Table Of ContentPhilosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture
Teri Merrick
Helmholtz,
Cohen,
and Frege
on Progress and
Fidelity
Sinning Against Science and Religion
Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture
Volume 27
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This series explores the philosophical issues, concerns, and controversies framing
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Teri Merrick
Helmholtz, Cohen, and Frege
on Progress and Fidelity
Sinning Against Science and Religion
Teri Merrick
Department of Philosophy
Azusa Pacific University
Azusa, CA, USA
ISSN 0928-9518 ISSN 2215-1753 (electronic)
Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture
ISBN 978-3-030-57298-3 ISBN 978-3-030-57299-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57299-0
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To my husband Jeff Merrick and my parents
Ray and Jan Glaze
Acknowledgements
This book interweaves answers to questions that I have been thinking and writing
about for the past 20 or so years: Why was Frege so resistant to the development of
non-Euclidean geometry? Why are my co-religionists so resistant to calls for pro-
gressive change within our tradition? What are some wise and workable solutions to
the ever-present problem of epistemic injustice? Though these questions seem dis-
parate and initially I treated them as such, I came to see that my answer to one
informed my answers to the others. I also came to see Cohen as a mentor in reason-
ably responding to Kuhnian-scale changes in scientific and religious traditions. One
hope then for the book is that my reader will come to see this as well.
Fortunately, my circle of mentors includes more than a neo-Kantian philosopher
who died over a century ago. I am especially thankful for Penelope Maddy. She
pushed and prodded me to make my thoughts more articulate and accessible. My
career as a philosopher and the completion of this book is due in large measure to
her patient and persistent support, as well as an oft-needed kick in the pants.
My interest in Frege began and was cultivated while a graduate student in the
Department of Philosophy and Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science
(LPS) at the University of California, Irvine. Upon entering the profession, I often
heard colleagues, particularly my fellow female colleagues, describe their graduate
school experience as one marked by alienation and marginalization if not downright
harassment or abuse. In contrast, I cannot say enough about the steadfast encourage-
ment and kind collegiality that I experienced in the Departments of Philosophy and
LPS. Special thanks go out to Martin Schwab and Terry Parsons for paddling along-
side me through my first deep dive into Kant and Frege scholarship, to David
Malament for tutoring me in projective geometry, and to the members of my dis-
sertation committee (Chair Penelope Maddy, Robert May, Alan Nelson, and P. Kyle
Stanford) for their invaluable commentary on the raw material of much that appears
in Chaps. 2–4 of the book. Thanks as well to my LPS traveling companions: Jason
Alexander, Gary Bell, Sean Ebels-Duggan, Curtis Franks, Patricia Marino, Carol
(Skrenes) Trabling, and Brian Woodcock for being exemplars of Aristotelian
friendship.
vii
viii Acknowledgements
I am indebted to my faculty colleagues at Azusa Pacific University (APU) for
inspiring my research on Cohen’s philosophy of religion and its relevance to con-
temporary discussions about epistemic injustice. I want to thank Sarah Richart for
introducing me to Katrina Karkazis’ Fixing Sex and the controversy over the unjust
treatment of intersex patients. Kay Higuera Smith introduced me to the postcolonial
literature within biblical and religious studies and enabled me to see the relationship
between Cohen’s Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and twenty-first century post-
colonial and feminist epistemology. She proofread the penultimate draft of Chap. 5
and was my go-to consultant on questions concerning Cohen’s philosophy of
Judaism and his exegesis of the Hebrew Bible. Rico Vitz read the entire manuscript
and urged me to submit it to Springer for their consideration. If not for the help and
support of these and other faculty colleagues, the manuscript would have remained
an incomplete and unpublished draft on my bookshelf.
For both Kant and Cohen, beliefs in God and in genuine human progress are
essentially related to hope. In Cohen’s case, this is the hope that we can asymptoti-
cally arrive at the messianic age envisioned by the Hebrew prophets and the Kantian
idea of a Kingdom of Ends. However, as Cohen realized, faithfully laboring at the
tasks that hope inspires often requires repeated doses of joy. I do not know if the
completion of this book or any of the other tasks I have labored at in the course of
my 60 years have contributed to genuine human progress in Cohen’s sense, but I do
know that I have been blessed with many joy-bearers. So in addition to the folks
already mentioned, I would like acknowledge and thank Christopher Wilby for
guiding me through the submission process and the staff, faculty, and students at
APU who often renew my hope. Finally, I want to thank my children and grandchil-
dren—Brady, Austin and his wife Jen, Joel, Ian, Tilly, Nixon, and Ryder—for the
continual joy they bring to my life.
Contents
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2 An Ambiguous Reading of Kant’s Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.1 Concepts, Intuitions, and a Cognitive Synthesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.2 Deploying the Distinction Between Concepts and Intuitions . . . . . 42
2.3 Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics: The Good, the Bad, and the
Notoriously Obscure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3 Disambiguating Kant for the Sake of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.1 Helmholtz’s Naturalized Kantianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.2 Cohen’s Contra-Helmholtz Kantianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
4 Disambiguating Frege for the Sake of Charity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
4.1 What Frege Meant by ‘Kant Is Right About Geometry’ . . . . . . . . . 109
4.2 Frege’s Kantianism vis-à-vis Helmholtz and Cohen . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
4.3 Deploying the Distinction Between Concepts and Objects . . . . . . . 131
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
5 Some Sanctifying Precepts for Science and Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
5.1 Redeeming the Concept of Scientific Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
5.2 Abrahamic Traditions and Accumulating Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . 194
5.3 Test Case – A Christian Community in Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
5.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
ix
Chapter 1
Introduction
Abstract This chapter introduces the expected pay-offs for a close reading of the
nineteenth century debate between Hermann Helmholtz, Hermann Cohen, and
Gottlob Frege. For readers interested in the history of early analytic philosophy and
Frege scholarship, the pay-off is providing a more charitable interpretation of
Frege’s notorious resistance to the development of non-Euclidean geometry and his
insistence on the absolute distinction between concepts and objects. For readers
interested in more contemporary questions about modern western science, religious
traditions, and epistemic injustice, examining this debate and the epistemic crises
surrounding it promises to yield precepts for wisely navigating revolutionary
changes in scientific and religious praxis, changes called for in hope of making
genuinely humane progress.
Keywords Hermann Helmholtz · Hermann Cohen · Gottlob Frege · Thomas Kuhn
· Science and religion · Epistemic injustice
In the 1906 issue of Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematike-Vereinigung, Gottlob
Frege wrote:
Whoever willfully deviates from the traditional sense (Sinne) of a word and does not indi-
cate in what sense he wants to use it, whoever suddenly begins to call red what otherwise is
called green, should not be astonished if he causes confusion. And if this occurs deliberately
in science, it is a sin against science (FG, 58)1
1 The following abbreviations will be used for frequently cited Frege texts: BGS – Begriffsscrift, a
formula language, modeled upon that or arithmetic for pure thought in Frege and Gödel: Two
Fundamental Texts in Mathematical Logic; BLA – Basic Laws of Arithmetic: Exposition of a
System; CP - Collected Papers on Mathematics; FA – The Foundations of Arithmetic; FG – On the
Foundations of Geometry; FR – The Frege Reader; PMC – Philosophical and Mathematical
Correspondence; PW – Posthumous Writings; and TPW – Translations from the Philosophical
Writings
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1
T. Merrick, Helmholtz, Cohen, and Frege on Progress and Fidelity,
Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture 27,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57299-0_1
