Kurd Lasswitz, the Marburg School, and the Problem of Individuality in Physics

Kurd Lasswitz (1848-1910) is primarily remembered as the father of German science fiction. Less known is that, from the early 1880s, he had engaged in an intense dialogue with Cohen and the emerging Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism. Lasswitz incorporated some of Cohen’s insights into his historical work on early modern atomism, which, by the end of the 1890s, was compiled into a two-volume Geschichte der Atomistik (1890), possibly the most successful example of Neo-Kantian historiography of science. The chapter demonstrates how, in response to Lasswitz’s philosophical defense of ‘atomism’, both Cohen and Natorp were forced to redefine their positions, thereby shaping some of the main tenets of the Marburg school at the turn of the century. It was mainly Ernst Cassirer who recognized Lasswitz’s achievement. Starting from the late 1920s, Cassirer understood that Lasswitz was the first to address the problem of individuality in classical physics within a Neo-Kantian framework, a problem that became even more significant with the advent of relativity and quantum mechanics.