Hermann Cohen

Hermann Cohen (Coswig, 1842 – Berlin, 1918) was a German Jewish philosopher and one of the founders of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism. He is often regarded as one of the most important Jewish philosophers of the nineteenth century. His name is above all tied to his reinterpretation of Immanuel Kant, which became the center of his work.

Cohen studied at the Gymnasium in Dessau, at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, and at the universities of Breslau, Berlin and Halle. He became known early on as a careful scholar of Kant. In 1873 he qualified as a lecturer at Marburg with a thesis on the systematic concepts in Kant's pre-critical writings. He was made extraordinary professor in 1875 and full professor the following year. His first major book, Kant's Theory of Experience (1871), examined Kant's transcendental method with a logical rigor that drew both skepticism and admiration. He went on to write on Kant's ethics and aesthetics. He also edited the posthumous work of Friedrich Albert Lange, Logische Studien, and prepared further editions of Lange's History of Materialism.

From 1902 he published his own system in three volumes: Logic of Pure Knowledge, Ethics of Pure Will and Aesthetics of Pure Feeling. A planned fourth volume on psychology was never written. Cohen held that Kantian ethical idealism and Jewish theology shared a common core, yet he insisted that personal religious beliefs should remain outside the reflective domain of philosophy. This view shapes Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, published posthumously in 1919. He was also a sharp critic of Zionism, fearing that a Jewish state would pull Jews away from their spiritual and moral mission.

His influence reached the philosophy of religion, the theory of knowledge and Jewish thought in the twentieth century. His students included Paul Natorp, Franz Rosenzweig, Boris Pasternak and Joseph B. Soloveitchik.