Popular Down the Hall

In 1992, a number of academic philosophers signed a letter to The Times of London, suggesting that the electors at Cambridge University vote against granting an honorary degree to Jacques Derrida. One of the matters alleged to the discredit of his writings was that Their influence, however, has been to a striking degree almost entirely in fields outside philosophy in departments of film studies, for example, or of French and English literature.I remembered this because the introductory notes to the excerpts of Hans Vaihinger's work in The Neo-Kantian Reader say among other things thatAlthough he has been nearly forgotten by philosophers, there has been a continued interest in his thought in literary studies and psychology.It is possible that Sebastian Luft, editor of The Neo-Kantian Reader thinks the forgetting not unjust, for Vaihinger gets a dozen pages, including textual notes. By comparison, Wilhelm Windelband gets 54 pages and Ernst Cassirer gets 44 pages, not counting his "Davos…