Max Frischeisen-Köhler’s Vindication of the Material Component of Cognition

In this paper I present Max Frischeisen-Köhler’s philosophy of science, which he develops as a critical response to the Neo-Kantians. Frischeisen-Köhler draws on insights from both his teacher Wilhelm Dilthey and Edmund Husserl. In the first four sections I examine Frischeisen-Köhler’s criticism of Marburg and Southwestern Neo-Kantianism. This criticism revolves around the view that reality factors into cognition as a fully independent element that cognition must acknowledge and can never construct out of its own intrinsic lawfulness. In the fifth section I turn to Frischeisen-Köhler’s ‘phenomenology.’ His main thesis is that reality is experienced as such in agency, such that our consciousness of reality does not stem from theoretical considerations about the hypothetical causes of our sensations, but from our transactions in the world as agents. Science takes its departure from this pre-scientific experience of reality. I conclude with a criticism of Frischeisen-Köhler’s distinction between consciousness in general and individual subjectivity from a phenomenological viewpoint.