricism/neopositivism and neokantianism.

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