Hermann Cohen 1842 – 1918

Hermann Cohen was a German Jewish philosopher and the founder of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism. Holding the chair of philosophy at Marburg for more than thirty years, he produced systematic reinterpretations of Kant's three Critiques and developed an original philosophy of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. After retirement he turned to the philosophy of Judaism, and his posthumous Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism became a foundational text of modern Jewish thought. He was Cassirer's teacher and a powerful influence on Rosenzweig and the broader twentieth-century Jewish renaissance.

Hermann Cohen was born in 1842 at Coswig in Anhalt, the son of a cantor and Hebrew teacher. He studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau and at the universities of Breslau, Berlin, and Halle, where he took his doctorate in 1865. From 1873 he taught at Marburg, succeeding F. A. Lange in the chair of philosophy in 1876, and made it the center of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism for the next thirty-five years.

His three great commentaries — Kant's Theory of Experience (1871), Kant's Foundation of Ethics (1877), and Kant's Foundation of Aesthetics (1889) — were succeeded by his own systematic Logic of Pure Knowledge (1902), Ethics of Pure Will (1904), and Aesthetics of Pure Feeling (1912). After his retirement to Berlin in 1912 he devoted himself to the philosophy of Judaism, producing the posthumously published Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919).

Cohen reinterpreted Kant as a philosopher not of subjective consciousness but of the objective conditions of mathematical natural science and ethical and aesthetic creation, and on this basis built one of the most ambitious philosophical systems of his age. His late work made him the most important German-Jewish philosopher of the Wilhelmine period and a decisive influence on Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. He died at Berlin in April 1918.