Hermann Cohen

Hermann Cohen was a German Jewish philosopher who founded the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. Teaching at Marburg from 1873 to 1912, he reinterpreted Kant's philosophy as a logic of scientific knowledge and built on it a system of logic, ethics and aesthetics. His ethics joined Kant's moral law to socialism, demanding that every person be treated as an end. In his final years in Berlin he turned to Jewish sources, and his posthumous Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism presents prophetic monotheism as the root of an ethics of compassion for the poor, the stranger and the 'fellow human'.

Key ideas

• Knowledge is not given by sensation but generated by thought according to its own principles, on the model of mathematical science.
• Kant's command to treat persons as ends, never merely as means, grounds an ethical socialism.
• Religion's distinctive contribution to ethics is the discovery of the 'fellow human' (Mitmensch) through compassion for suffering.
• The unique God of monotheism guarantees the moral ideal and the messianic future of a united humanity.

Major works

• Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919)
• Kant's Theory of Experience (1871)
• Logic of Pure Knowledge (1902)
• Ethics of Pure Will (1904)
• Aesthetics of Pure Feeling (1912)

In the Book corner

• Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism 1919 · Advanced
  The last major work of Hermann Cohen, founder of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, published in 1919, the year after his death.…

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