I see in Germany there are large efforts to go mining and digging into Kant and some of his major commentators: Hermann Cohen [in Germany] Allison, Strawson, Sellars in the USA.
I asked Dr Kelley Ross [of The Kant-Fries School ] and this was his answer:
I wrote: Let me say she [Bauman] is saying that the categories of Kant are not a ''thing in itself''' but rather the structures that make thinking possible.
Dr Ross: "The categories do apply to things in themselves, but we don't know how. Once they are "schematized" with space and time, they make phenomenal objects possible. But then causality, in particular, can mean free will among things in themselves; but the evidence for that only comes with morality.""
I wrote : ""She [Charlotte Bauman] shows there is a difference between the early Hermann Cohen which was like this and the later Cohen that Nelson was disagreeing with."
KR: "As soon as Cohen rejects things in themselves, then really nothing is left of Kantian philosophy. Whether that is "early" or "late" doesn't make much difference to me."
I wrote : "That is as well as I can understand her point of view right now. Why this is relevant to the Friesian school is that in this way the categories are not derived, but given and thus similar to non intuitive immediate knowledge."
Kelley Ross: "Kant thought that the categories are somehow derived directly from the forms of logic, which is what people call the "metaphysical deduction" of the First Critique. This is nonsense. His move is a leap of imagination, not inference, and his epistemology has nothing to explain it. Before Fries, one could only appeal to Platonism for a more sensible explanation.
If the "early" Cohen was more like Kant, he is still stuck with Kant's problems and improbabilities. I doubt that Bauman fixes that up. "
The Kant-Fries school is important because it shows and corrects many of the flaws in Neo-Kantian thinkers. A side benefit i that it shows a connection between faith and reason.
One benefit about the combination of faith a reason is that one can have faith that is false. [just like when reason can be flawed.] When one combines faith reason it is more likely to hit the truth.
One can see what happens in Philosophy by means of the mathematical notion of flabby sheaves. There is loss of exactness in a case where one wants to go from a smaller domain into the whole space. There is then loss of exactness. And this is what happen in philosophy when people do not look at the big picture-or refuse to acknowledge the role that faith plays in coming to truth. [This is hinted at in Torah:אנחנו מאלמים אלומים בשדה ] We were gathering sheaves in the field. For to correct the problem of loss of exactness one must go to the stalks that make the sheaves,--but you do not worry about gluing the stalks together.