Hermann Cohen S Ethics

Through explorations of Hermann Cohen’s Ethics of Pure Will, an international set of scholars opens questions both about the text itself and about the relation of ethics and the Jewish tradition. Originally published as Volume 13 (2005) of The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy.

"Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) was a leading figure in the Neo- Kantian philosophical movement that dominated European thought before 1918. He was also an inaugural figure in modern Jewish philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book explores Cohen's striking claim that ethics is rooted in law - a claim developed both in his philosophical ethics and his philosophy of Judaism, in particular in his writings on "love-of-neighbor," up to and including his well-known Religion of Reason. Dana Hollander proposes that neither Cohen's systematic philosophy nor his "Jewish" philosophy should be seen as the dominant framework for his oeuvre as a whole, but that his understanding of key philosophical questions take shape in the passages between both corpuses, a trait that could be seen as paradigmatic for modern Jewish philosophy. Ethics Out of Law taps into one of the prime topics of current interest in the field of Jewish philosophy: the nature of Jewish political existence and the changing configurations of "law" that this entails."--

This is the first book in English to lay out the philosophical ethics and philosophy of law of Hermann Cohen, one of the leading figures in both Neo-Kantian and Jewish philosophy.

Hermann Cohen’s essay on Maimonides’ ethics is one of the most fundamental texts of twentieth-century Jewish philosophy, correlating Platonic, prophetic, Maimonidean, and Kantian traditions. Almut Sh. Bruckstein provides the first English translation and her own extensive commentary on this landmark 1908 work, which inspired readings of medieval and rabbinic sources by Leo Strauss, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas. Cohen rejects the notion that we should try to understand texts of the past solely in the context of their own historical era. Subverting the historical order, he interprets the ethical meanings of texts in the light of a future yet to be realized. He commits the entire Jewish tradition to a universal socialism prophetically inspired by ideals of humanity, peace, and universal justice. Through her own probing commentary on Cohen’s text, like the margin notes of a medieval treatise, Bruckstein performs the hermeneutical act that lies at the core of Cohen’s argument: she reads Jewish sources from a perspective that recognizes the interpretive act of commentary itself.

Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) is an original systematic thinker and representative of the Marburg School of Critical Idealism. The Marburg School was a leading school in German academic philosophy and in German Jewish philosophy for a period of over thirty years preceding the First World War. Initially standing at the front of the ‘Return to Kant’ movement, Cohen subsequently went beyond Kant in developing a system of critical idealism in which he offered a critique of and alternative to absolute idealism, positivism, and materialism. A critical idealist in heart and soul, Cohen is also recognized as a man who embodied German Jewish culture. Publications on Cohen in the English language are small in number and this volume aims to fill the gap. It offers an analysis of Cohen’s System of Philosophy - the three-volume classic on logic, ethics, and aesthetics - and his writings on Judaism and religion. The book highlights Cohen’s contributions in these fields, including his discussions with Maimonides, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel. It demonstrates the congeniality of Cohen’s critical idealism as expounded in the System and his writings on Judaism, and offers an overview of contemporary Cohen research.

Complete collection of Schwarzschild’s essays on the neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen. Steven S. Schwarzschild (1924–1989) was arguably the leading expositor of German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), undertaking a lifelong effort to reintroduce Cohen’s thought into contemporary philosophical discourse. In The Tragedy of Optimism, George Y. Kohler brings together all of Schwarzschild’s work on Cohen for the first time. Schwarzschild’s readings of Cohen are unique and profound; he was conversant with both worlds that shaped Cohen’s thought, neo-Kantian German idealism and Jewish theology. The collection covers a wide range of subjects, from ethics, socialism, the concept of human selfhood, and the mathematics of the infinite to more explicitly Jewish themes. This volume includes two of Schwarzschild’s previously unpublished manuscripts and a scholarly introduction by Kohler. Schwarzschild shows that despite its seeming defeat by events of the twentieth century, Cohen’s optimism about human progress is a rational, indeed necessary, path to peace. “The Tragedy of Optimism gives us excellent—perhaps unparalleled—insight into the thought of Hermann Cohen. Although Cohen was one of the most important thinkers in the history of Jewish philosophy, he is often misread or simply ignored. Schwarzschild shows in painstaking fashion why the standard criticisms of Cohen miss the point. What emerges is a picture of Cohen as a more sophisticated thinker than what we usually get in histories of the period.” — Kenneth Seeskin, author of Autonomy in Jewish Philosophy

A collection of papers, this volume deals with different aspects of Cohen's thought, ethical, political, aesthetic, and religious aspects in particular. It represents attempts to follow the ubiquitous presence of certain important themes in Cohen and their capacity for containing meanings that cannot be limited to a single philosophical sphere.