The Idea Of Atonement In The Philosophy Of Hermann Cohen

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

Hermann Cohen was a Jewish-German thinker with a passion for philosophy. Two forms of national engagement influenced his philosophical system and his Jewish thought: a cultural-political 'Germanness' (Deutschtum) and a religious Judaism beyond the political.

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

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.

The 19th century neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen has provided significant underpinnings for understanding Judaism as a religion with a rational and universal character, as a religion of hope for the future. Eva Jospe translates, introduces, and presents commentary on eight selected essays that constitute an introduction to Cohen's thought. This reprint edition comes more than twenty years after the book's first publication and remains a valued resource for introducing scholars, students, and lay readers alike to the work of this important Jewish thinker.

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 (1842–1918) is often held to be one of the most important Jewish philosophers of the nineteenth century. Paul E. Nahme, in this new consideration of Cohen, liberalism, and religion, emphasizes the idea of enchantment, or the faith in and commitment to ideas, reason, and critique—the animating spirits that move society forward. Nahme views Cohen through the lenses of the crises of Imperial Germany—the rise of antisemitism, nationalism, and secularization—to come to a greater understanding of liberalism, its Protestant and Jewish roots, and the spirits of modernity and tradition that form its foundation. Nahme's philosophical and historical retelling of the story of Cohen and his spiritual investment in liberal theology present a strong argument for religious pluralism and public reason in a world rife with populism, identity politics, and conspiracy theories.