Cohen, Hermann
COHEN, HERMANN (1842–1918) was a Jewish philosopher of religion and founder and exponent of Marburg Neo-Kantian philosophy. Born into a cantor's family in the small-town Jewish community of Coswig/Anhalt, Germany, Cohen received intense religious training from his father in addition to the general education typical of his time and place. The transition from these beginnings to the modern rabbinical seminary of Breslau was natural. Part of the seminary's curriculum was the requirement of university studies, and while at the University of Breslau, Cohen decided that philosophy, rather than the rabbinate, was his vocation.
Scholar
Transferring to the University of Berlin, Cohen first fell under the influence of the folk-psychological epistemologists Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899) and Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903), but he quickly progressed toward the ideas of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and a more logistic outlook. His habilitation thesis on Kant's theory of experience was published in 1871, and in the context of the "back to Kant" movement of the day, his ideas had a revolutionary impact. He particularly impressed the radical social reformer and professor of philosophy at Marburg, Friedrich Lange (1828–1875; author of the famous idealistic History of Materialism). Through Lange, a committed Protestant, Cohen, a committed Jew, received his first appointment at the University of Marburg in 1873.
This page contains 201 words.
Cohen, Hermann article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 2,145 words
(approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Hermann Cohen Article
