The Critical Philosophy Of Hermann Cohen

This is a translation of Andrea Poma's La filosofia critica di Hermann Cohen, which first appeared in 1988. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the German philosophical scene had witnessed the extinction of absolute idealism and the predominance of the naive materialism of the adherents of scientism. Hermann Cohen's philosophy stood out in favor of the value of critical reason, on which scientific idealism, in the form of a revival of authentic rational idealism, is founded. His standpoint rejected the opposite extremes of both absolute idealism and naive materialism. The Marburg school, one of the great German philosophical schools at the turn of the century, grew out of Cohen's philosophy, which inspired a large number of twentieth-century thinkers. Cohen was, without doubt, one of the principal adherents of the "return to Kant" as a fundamental point of reference of "Critical Idealism." He based this revival on a long, historical, philosophical tradition, represented by Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, and others, apart from Kant himself. Although Cohen saw himself as Kant's heir, he went beyond Kant in his development and deepening of the meaning of critical philosophy in his own philosophical system. He followed an original path, which revealed a great deal of the hitherto concealed potential of this type of philosophy. In his later years Cohen turned his attention mainly to the philosophy of religion, but his last works are not simply what would be termed the Summa theologica of contemporary Judaism. They also belong to a continuous line connecting them to his previous thought, deepening the meaning and extending the potentiality of critical philosophy and its connection to religious problems, satisfactorily developing the aspect of thought on the limit of reason, which, for critical philosophy, is a necessary complement to thought within the limits of reason.

Hermann Cohen’s philosophy has now, finally, received the recognition it deserves. His thought undoubtedly has all the characteristics of a classic. It faced the great problems of philosophical tradition, with full critical awareness and at the same time, with the capacity to open up new, original routes. It represents one of the last expressions of great systematic thought. The papers collected in this volume deal with different aspects of Cohen’s thought, ethical, political, aesthetic and religious aspectsin particular. However they all represent 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: themes that are keys to reading unity of inspiration in his thought, which is more deeply imbedded than the exterior architectural unity of his work. The search for the fundamental themes behind Cohen is an important task, if we wish to see this philosopher as a present-day vital point of reference.

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

Zank (Boston U.) reappraises the work of German Judaic scholar Cohen (1842-1918) and aligns him with the tasks of Jewish philosophy first taken up in the period of Jewish-Muslim philosophical symbiosis. He considers his position between Judaism and philosophy; atonement in his project of renewing the Jewish philosophy of religion and ethics; and substance, self-consciousness, and concrete subjectivity. He developed the study from his 1994 doctoral dissertation for Brandeis University. He substitutes a detailed table of contents for an index. Distributed in the US by the Society of Biblical Literature. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

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.

This book is the first complete intellectual biography of Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) and the only work to cover all his major philosophical and Jewish writings. Frederick C. Beiser pays special attention to all phases of Cohen's intellectual development, its breaks and its continuities, throughout seven decades. The guiding goal behind Cohen's intellectual career, he argues, was the development of a radical rationalism, one committed to defending the rights of unending enquiry and unlimited criticism. Cohen's philosophy was therefore an attempt to defend and revive the Enlightenment belief in the authority of reason; his critical idealism an attempt to justify this belief and to establish a purely rational worldview. According to this interpretation, Cohen's thought is resolutely opposed to any form of irrationalism or mysticism because these would impose arbitrary and artificial limits on criticism and enquiry. It is therefore critical of those interpretations which see Cohen's philosophy as a species of proto-existentialism (Rosenzweig) or Jewish mysticism (Adelmann and Kohnke). Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography attempts to unify the two sides of Cohen's thought, his philosophy and his Judaism. Maintaining that Cohen's Judaism was not a limit to his radical rationalism but a consistent development of it, Beiser contends that his religion was one of reason. He concludes that most critical interpretations have failed to appreciate the philosophical depth and sophistication of his Judaism, a religion which committed the believer to the unending search for truth and the striving to achieve the cosmopolitan ideals of reason.