Consider two features of Hermann Cohen's critical philosophy. First, using what Cohen calls the transcendental method, critical philosophy aims to identify formal conditions of experience that are universally, and so timelessly, valid. Second, detailed, context-sensitive surveys of the history of science and philosophy are ubiquitous in his accounts of those formal conditions. This paper argues for two claims about how those two features of Cohen's philosophy fit together. First, Cohen holds the striking view that, while philosophy aims to discover and investigate principles that are timelessly valid, it must nevertheless use historical investigation to do so. Second, Cohen has the resources to explain why, on his view, history must play this role in philosophy. This paper uses a genealogical strategy to locate that explanation in Cohen's writings: it traces views of history held by various of Cohen's teachers and shows that Cohen combines and develops those ideas to produce just the explanation needed. Ultimately, the underlying reasoning of Cohen's explanation is this. The history of science has a teleological structure, and as it unfolds, knowledge becomes increasingly universal. But then, elements of scientific theories that remain stable across a succession of increasingly universal theories will be plausible candidates for or approximations of the strictly universal formal conditions of experience. The critical philosopher is thus required to attend to the history of science to identify plausible candidates for those formal conditions.

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赫尔曼·科恩谈历史在批判哲学中的作用

考虑赫尔曼·科恩的批判哲学的两个特征。首先，使用科恩所谓的先验方法，批判哲学旨在识别普遍的、永恒的、有效的经验的形式条件。其次，对历史进行详细的、上下文相关的调查在他对这些形式条件的描述中，科学和哲学的概念无处不在。本文就科恩哲学的这两个特征如何结合在一起提出了两个主张。首先，科恩持有一个惊人的观点，即虽然哲学旨在发现和研究永恒有效的原则，但它仍然必须使用历史研究来做到这一点。其次，科恩有足够的资源来解释为什么在他看来，历史必须在哲学中扮演这个角色。本文使用谱系策略来定位科恩著作中的这种解释：它追溯了科恩的各种老师所持有的历史观点，并表明科恩结合并发展了这些观点以产生所需的解释。归根结底，科恩解释的根本原因是这样的。科学史有一个目的论结构，随着它的展开，知识变得越来越普遍。但是，在一系列日益普遍的理论中保持稳定的科学理论元素将成为严格普遍的经验形式条件的合理候选者或近似者。因此，批判哲学家需要关注科学史，以确定那些形式条件的合理候选者。