‘Something Entirely Contingent’: Hermann Cohen’s Already Relativized A Priori

Among current endeavours to historicize Kantianism, two prevailing approaches are frequently discussed: Reichenbach’s ‘constitutive, but relative a priori’ and Cassirer’s ‘regulative, but absolute a priori’. This paper argues that this opposition is misleading, as it fails to fully appreciate the significant influence of Hermann Cohen in shaping Cassirer’s and, more generally, the ‘Marburg’ interpretation of Kant. The paper aims to demonstrate that Cohen’s interpretation of Kant is prominently centred around a relatively obscure passage from the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in which Kant highlights that the possibility of experience is ‘something entirely contingent’ (etwas ganz Zufälliges). It suggests that Cohen argued for what might be called an ‘already relativized a priori’: already in Kant’s philosophy, the necessity of the constitutive principles was recognized as being relative to ‘something entirely contingent’, i.e., the historical fact of the science of nature.