Paul Natorp

Paul Natorp (Düsseldorf, 1854 – Marburg, 1924) was a German philosopher and educationalist, one of the co-founders, with Hermann Cohen, of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. He was also known as a leading authority on Plato, and as a pioneer of systematic theories of social pedagogy, an approach that shaped educational debate long after his death.

The son of a Protestant minister, he studied music, history, classical philology and philosophy in Berlin, Bonn and Strasbourg. He took his doctorate at Strasbourg in 1876 under Ernst Laas and qualified as a lecturer in 1881 under Cohen. From 1885 he taught at Marburg University, becoming a full professor of philosophy and pedagogy in 1893 and remaining there until his retirement in 1922. In 1923–24 he held a lively exchange of ideas with Martin Heidegger, who had recently arrived in Marburg. He was also an ambitious composer, mainly of chamber music, and corresponded with Johannes Brahms, who advised him against a professional career in composition.

Shared with Cohen, his neo-Kantianism had a logical-objectivist bent. Against the post-Kantian idealists, he held that objective thinkability is the only reality, and that this has nothing to do with empirical objectivity. His aim was to reconcile Kant with Plato. In The Theory of Ideas of Plato (1903) he treated Platonic ideas as the object of pure thought, which could only establish the cognitive functions that ground science. For him, everything human reduced to knowledge, and science was consciousness at its clearest. Philosophy divided into logic, ethics and aesthetics, and was itself a form of knowledge directed at the unity of knowing.

In pedagogy he argued that no individual grows in isolation: people are always formed under the influence of others, so education is socially conditioned. Education aims at values, and philosophy, as the theory of culture, must ground pedagogy. He proposed a national, democratic school, compulsory until twelve, followed by differentiated higher schooling according to ability. His influence reached the Weimar Constitution, the unified school and the work school movement, and he provided a basis for the later social pedagogy movement.