cohen by stanforduniv

7/30/2019 Cohen by StanfordUniv.

1/22

1

Hermann Cohen Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford UniversityFirst published Thu Jul 15, 2010

Hermann Cohen, more than any other single figure, is responsible for founding the Neo-Kantianism that dominated academic philosophy in Germany from the 1870s until theend of the First World War. Earlier German philosophers finding inspiration in Kanttended either towards speculative, metaphysical idealism, or sought to addressphilosophical questions with the resources of the empirical sciences, especiallypsychology. In contrast, Cohen's seminal interpretation of Kant offered a vision ofphilosophy that sought to avoid uncritical metaphysics without at the same time simplyabsorbing philosophy into psychology. Cohen brought these attitudes to bear on a widerange of topics, writing systematically about epistemology, philosophy of science,ethics, law, political theory, and aesthetics. His anti-psychologism and suspicion ofspeculative idealism became defining commitments not only of the Marburg School ofNeo-Kantianism, founded by Cohen himself, but of orthodox Neo-Kantianism more

generally. Indeed, these commitments ultimately defined the philosophical context fromwhich, in the early twentieth century, both phenomenology and logical positivismemerged.

No less significant than his influence on academic philosophy, Cohen was hisgeneration's preeminent German-Jewish public intellectual and religious philosopher.His philosophical ethics and political theory provided the foundation for a non-Marxist,Kantian democratic socialism that informed his more popular and topical writings. Heargued publicly for universal suffrage and for the rights of workers to organizedemocratically-constituted collectives. He also saw deep points of connection betweenethics and religion, and developed a view of Judaism as a profoundly ethical system of

belief and practice. He argued that monotheism was the historical source of the idea ofuniversal ethical laws, and thus that Judaism offered the world its first model of auniversalist morality. This view of Judaism's ethical significance ultimately informedCohen's public defense of the Jews' place in Germany not only against anti-Semiticattacks, but also against the arguments of early twentieth-century Zionists. However,Cohen's influence on Jewish thought extends far beyond debates within ImperialGermany: his late religious writings inspired a broad renewal in twentieth-centuryJewish ethics and philosophy of religion.

1. Life and Works2. The Interpretation of Kant

3. The Transcendental Method4. Critical Idealism5. Continuity, Generation, and Origin6. Ethics, Jurisprudence, and the Laws of Human Action7. The Kantian Foundations of Democratic Socialism, Aesthetics8. Philosophy of Religion9. Monotheism and Prophetic Messianism10. Cohen's InfluenceBibliography

o Selected Works by Coheno Selected Secondary Literature

Other Internet ResourcesRelated Entries
http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/info.html%23chttp://mally.stanford.edu/http://www-csli.stanford.edu/http://www.stanford.edu/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23LifWorhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23LifWorhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23IntKanhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23IntKanhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23TraMethttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23TraMethttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23CriIdehttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23CriIdehttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23ConGenOrihttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23ConGenOrihttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23EthJurLawHumActhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23EthJurLawHumActhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23KanFouDemSocAeshttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23KanFouDemSocAeshttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23PhiRelhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23PhiRelhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23MonProMeshttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23MonProMeshttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23CohInfhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23CohInfhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23Bibhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23Bibhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23SelWorCohhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23SelWorCohhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23SelSecLithttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23SelSecLithttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23Othhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23Othhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23Relhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23Relhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23Relhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23Othhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23SelSecLithttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23SelWorCohhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23Bibhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23CohInfhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23MonProMeshttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23PhiRelhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23KanFouDemSocAeshttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23EthJurLawHumActhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23ConGenOrihttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23CriIdehttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23TraMethttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23IntKanhttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/Mis%20im%C3%A1genes/Hermann%20Cohen%20(Stanford%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Philosophy).htm%23LifWorhttp://www.stanford.edu/http://www-csli.stanford.edu/http://mally.stanford.edu/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/info.html%23c


2/22

2

1. Life and Works

Born in 1848 in Coswig, Germany, Cohen was raised in a devout family. His father wasa synagogue cantor, and Cohen left Gymnasium in order to attend a rabbinical seminaryin Breslau, Poland. But he decided against becoming a rabbi, and enrolled in universityfirst in Breslau and then in Berlin, where he attended classes taught by a leading light inthe history of philosophy, the Aristotelian Adolf Trendelenburg. He received hisdoctorate from the University of Halle, after which, encouraged by H. Steinthal, hestudied Vlkerpsychologie, an anthropological investigation of the origins of culturalproducts such as art and literature. It was in a journal ofVlkerpsychologie andlinguistics that he published his first major work of Kant interpretation, an interventionin Trendelenburg's and Kuno Fischer's debate about Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic(see 2 below). That essay also marked a decisive turn in Cohen's philosophicalorientation, and after two years in which he wrote on both Kant's pre-critical philosophy

and the Critique of Pure Reason, he was appointed lecturer at the University ofMarburg. Three years later, he was promoted to full Professor, a rank that was at thattime in Germany almost never granted to unconverted Jews in philosophy departments.It was no coincidence that Cohen's appointment and subsequent promotion took placeduring Bismark's anti-Catholic Kulturkampf, a brief period of relatively liberal attitudestoward Jews. But following Heinrich von Treitschke's notorious 1879 anti-Semiticattack on German-Jewish writers and intellectuals, Cohen was compelled to enter the

public debate about the Jews' place in Imperial Germany. His Declaration on theJewish Question appeared in 1880, and questions of German-Jewish identity wouldoccupy him throughout his career (Schwarzschild 1979; Wiedebach 1997, Pts. 45). Heremained at Marburg for almost four decades. After retiring in 1912, Cohen returned to

Berlin to teach at a rabbinical seminary, the Academy of Jewish Sciences. He spent fouryears there, writing principally about religious problems, until his death in 1918.

Cohen's period of philosophical productivity spanned the duration of the Germanempire, from the late 1860s until 1918. We can distinguish three periods in his writing(van der Linden 1988, 2056; Bonaunet 2004: 22ff). The first, early period ischaracterized by Cohen's attempts to develop his own views as commentaries on Kant.During this period, he wrote Kant's Theory of Experience, Kant's Foundations of Ethics,and Kant's Foundations of Aesthetics. In the second period, Cohen's views had maturedto the point where he had explicitly abandoned central Kantian doctrines. He thuspresented his views systematically, and as his own, rather than offering them as

interpretations of Kant. He conceived his major works from this period as part of amulti-volume project he called his System of Philosophy. The System included The

Logic of Pure Knowledge, The Ethics of Pure Will, and The Aesthetics of Pure Feeling.(He planned, but never wrote, a fourth part of the Systemon the psychology of culturalconsciousness. This fourth part was to provide the systematic foundation for the otherthree parts of the System [Adelmann 1968].) Finally, although Cohen had beeninterested in religious questions throughout his career, in the the last years of his lifethey were his overwhelming concern. It was during this period that he wrote his

Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism.

However, while Cohen's interests and views evolved over the course of his career, hisphilosophy from all three periods nevertheless exhibits points of deep continuity. All ofCohen's major works share a profoundly historical orientation. A concern with the


3/22

3

history of philosophy dominates his writing, and he was convinced of history'scontinuing significance for philosophy in the present. But he was also concerned withthe histories of those subjects he took to be philosophy's topics, including science,ethics, and religion. This concern for history permeates his thought so completely thateven in his systematic works, he prefers to introduce concepts and theories not bydefining them straightforwardly, but by rehearsing major episodes in the history of their

development. This historically-oriented method was a model for what later philosopherscalled Problemgeschichtethat is, the history of the origin, development, and evolutionof philosophical problems, as opposed to the historical survey of candidate solutions toproblems the philosopher conceives as fixed, unchanging, and unresponsive to a broaderphilosophical context. (In Cohen's hands, this historical orientation contributes in nosmall part to other aspects of his writing that none of his readers can fail to notice: itsobscurity, repetition, and sometimes unnecessary length.)

Cohen himself came to think that one commitment above all else unified hisphilosophy, from his earliest interpretation of Kant to his mature System of Philosophy.It was his commitment to a philosophical method he claimed was Kant's, and that

Cohen called the transcendental method. What follows is a sketch of thetranscendental method in Cohen's philosophy: how it emerged from his interpretation ofKant; how he sought to apply that method in epistemology and philosophy of science,as well as in ethics, political theory, and aesthetics; and finally, how he sought toarticulate a view of religion as a necessary counterpart to philosophy done according tothat method.

2. The Interpretation of Kant

Throughout his writings on epistemology and philosophy of science, Cohen was

committed to two ideas: first, that a priori laws of human knowledge determine whatcounts as an object for us; and second, that philosophy investigates knowledgeaccording to what Cohen called the transcendental method. His early interpretation ofKant reveals both of these commitments. It also reveals a problem that would occupyhim throughout his later writings on epistemology and philosophy of science: theproblem of explaining the origin of the a priori laws in human knowledge.

In 1871 Cohen published a long essay, On the Controversy between Trendelenburgand Kuno Fischer, and a book, the first edition ofKant's Theory of Experience. Theywere both defenses of Kant against objections that Cohen thought badly misunderstoodhis views on objectivity and the a priori. Cohen was responding to an interpretation of

Kant in the 1860s commonly held by figures of the Back-to-Kant movement such asHermann von Helmholtz and Cohen's own senior colleague at Marburg, F.A. Lange, aswell as by non-Kantian philosophers such as Adolf Trendelenburg. Very roughly, thesefigures thought that Kant held (or that Kantian philosophers ought to hold) that thecharacter of human knowledge is determined by both objective and subjective factors.On one hand, there are objects that exist independently of the subject's mind. Theseobjects affect the subject's mind, and in so doing contribute the objective element to thesubject's representations. On the other hand, there are structures in the subject's mindsay, the forms of human intuition, space and time. Because these structures are in thesubject's mind and thus don't come from experience, they are a priori. Further, these apriori structures organize the subject's representations and thereby contribute asubjective, mind-dependent element to them. But since on this interpretation of Kant the


4/22

4

a priori is subjective, an explanation of knowledge's objectivity must appeal not to it,but to the objects that exist independently of the mind.

Cohen thought this interpretation of Kant was wrong, and he thought that influentialobjections to Kant depended on it. Cohen was especially concerned withTrendelenburg's well-known neglected alternative objection to Kant's claim that space

and time are nothing but the forms of intuition. But Cohen was also concerned with J.F.Herbart's (and in Cohen's own time, Helmholtz's) contention that Kant thought spatialrepresentations were innate. Since Cohen thought both Trendelenburg's and Herbart'sobjections depended on a misinterpretation of Kant, he thought those objections failed.He responded to them by defending an alternative account of the relation betweenobjectivity and the Kantian a priori (Khnke 1991, 1758; Patton 2005).

Consequently, Kant's Theory of Experience is above all an attempt to articulate anddefend Cohen's alternative interpretation of Kant's a priori. On that interpretation, Kant'saim in the Critique of Pure Reason is to show how a priori laws of human thoughtexplain the character of our experience of objects. For Cohen, because these a priori

laws are necessary, they are objective. So Kant's explanation of objective experienceappeals to them, and not to the effects of any alleged mind-independent objects.

Cohen argues that there are three different levels or degrees of Kant's a priori. Heclaims that the first of these is inessential for Kant's philosophy, and consists in theapparently permanent metaphysical structures we can discover in our own thought bymeans of introspection. The second level of the a priori consists in the forms ofsensibility and the understanding, that is, space, time, and the categories. But thenecessity of these forms ultimately derives from the necessity of the third level of the a

priori, because the forms of sensibility and understanding are scientific abstractions(Cohen 1987 [1871b], 8384) from that third level. The third level is thus the mostimportant of the three levels. Cohen argues that a priori laws in this most important,third sense consist in the formal conditions of the possibility of experience. Or, as healso sometimes puts it, the a priori in this third sense consists in laws that areconstitutive of of the possibility of experience. For Cohen, these necessary, a priorilaws define what an object of experience is for us. (Klaus Christian Khnke identifiesthis point in Cohen as the source of the central Marburg School doctrine that a priorilaws generate objects of possible experience [Khnke 1991, 17884].)

Cohen has a striking view of what a priori laws of the third level actually consist in, andof the possible experience they are constitutive of. Although he would emphasize this

striking view more in later writings it is nevertheless explicit in the first edition of hisKant's Theory of Experience. He did not think the third level of the a priori consists incognitive structures in the subject's mind, structures we could discover by doingphysiology (as, for example Helmholtz and Lange thought) or by introspection (as, forexample, J.F. Fries and, in Cohen's own time, Jrgen Bona Meyer thought) (de Schmidt1976: Ch. 2.3). Rather, he insisted that these a priori laws were the principles ofmathematics and the fundamental laws of pure natural science, that is, mechanics.Further, these principles and laws are constitutive of the possibility of experience in avery specific and, Cohen insists, Kantian sense of experience: for Cohen, experienceconsists in the theories furnished by the mathematically precise science of nature,considered as if laid out in printed books (Cohen 1877, 27). That is, on Cohen's

interpretation, Kant's a priori has nothing at all to do with the cognitive activity of the


5/22

5

knower. Rather, it consists in the laws of mathematically precise natural scienceconsidered independently of any particular knower.

Cohen's interpretation of Kant is thus robustly anti-psychologistic: he thinks anyconsideration of how the human mind operates to produce representations is completelyirrelevant to a philosophical theory of knowledge. In fact, some commentators have

suggested that Cohen offered the first genuinely anti-psychologistic interpretation ofKant's Critique of Pure Reason (Hatfield 1990, 110; Anderson 2005, 298). At the sametime, Cohen's anti-psychologism is not always easy to locate in his writings. On almostevery page ofKant's Theory of Experience (and later, The Logic of Pure Knowledge)Cohen helps himself to the language of transcendental idealism and transcendentalpsychology, giving the impression of an active, conscious mind, with faculties ofsensibility and understanding that produce the subject's experience of objects. But,Cohen insists, this language is actually anti-psychologistic: understood properly, theKantian's talk of cognitive faculties really refers to the methods of mathematically

precise natural science. Thus the faculty of sensibility is really just the methods bywhich the mathematician constructs spatial magnitudes, and the faculty of

understanding is really just the methods by which the physicist constructsrepresentations of physical objects (Cohen 1885, 586ff.) Kantian theory of knowledgethus turns out to be the philosophical investigation of the methods of natural science.

3. The Transcendental Method

Cohen's distinctive conception of experience and the a priori laws that constitute itspossibility is a consequence of his view of Kant's philosophical method. Cohen wouldcall this method the transcendental method, and he would come to consider it thedefining characteristic of his Kantianism. Cohen (and his students) would articulate the

transcendental method clearly only in later writings. But even as early as the firstedition ofKant's Theory of Experience, we can see the transcendental method emergingfrom his interpretation of Kant's Analytic of Principles and the Prolegomena to AnyFuture Metaphysics.

According to Cohen, for Kant mathematical natural science is the starting-point ofphilosophical investigation. It is the explanandum that Kantian philosophy seeks toexplain. It is then up to philosophy to identify and articulate the a priori laws in thatexperience that explain its objectivity. If it is less than obvious that this is Kant's methodin the Critique of Pure Reason, Cohen insists, it is at least clear in the Prolegomena.There, Kant is explicit that he begins by assuming that mathematical natural science

provides us with genuine objective knowledge, and that it contains synthetic a prioriprinciples; Kant is likewise explicit that his task is to identify the necessary conditionsof those principles' possibility, and that doing so will explain the objectivity ofmathematical natural science. (Kant is also explicit that this method, which in theProlegomenahe calls the analytic method, is not the method he uses in the Critique ofPure Reason, nor would it be suitable for the full project of the Critique. Cohen seemscheerfully undaunted by this textual anomaly.)

Taking Kant's method in the Prolegomena as his guide, Cohen claims that thetranscendental method is this. He thinks philosophy takes the theories of mathematicalnatural science as its starting point. It begins, as he puts it, with the fact ofmathematical natural science (Cohen 1883, 119120). Although Cohen does notemphasize it in the first edition ofKant's Theory of Experience, he thinks (and it is


6/22

6

consistent with his views) that this fact of science changes as science progresses. Onthe transcendental method, the philosopher takes the best physical theories of the day asher starting point, and thus the fact science will be different for philosophers indifferent periods of the history of science.

Further, Cohen identifies the a priori of his third level, the laws of mathematical natural

science, with the synthetic a priori principles Kant thinks mathematical natural sciencecontains. Cohen says of these of synthetic a priori principles that they are that which ispresent in experience (Cohen 1987 [1871b], 206). Then philosophy seeks to explainthe possibility of experience by identifying and articulating the a priori laws presentin it. As Cohen would later put it, experience, conceived as the evolving doctrines ofmathematical natural science, is given as a task [aufgegeben] to philosophy: whileexperience is given with synthetic a priori principles already contained in it, it is thetask of philosophy to identify and articulate those principles, and in so doing to explainhow they make objective experience possible.

Cohen's student and colleague at Marburg, Paul Natorp, would emphasize a major

advantage of the transcendental method for Cohen (Natorp 1912, 1967). This methodallowed him to avoid what he took to be the two major errors of other post-Kantianphilosophy. First, because Cohen sought to explain the possibility of experience byappeal to a priori laws in it, he avoided the physiologically-oriented psychologism ofHelmholtz and Lange, among others. But second, the transcendental method anchorsKantian philosophy to mathematical natural science as its starting point. This anchorwould prevent philosophy from taking off on the speculative, metaphysical flights offancy that, in the minds of many Kantian philosophers in the 1860s and 1870s,decisively undermined the IdealistNaturphilosophie of the first half of the nineteenthcentury. For Cohen and his students, the transcendental method thus made possible aphilosophy that was properly scientific, without absorbing it completely into physiologyand psychology.

4. Critical Idealism

Cohen's 1883 The Principle of the Infinitesimal Method and its History and the second,1885 edition ofKant's Theory of Experience reveal the considerable extent to which hemodified and deepened his epistemology and philosophy of science over the course ofthe 1870s and early 1880s. In one move that marks his increasing clarity about his ownviews, he abandons the term theory of knowledge [Erkenntnistheorie] asirredeemably psychologistic, since it was too closely associated with psychologically-

oriented projects such as Helmholtz's. Instead, he proposes to call the project of histheoretical philosophy critique of knowledge [Erkenntniskritik].

Beyond merely terminological changes, in The Principle of the Infinitesimal Methodand the second edition ofKant's Theory of Experience, Cohen offers a better developedand more clearly articulated account of the substance of his epistemological view. Hecalls the view critical idealism, and he argues that it is, above all, a methodologicalcommitment to the transcendental method. As his students, Natorp and Ernst Cassirer,would emphasize, Cohen's Kantianism ultimately consists in his commitment to thetranscendental method, rather than any of Kant's particular arguments or doctrines(Cassirer 2005 [1912], 115; Natorp 1912, 1945). As Cohen himself puts it,[p]hilosophy is not doctrine, but critique (Cohen 1885, 577), and it is above all the


7/22

7

transcendental method that distinguishes Cohen's critical idealism from pre-criticalphilosophy.

Cohen's increased clarity about critical idealism and the transcendental method emergedin part from work on the history of philosophy he did in the 1870s and early 1880s. Hepresents his view of that history in both The Principle of the Infinitesimal Methodand a

long introduction he added to the second edition ofKant's Theory of Experience. AsCohen sees it, Plato and Leibniz play roles in the development of critical idealism thatare second only to Kant's. Like Kant, both sought to understand mathematics asparadigms of knowledge in general. Further, as Cohen argued in his 1878 essay Plato'sDoctrine of Ideas and Mathematics, Plato anticipated Kant in maintaining that theobjects of our thought are explained by appeal to ideas (which Cohen, employing hischaracteristic form of philosophical charity, identified with Kantian a priori laws). Incontrast with this Platonic-rationalist antecedent to critical idealism, Cohen argues,stands an Aristotelian-empiricist tradition. Members of this uncritical tradition believe,in one way or another, that we must explain the objects of our thought by appeal toobjects that exist independently of the mind.

No less than Cohen's historical writing, his increasing willingness to reject certainKantian doctrines reveals the extent to which his critical idealism was a commitmentonly to Kant's philosophical method. For example, in one of the many sections he addedto the second edition ofKant's Theory of Experience, Cohen argues that the proper wayto understand the notion of the thing-in-itself is not (as Kant seems to suggest) as anobject that exists independently of the subject's representations, somehow affecting thesubject and thereby giving rise to her sensations. Rather, Cohen argues that we mustthink of the thing-in-itself as the totality of all experience, taken as an object of thought(Cohen 1885, 503ff). Since it is the totality of all experience, rather than merely theexperience we happen to have at our particular point in the history of science, the thing-in-itself is the ideal that science and critical philosophy aim at.

5. Continuity, Generation, and Origin

However, perhaps the most significant way that the Principle of the InfinitesimalMethodclarifies Cohen's critical idealism is by presenting a detailed illustration of whatthe critique of knowledge done according to the transcendental method looks like. Atthe same time, in this work Cohen also returns to something he had left obscure in thefirst, 1871 edition ofKant's Theory of Experience: namely, the origin of the a priorilaws that explain the possibility of objective experience.

The Principle of the Infinitesimal Methodis concerned with philosophy of mathematics,and specifically with the mathematical concepts of infinity, the infinitesimal and, aboveall for Cohen, continuity. Cohen recognizes that these notions are facts of science: theyare concepts required by Newtonian and eighteenth-century rational mechanics, andthus philosophy must accept them as starting points. But still, some philosophers havetaken some or all of them to be problematic. For example, Berkeley argued that wecould have no way to represent something that was infinitesimally small. Cohen arguesthat we can see past these philosophical problems only when we understand the role theconcept of continuity plays in generating the a priori laws of our knowledge(Richardson, 2006, 2201). Thus the right philosophical account of continuity willprovide two things. First, it will provide grounds for dismissing philosophical objectionsto the mathematical concepts of infinity, the infinitesimal, and continuity. But perhaps


8/22

8

more importantly, it promises to explain the origin of the the a priori laws that Cohenthinks are constitutive of experience's possibility.

The key to understanding the concept of continuity, Cohen insists, is found in the briefsection of the Critique of Pure Reason that Kant called the Anticipations of Perception.(This will, perhaps, come as a surprise to historians of analysis in the nineteenth

century. It certainly suprised Gottleb Frege [Frege 1984 (1885)].) In the Anticipations,Kant introduces the concept of magnitudes that can vary continuously in degrees fromzero to a positive value, and he calls them intensive magnitudes. Kant further argues thatthere is an important connection between these continuously varying magnitudes,sensation, and reality. While Cohen thinks Kant's concern with sensation is misguided,he thinks the connection between intensive magnitudes and reality is exactly right. Heargues that when the concept of continuity is applied to intuition, it continuouslygenerates [erzeugt] an a priori system of what Kant called extensive magnitudesparadigmatically, space and time. This is important, since Cohen (following Kant)thinks we can identify unique objects (and their lawlike physical relations) only if wecan represent them in determinate spatial and temporal locations. For Cohen, these are

the conditions of objecthood our representations must satisfy if they are to count asobjective. So an a priori system of spatial and temporal magnitudes makes objectiverepresentation possible for us. In precisely this sense, Cohen maintains, that system ofmagnitudes (partially) defines what a real object is for us.

Cohen thus argues that the concept of continuity plays a role in generating the a priorilaws that are formal conditions of the possibility of experience of objects. Further, sincethe concept of continuity plays this role in making experience possible, Cohen arguesthat he can dismiss philosophical objections to it, as well as to concepts defined in termsof it, such as the concept of the infinitesimal.

However, Cohen would not remain satisfied with this account of the origin of the apriori laws that constitute experience's possibility. His final major work in epistemologywas the 1902Logic of Pure Knowledge, the first part of his projected System ofPhilosophy. It is concerned precisely with with articulating a revised and muchexpanded account of the origin of the a priori. There, Cohen offers a lengthy anddifficult investigation of the judgmental structure of thought. Especially in hisdiscussions of logic and mathematics, he attempts to link that structure to his earlieraccounts of the role that the concept of continuity plays in generating knowledge. Heargues that continuity is a law of thought that makes possible and carries out thegeneration of those judgmental structures that give unity to thought (Cohen 1902, 91

2). In so doing, he thinks, the concept of continuity generates a unified object ofknowledge.

But while Cohen maintains his earlier concern with continuity in theLogic of PureKnowledge, he also departs from his earlier views in important respects. Cohen nowargues that the origin of knowledge and the a priori laws that make it possible is in purethought. For Cohen, pure thought is pure because its origin is entirely within itself: thatis, it does not depend for its content on an independent faculty of sensibility. Cohen'sinsistence that pure thought is the origin of knowledge is thus a decisive rejection of acentral feature of Kant's critical philosophy, and one that Cohen himself had apparentlyearlier accepted. It is a rejection of the view that knowledge has its source not only in

the faculty of understanding but also in a faculty of sensibility that is independent of theunderstanding. Kant thought critical philosophy needed an investigation of sensibility as


9/22

9

well as an investigation of the understanding, that is, a transcendental aesthetic as wellas a transcendental logic. But for Cohen only the logic remains. Critical philosophy isthe logic of pure knowledge (Cohen 1902, 1213).

Cohen's rejection of an independent faculty of sensibility helps explain why he chose topublish theLogic of Pure Knowledge and his 1907 Commentary on Immanuel Kant's

Critique of Pure Reason separately, rather than articulating his own views ascommentary on Kant, as he had done in his earlier works. It has also lead somecommentators to suggest, because Hegel too rejected Kant's distinction betweenindependent faculties of sensibility and understanding, that Cohen's mature theory ofknowledge was really more Hegelian than Kantian (Ebbinghaus 1967). At the veryleast, it illustrates dramatically the extent to which his Kantianism consists in acommitment to the transcendental method, rather than to the substance of even Kant'smost central doctrines.

6. Ethics, Jurisprudence, and the Laws of Human

Action

Cohen thought the transcendental method must be used in ethics, no less than inepistemology and philosophy of science. He thus sought to extend its applicationbeyond a treatment of the laws of nature to the laws of human action. He ultimatelyargued the that result of this application was a Kantian ethical justification fordemocratic socialism.

Cohen's first attempt to apply the transcendental method to ethics was his Kant'sFoundations of Ethics, which first appeared in 1877. In it, he is motivated by adissatisfaction that Kant could not provide a transcendental deduction of the moral lawthe way he had for the categories in the first Critique (Cohen 1877, 179). In the firstCritique, Kant had argued that the categories are justified, because they are necessaryconditions for the possibility of experience. But in the Critique of Practical Reason, heargued that the moral law cannot be justified as a necessary condition of experience,because we can experience ourselves only as beings whose actions have natural causes,and cannot experience ourselves as free moral agents. Thus, Kant insisted, the morallaw must be the sole factof reasona fact that has no, but needs no, justificationbeyond the force with which it impresses itself on us (Kant 1999 [1788], 5:31, 5:478).Cohen thinks this was an inadequate justification of the moral law. He attempts to showthat an improved justification results from transcendental reflection on the idea of a pure

will, that is, the idea of a will that is not conditioned by any antecedent causes and istherefore free. With Kant, he argues that such a will is possible only on the conditionthat the moral law applies to it. But unlike Kant, he does not assert the actuality of apure, free will. Rather, he argues that freedom of the will is itself a regulative ideal, anend at which we aim our actions (Cohen 1877, 199201ff.).

However, Cohen did not remain satisfied with this account of the foundations of themoral law, nor with his early view of how the transcendental method applies in thedomain of ethics. In his 1904Ethics of Pure Will, the second part of his System ofPhilosophy, he offers a significantly revised account of both. Here, Cohen's account isshaped by two commitments. First, he asserts that the subject matter of ethics is

humanity, that is, human moral agency (Cohen 1902, 3). He thinks the aim of ethics isto construct a normative theory of the human moral agent and its will. Second, unlike in


10/22

10

his earlier Kant's Foundations of Ethics, Cohen now takes seriously the requirement thatthe transcendental method begins with a fact of science. For Cohen, just asepistemology and philosophy of science must begin by accepting the theories of purenatural science as given, ethics according to the transcendental method must begin witha science of humanity.

Cohen canvasses three possibilities for such a science of humanity. Ethics might startwith a Fichtean science of the subject. But Cohen rejects this possibility as a lapseback into pre-critical speculation (Cohen 1902, 13ff.). Alternatively, ethics might startwith naturalistic human sciences such as psychology. But, Cohen objects, making thesesciences the starting point for ethical reflection would violate Kant's insistence thatethics distinguishes between normative and non-normative considerations, betweenwhat Cohen calls Being and the Ought (Cohen 1902, 9ff.).

Thus Cohen argues that ethics begins with the science of jurisprudence, that is, thescience that investigates law and human beings considered precisely as agents whoseactions are bound by law's normative constraints (Cohen 1902, 66ff.). Cohen does not

have in mind a jurisprudence that is concerned only with positive law. Rather, thetranscendental method in ethics begins withpure jurisprudence, which investigates thevery concept of law and its essential features such as universality. Pure jurisprudence isthus the science of universal laws of human action. (Pure jurisprudence in this sensewas one topic of German legal theory around the turn of the twentieth century. RudolfStammler's 1902 The Theory of Justice is representative.) For Cohen, this evolving bodyof pure legal doctrine constitutes a fact of science. Ethics according to thetranscendental method accepts it as given. Then, by reflecting on this evolving body oflegal doctrine, ethics seeks to construct a theory of the human being as a moral agent(Schwarzschild 1975).

Pure jurisprudence guides ethics in constructing a theory of humanity by overcoming aproblem that, Cohen thinks, any theory of humanity faces. He claims the concept ofhumanity has a tension contained in it: a human being is at once an individual and amember of various pluralities, such as religious communities or economic collectives(Cohen 1902, 3ff). Further, the wills of pluralities of individuals do not necessarilycohere: individuals do not necessarily will things that are consistent with what otherindividuals will, or with what the community as a whole wills. But, Cohen suggests,without an account of what an individual may will consistently with the wills of others,we have no coherent account of the moral agent as both an individual and a member ofa plurality. Thus any theory of humanity requires an account of how to reconcile

individuals' wills within a plurality. As Cohen puts it, individuals' wills must be unifiedinto a totality. Or, in somewhat less opaque language, we must understand how theuniversal laws of an ideal state can reconcile the wills of individuals and pluralities(Wiedebach 1997, Pt. 3). Finally, according to Cohen, if we want to thinksystematically about what those universal laws are, we must start by reflecting on theevolving body of legal doctrine provided by pure jurisprudencethe science ofuniversal laws.

Cohen's emphasis on the universal character of ethical laws is clearly Kantian in spirit,and he certainly intends the universal laws of an ideal state to be the laws people mustgive to themselves in Kant's realm of ends. But still, it is not obvious how exactly to

characterize the relation of Cohen's ethics to Kant's. On one plausible reading of Kant, ageneral theory of the moral will was the basis for his theory of law in the Doctrine of


11/22

11

Right. But on Cohen's view of how to apply the transcendental method to ethics, ethicsbegins with a theory of law from pure jurisprudence and then, by reflecting on pure law,it seeks to construct a general theory of the moral agent and its will. Thus Cohen'saccount of the foundations of ethics might differ fundamentally from Kant'sindeed, itmight turn Kant's account on its head.

7. The Kantian Foundations of Democratic Socialism,Aesthetics

However, while a doctrine of pure, universal laws makes possible a coherent theory ofthe concept of humanity, Cohen thinks the laws of any actual state will fall short of purelaw's ideal form. He maintains that states, in the course of their development throughhistory, tend to amend their laws so as to better approximate the ideal laws. Cohen doesnot argue from some antecedent philosophical theory of human nature that history issomehow compelled to exhibit this progress (Cohen 1902, 37). Rather, he simplyaccepts it as a datum of history: philosophy can no more deny this progress than it can

deny progress in the history of physics and mathematics. At the same time, Cohen'soptimism was tempered by an awareness of injustice in the non-ideal world: moralprogress must be unending, precisely because no actual state will ever realize the idealcompletely (Schwarzschild 1979, 13940). There is, in Cohen's terms, an unbridgeablegap between Being and the Ought.

As Cohen saw it, political progress was, and ought to be, moving towards democraticsocialism. The laws of an undemocratic state cannot genuinely reconcile the wills ofindividuals and pluralities of individuals, even if the state has the power to control their

behavior. So, Cohen argued in his 1904 essay The General, Equal, and Direct RightVote, any state whose laws make the wills of individuals and pluralities cohere must beone with universal suffrage (van der Linden 1988, 215). He thus opposed WilhelmineGermany's system of tiered suffrage, under which lower-class men from some regionsvoted only in national elections and women did not vote at all.

Moreover, Cohen argued that, as states amend their laws to better approximate ideallaws, legal frameworks should emerge to govern the economic activity ofdemocratically-constituted pluralities of people. In other words, he thought that an idealstate would allow democratic workers' collectives to own the means of production. InhisEthics of Pure Willas well as his 1896 Postscript to F.A. Lange'sHistory of

Materialism, Cohen argues that this socialism follows straightforwardly from a proper

understanding of Kant's categorical imperative (Cohen 1902, 320). For Cohen, nottreating people merely as a means entails not exploiting their labor (Holzhey 2005, 26).Along with Lange, Cohen thus advocated a socialism with Kantian, rather than Marxist,foundations. (The 1890 repeal of Bismark's Anti-Socialist Laws would have offered himsome evidence that Germany was moving towards that democratic socialist ideal.)Cohen's Kantian socialism was an important influence on socialist political leaders suchas Eduard Bernstein, a social democratic member of theReichstag (Gay 1970).

Politics was not the only sphere in which Cohen thought philosophy must engage withculture. In the third part of his System of Philosophy, theAesthetics of Pure Feeling(1912), he argued that critical philosophy could not leave art without a philosophical

foundation (Cohen 1982 [1912], 1.4). In his aesthetics, Cohen sought to avoid Schellingand Hegel's idealism as well as, for example, Helmholtz's physiological approach to


12/22

12

philosophy, exemplified in aesthetics by his investigations of music. However, inCohen's theory of knowledge and ethics, he had avoided these approaches by adheringto the transcendental methodthat is, by starting with a fact of (natural or juridical)science and then articulating the a priori, universal laws that constitute that science'sobject. But for Cohen, there is no science of art, so a philosophical aesthetics mustbegin with only the fact that art is central to culture (Poma 1997, Ch. 7). He develops

an account of pure feelingthat is, feeling that is produced independently of, forexample, thinking or willing, and that he characterizes as lawfulness (Gesetzlichkeit)(Cohen 1982 [1912], 1.68ff; cf. de Launay 2005). According to Cohen, this lawfulnessof pure feeling is what produces the object of aesthetic judgment.

Apart from systematic philosophical considerations, Cohen's aesthetics is of interest forthe light it promises to shed on his philosophy of religion. Cohen came to believe thatconcepts central to philosophy of religion should be articulated by interperetinghistorical scriptural texts, including prayers and biblical poetry and prose (Kepnes 2007,Ch. 2) (see 9 below). Thus recent commentators have used Cohen's account of lyricpoetry in theAesthetics of Pure Feeling to help make sense of his account of an

individual's love for God (Poma 2000), as well as his conception of compassion(Wiedebach 2002).

8. Philosophy of Religion

Cohen retired from Marburg in 1912, and taught until his death at the Academy ofJewish Sciences, a rabbinical seminary in Berlin. During this period, he worked aboveall else on religious philosophy, writing The Concept of Religion in the System ofPhilosophy (1915) and his monumentalReligion of Reason Out of the Sources of

Judaism, which appeared in 1919, after his death. TheReligion's signficance is difficult

to overtstate: it has been called the single most consequential work of Judaic thought inthe period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Dietrich 2000). In it, Cohen aimsto synthesize Kantian philosophy of religion and Jewish thinking on religion andmorality. He articulates a definition of a religion of reasonthat is, a religion thatcomplements, but remains distinct from, his System of Philosophy. But also, he arguesthat fundamental concepts of Judaism, as they are revealed in historical Jewish texts,were the original historical sources of this religion of reason.

Cohen initially faces a problem in defining the relation of religion to systematicphilosophy (Holzhey 2000). In both the Concept of Religion and theReligion of Reason,he identifies the two central concepts of religion as humanity and God (Cohen 1972

[1919], 11ff.) But he had already offered philosophical accounts of those concepts in hisethics. For Cohen, ethics is the theory precisely of humanity. But also, in hisEthics ofPure Will, Cohen defined God as the conjunction of two ideas: the concept of idealethical laws unifying all humanity into a harmonious realm of ends, and the faith that, atthe end of history, this ideal would be realized. Thus Cohen's ethics seem to offercomplete, systematic accounts of both of religion's central concepts. Consequently,Cohen appears to face a dilemma: religion has a distinctive role to play in philosophy

just in case his philosophical ethics offered only incomplete accounts of humanity andGod. But this is unacceptable to Cohen.

Cohen must thus offer an account of the distinctiveness of religion in relation tosystematic philosophy, and do so in a way that does not entail the incompleteness of hisethics. The crux of his account of religion's distinctiveness seems to be the vaguely


13/22

13

Tolstoyan assumption that insofar as individuals are moral, they are alike, but that everyindividual is immoral in his or her own way. In theReligion, Cohen claims thatsystematic philosophical ethics is concerned with individuals only insofar as they aremembers of pluralities or humanity as a wholethat is, only insofar as they are boundby ethical laws. But this is not the only way to conceive of individuals. We can alsorecognize an individual's particular moral failings, and we can recognize the particular

ways an individual suffers because of those failings (Zank 2000). When we recognizean individual this way, Cohen says (appropriating Feuerbach's vocabulary) werecognize the individual as a Thou, rather than merely as a He, a genericrepresentative of humanity. On Cohen's account, it thus turns out that systematicphilosophical ethics does not address certain pervasive features of our lived moralexperience: our varied, multiple, and particular moral failings, as well the suffering theybring us (Bonaunet 2005, 49ff.). This is not, he thinks, a criticism of ethics for beingincomplete. It is only the recognition of what ethics is, and is not, concerned with.

Religion, however, is concerned precisely with the individual's particular moral failings(Zank 1996 and 2000). While we can recognize another individual as a Thou, and so

assess her particular moral failings, Cohen thinks the most important person torecognize as a Thou is ourselves. As he puts it, we discover the I only by means ofthe Thou. That is, we recognize our moral selves by recognizing our own particularmoral failings. As he puts it, [i]n myself, I have to study sin, and through sin I mustlearn to know myself (Cohen 1972 [1919], 22). Without first discovering our ownparticular moral failings, we could not strive for moral improvement. But for Cohen,this process of moral improvement is inherently religious. Prayer gives us the strengthto overcome our hypocrisy and self-deceit. And only when we do that can we confess,that is, acknowledge our own moral failings. This in turn makes it possible for us toatone, that is, to strive to realize our ethical ideals in ways that respond appropriately toour particular failings (Horwitz 2000; Zank 2000). Thus, for Cohen, knowledge of ourown moral selves is the deepest ground of religion: [t]he discovery of humanitythrough sin is the source from which every religious development flows (Cohen 1972[1919], 20).

By striving for moral improvement, the individual relates herself to her ethical ideals.But since for Cohen our concept of ideal ethical laws just is our idea of God (or at leasta component of our idea of God), an individual's striving for moral improvement relatesher to God. In Cohen's terms, striving for moral improvement establishes a correlationbetween the individual and God. This correlation is a profoundly personal relationship:since the individual confesses and atones for her own particular sins, she relates herself

to God in a way that is similarly particular to her. In relating herself to God, Cohenthinks, the individual thereby constitutes herself as a unique moral and religious self,and God becomes her guide on the long road from sin to virtue (Cohen 1919, 20).

Thus Cohen maintains that there is a distinctive role in philosophy for a religion ofreason: its distinctive concern is precisely with the particularities of individual humans'lived moral experience, and their attempts to overcome their various and different moralfailings as they strive to realize ideal ethical laws. Cohen's readers have had variedreactions to this account. His friend Franz Rosenzweig argued that Cohen's concern intheReligion for the concrete individual, expressed in the idea of the individual'scorrelation with God, constituted a decisive break from theEthics of Pure Will's

concern with universal laws of human action (Rosenzweig 1924). Alternatively, othershave argued that Cohen's account of the concrete individual in theReligion completes


14/22

14

the theory of moral selfhood begun in theEthics of Pure Will (Schwarzschild 1975), orthat the religious idea of God, since it is the idea not only of universal ethical ideals, butof humanity's progress towards those ideals, provides a connection between thedescriptive and normative aspects of Cohen's philosophy (Poma 1988). More recently,Michael Zank has emphasized that Cohen did not intend his philosophy of religion aspart of the System of Philosophy, but nor can the philosophy of religion be in any sense

a break from theEthics of Pure Will in his System, since he started working on bothprojects at roughly the same time around the turn of the century. Cohen's systematicphilosophy and his philosophy of religion thus stand as complements to each other:whereas one conceives the human as an ideal agent constituted by universal ethicallaws, the other treats the human as a concrete individual, constituted by theparticularities of his own moral failings and attempts to atone for them (Zank 1996 and2000).

9. Monotheism and Prophetic Messianism

Cohen's second aim in theReligion is to show that Judaism has what he calls a specialmethodological significance for philosophy of religion, because it is the originalhistorical source of a religion of reason (Cohen 1972 [1919], 8). Judaism has thisspecial status because it was, Cohen contends, the original monotheistic religion, andonly monotheistic religions can be religions of reason. The polytheism of the ancientworld posited different gods for different peoples in different places. But, Cohen argues,since reason is a universal human power that belongs to all humanity (Cohen 1972[1919], 78), a religion of reason cannot recognize different gods for different people,but must recognize a single, unique God for all humanity. Since the idea of such a Godfirst emerged in history with Judaism, it is the original source of a religion of reason.Consequently, the investigation of a religion of reason must recover that religion's

source by interpreting the historical scriptures and liturgical practices of Judaism(Kepnes 2007, Ch. 2).

According to Cohen, monotheism, and so too Judaism, was the historical source of theidea that all humanity could be unified by a single set of ethical laws. As Cohen sees it,God is the set of ideal ethical laws. To assert that there is only one God for all ofhumanity is thus to assert a universal ethical ideal, one on which individuals see all

people as fellow humans, and not as others who can be excluded from the moralcommunity (Cohen 1972 [1919], 14ff). Later religious scholars such as WendellDietrich would call this doctrine ethical monotheism (Cf. Dietrich 1986 and Theodoreand Hadley 2001). Cohen thinks that because monotheism has an ethical dimension, it

culminates inits highest form isa view he calls prophetic messianism. For Cohen,messianism just is the dominion of the good on earth. It is the view that the Messiah'scoming consists in nothing but the ultimate end of injustice (Cohen 1972 [1919], 21).Prophetic messianism is thus an expression of faith that humanity is making progresstowards realizing ideal ethical laws.

Cohen's conception of the essentially ethical nature of Judaism had importantconsequences for his view of Judaism's relation to other religions, as well as his viewsof Zionism and the Jews' place in Wilhelmine Germany. Because Cohen thought theethical nature of Judaism was expressed by its monotheism, he believed that at leastsome forms of Christianity had the same ethical nature. While for Cohen Judaism wasthe original religion of reason, liberal Protestantism expresses universal ethical idealsand is a religion of reason as well. (He thought Catholicism failed to express properly


15/22

15

universal ideals. He seems not have considered Islam.) At the same time, because forCohen Judaism ultimately aims at an ethical ideal that includes all humanity, he rejectedthe nationalism he saw in non-liberal forms of Judaism and was a vocal critic ofZionism. In a public exchange with Martin Buber, Cohen argued that Jews had anobligation to remain in their countries of birth, so that their religious communities couldserve as exemplars for the rest of humanity of communities unified by ethical laws. He

died in 1919, before the increasing virulence of antisemitism in Germany could makehim reconsider this argument.

10. Cohen's Influence

The range of Cohen's influence is wide. Few figures are as important for Jewish ethicsand philosophy of religion in the twentieth century, and in the last four decadesreligious scholars have devoted considerable attention to understanding Cohen'ssignificance as a religious thinker and public intellectual. More recently, historians ofphilosophy in the analytic tradition have begun to appreciate the importance of Cohen's

Neo-Kantianism as a source not only of infliential interpretations of Kant, but of thetopics and methods characteristic of philosophy of science in the twentieth century.

In Jewish religious thought, Cohen's influence is highly visible, and substantivedoctrines he developed in theEthics of Pure Will and theReligion of Reason Out of theSources of Judaism are still topics of debate. Martin Buber's 1923I and Thou wasexplicitly indebted to, and a response to, Cohen'sReligion. Inspired by Cohen (see 8above), Buber elaborated an account of a relationship between the I and the Thou.Like Cohen, for Buber this relation is the central part of how an individual establishes aprofoundly personal relationship with God. Also like Cohen, Buber thinks establishingthat relationship with God is essential to strengthening the ethical bonds in one's

community. But unlike Cohen, Buber thought the I-Thou relationship was essentiallybeyond language's ability to expressa view strikingly at odds with Cohen's rationalistphilosophical tendencies.

More recently, religious ethicists have been interested in Cohen's view that monotheismexpresses a universalist morality, and that it expressed for the first time in history theidea that all humanity must be subject to the same ethical laws. The religious scholarWendell Dietrich (Dietrich 1986) identifies this view as ethical monotheism, and seesCohen as the first in a trajectory of religious philosophers who argue that the concept ofa unique God is necessary foror whose essential content is revealed to us as (Gibbs2001)ethical laws and the freedom to live according to them.

Cohen's influence on Anglo-American analytic philosophy is less visible. Perhaps theonly area of Anglo-American philosophy where a substantive doctrine of Cohen's is stillrespected is Kant interpretation. Before Cohen's Kant's Theory of Experience,interpretations of Kant were overwhelminglysome have claimed exclusivelypsychologistic in one way or another (see 2 above). Some of those interpretationsattributed to Kant a form of idealistic transcendental psychology, what Hegel calledsubjective idealism. Others attributed to Kant some form of empirical psychologism.But Cohen denies that Kant is interested in how the mindeither the transcendentalmind or the empirical mindoperates to synthesize the knower's representations. ForCohen, Kant is interested in knowledge considered as if laid out in printed books(Cohen 1877, 27).


16/22

16

Cohen is thus at the head of a tradition of anti-psychologistic interpretations of Kantthat includes Kant scholars such as Peter Strawson and, more recently, Henry Allison. Itwould overstate Cohen's influence to suggest that he directly inspired, say, Strawson'sinterpretation of Kant. But the anti-psychologistic philosophical environment in whichStrawson produced his Kant interpretation owed a great deal to Cohen's influence. (Cf.Edel 1993 for a discussion of Cohen's anti-psychologism in relation to the tradition of

analytic philosophy to which Stawson belongs.) Further, as English-language Kantinterpretation became more sophisticated over the second half of the twentieth centuryand engaged more seriously with existing German literature, historians of philosophylike Allison found themselves at home in a much longer German tradition of anti-psychologistic Kant interpretation going back directly to Cohen. That anti-psychologistic tradition dominated Anglo-American Kant interpretation for the latterdecades of the twentieth century and is still the majority view today.

However, it would be a mistake to limit a survey of Cohen's influence on contemporaryanalytic philosophy to the doctrines of his that are still alive today. Arguably his mostprofound influence has not been to give us particular philosophical doctrines, but to

contribute to the basic shape, the basic orientation of an entire major subdiscipline ofphilosophy. Nowhere is this more evident than in history and philosophy of science (cf.Patton 2005).

Recent history of philosophy of science has become increasingly aware of Neo-Kantianism's influence on philosophy of science in the twentieth century. It is thusworth taking seriously Cohen's role in shaping twentieth-century philosophy of science.His commitment to the transcendental method lead him to a view of epistemology, andtheoretical philosophy more generally, as essentially a philosophically critical accountof the historical development of concepts in the mathematically-precise naturalsciences. This view of a historically-oriented philosophy of science is nowhere moreclear in Cohen's work than in his Principle of the Infinitesimal Method. There are twosignificant points about the view he expresses there. First, for Cohen, the theory ofknowledge begins by accepting a body of existing science, and then gives aphilosophical reconstruction of important concepts and developments in that science'shistory. Second, Cohen thinks the principal topic of the theory of knowledge ismathematically-precise natural scienceparadigmatically mathematics and physics(Richardson 2006). Cohen's disciple, Ernst Cassirer, would carry out this program in,among other writings, three books on the history and philosophy of physics.

But philosophers far beyond the Marburg School were influenced by Cohen's insistence

that the philosophical reconstruction of scientific theories is the principal method of thetheory of knowledge, and that its principal topic is mathematically-precise naturalscience. Logical positivist philosophy of science took up aspects of Cohen's project,including its central concern with mathematics and physics. Like Cohen, positivists alsothought philosophy should accept existing bodies of science as a starting point, andshould seek to reconstruct that science's theories and methods, even though they thoughtmodern logic was the proper tool for carrying out their reconstructions. Recentscholarship on logical positivism, and especially on Rudolf Carnap, has emphasized itsintellectual debts to Marburg School Neo-Kantianism. (Cf. Friedman 1999 and 2000;Richardson 1998 and especially 2006.) Conversely, a French tradition of philosophy ofscience emphasized a different aspect of Cohen's project. The Neo-Kantian Emile

Meyerson, and his intellectual heirs, Alexandre Koyr and ultimately Thomas Kuhn,emphasized a more deeply historical reconstruction of scientific theories and methods.


17/22

17

Finally, more recent philosophy of science has seen a turn back to views even moreexplicitly inspired by Marburg School doctrines: most prominently, Michael Friedmanhas defended the view that in reconstructing scientific theories, philosophy should seekto articulate the constitutively a priori principles in those theoriesthat is, principlesthat are constitutive of the possibility of experience in precisely Cohen's sense(Friedman 2001). More generally, although twentieth-century history and philosophy of

science did not always take seriously Cohen's substantive doctrines, it was neverthelessaffected profoundly by his vision of philosophy as the reconstruction of historicaldevelopments in mathematically-precise natural science.


18/22

18

Bibliography

Selected Works by Cohen

For a complete bibliography of Cohen's works, see Holzhey 1986, 1.355383.

19772005, Werke. H. Holzhey and H. Weidebach (eds.), Hildesheim: G. Olms.1871a, Zur Controverse zwischen Trendelenburg und Kuno Fischer, [On theControversy between Trendelenburg and Kuno Fischer,]Zeitschrift frVlkerpsychologie and Sprachewissenschaft, 7 (1871): 249296.1871b/1885, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, [Kant's Theory of Experience,]Berlin: Dmmler.1873,Die systematische Begriffe in Kants vorkritische Schriften nach ihremVerhltniss zum kritischen Idealismus, [Systematic Concepts in Kant's Pre-critical Writings according to their relation to Critical Idealism,] Berlin:Dmmler.

1877, Kants Begrndung der Ethik, [Kant's Foundations of the Ethics,] Berlin:Dmmler.1878, Platons Ideenlehre und die Mathematik, [Plato's Doctrine of Ideas andMathematics,]Rectoratsprogramm der Univerisitt Marburg, Marburg:Elwertsche.1883,Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode and seine Geschichte: Ein Kapitel

zur Grundlegung der Erkenntniskritik, [The Principle of the InfinitesimalMethod and its History: a Chapter of the Foundations of the Critique ofKnowledge,] Berlin: Dmmler.1889, Kants Begrndung der sthetik, [Kant's Foundations of the Aesthetics,]Berlin: Dmmler.

1902a, System der Philosophie, Erster Teil: Logik der reinen Erkenntnis,[System of Philosophy, First Part: Logic of Pure Knowledge,] Berlin: BrunoCassirer.1902b, Biographisches Vorwort und kritischem Nachtrag, [BiographicalForward and Critical Supplement,] in F.A. Lange, Geschichte des

Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, Iserlohn undLeipzig: Baedeker.1904/1907, System der Philosophie, Zweiter Teil: Ethik der reinen Willens.[System of Philosophy, Second Part: Ethics of Pure Will,] Berlin: BrunoCassirer.1907, Kommentar zu Immanuel Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, [Commentary

on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,] Leipizig: Meiner.1912, System der Philosophie, Dritter Teil: sthetik der reinen Gefhls, [Systemof Philosophy, Third Part: Aesthetic of Pure Feeling,] Berlin: Bruno Cassirer.1915,Der Begriffe der Religion im System der Philosophie, [The Concept of

Religion in System of Philosophy,] Geissen: Tpelmann.1919,Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, Leipzig: Fock.Translated as: Cohen H., 1972,Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of

Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan, New York: Frederick Unger.1924,Jdische Schriften, ed. B. Strauss, Berlin: Schwetschke. Partiallytranslated as: Cohen, H., 1971,Reason and Hope: Selections from the JewishWritings of Hermann Cohen, trans. Eva Jospe, New York: Norton and Norton.1971 (1908), Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis, in W. Bacher, M. Brann, D.Simonsen, and J. Guttman (eds.),Moses ben Maimon: Sein Leben, seine Werke,


19/22

19

und seine Einfluss, Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Translated as: Cohen H., 2004,Ethics of Maimonides, trans. with extensive comnmentary A. Sh. Bruckstein,Madison, WI: Univerity of Wisconsin Press.

Selected Secondary Literature

General Commentary

Adelmann, D., 1968,Einheit des Buwusstsein als Grundproblem derPhilosophie Hermann Cohens, Heidelberg.

, 2010, Reinige dein Denken: ber den jdischen Hintergrund derPhilosophie von Hermann Cohen, G. Hasselhoff (ed.), Wrzburg: Knigshausen& Neumann.Cassirer, E., 1912, Hermann Cohen und die Erneuerung der kantischePhilosophie, Kant-studien, 17: 252-273. Translated as: Cohen H., 2005,Hermann Cohen and the Renewal of Kantian Philosophy, trans. Lydia Patton,

Angelaki, 10(1): 113125.

, 1943, Hermann Cohen, 18421918, Social Research, 10(1/4): 219232.Dufour, ., 2001,Hermann Cohen: Introduction au Nokantisme de Marbourg,Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

, 2003,Les Nokantiens: Valuer et Vrit, Paris: Vrin.Ebbinghaus, J., 1959, Zur Berufung Cohens auf den Marburger Lehrstuhl,

Archiv fr Philosophie, 9: 9092., 1967, Hermann Cohen, in P. Edwards, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy,New York: Collier-Macmillan.Holzhey, H., 1986, Cohen und Natorp, Basel: Schwabe & Co.

, 2005, Cohen and the Marburg School in Context, in (Munk, 2005).Munk, R. (ed.), 2005,Hermann Cohen's Critical Idealism, Dordrecht: Springer.

Natorp, P., 1912, Kant und die Marburger Schule, Kant-studien, 17: 193-221.Poma, A., 1997, The Critical Philosophy of Hermann Cohen, trans. JohnDenton, Albany: SUNY Press.Sieg, U., 1994,Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus: DieGeschichte einer philosophischen Schulgemeinschaft, Wrzburg: Knigshausenund Neumann.

Kant Interpretation, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science

Anderson, R.L., 2005, Neo-Kantianism and the Roots of Anti-Psychologism,

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 13(2): 287323.Dufour, ., 2003, Remarques sur la Note du Paragraphe 26 de l'AnalytiqueTranscendentale: Les Interprtations de Cohen et Heidegger, Kant-Studien 94:69-79.Edel, G., 1988, Von der Vernunftkritik zur Erkenntnislogik, Frieburg: KarlAlber.Frege, G., 1984 (1885), Review of H. Cohen,Das Prinzip der

Infinitesimalmethode und seine Geschichte, in B. McGuinnes (ed.), CollectedPapers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Horstmann, R.P., 2008, Hermann Cohen on Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic,The Philosophical Forum, 39(2): 127138.


20/22

20

Khn, M., 2009, Interpreting Kant Correctly: On the Kant of the Neo-Kantians, in R. Makreel and S. Luft (eds.),Neo-Kantianism in ContemporaryPhilosophy, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Luft, S., 2008, Reassessing Neo-Kantianism. Another Look at HermannCohen's Kant Interpretation,Dilthey: International Yearbook for Philosophyand the Human Sciences, 1

Patton, L., 2005, The Critical Philosophy Renewed,Angelaki, 10(1): 109118.Richardson, A., 2003, Conceiving, Experiencing, and ConceivingExperiencing: Neo-Kantianism and the History of the Concept of Experience,Topoi, 22(1): 5567.

, 2006, The Fact of Science and Critique of Knowledge: Exact Sceince asproblem and Resource in Marburg Neo-Kantianism, in M. Friedman and A.Nordmann (eds.), The Kantian Legacy in Ninete enth-Century Science,Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.de Schmidt, W., 1976, Psychologie und Transzendentalphilosophie: ZurPsychologie-Rezeption bei Hermann Cohen und Paul Natorp, Bonn: Bouvier.Stolzenberg, J., 2009, The Highest Principle and the Principle of Origin in

Hermann Cohen's Theoretical Philosophy, in R. Makreel and S. Luft (eds.),Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy, Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press.

Ethics, Political Theory, and Aesthetics

Bernstein-Nahar, A., 1998,Accounting for Modern Jewish Identity: HermannCohen and the Ethics of Self-Responsibility, Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress.Gibbs, R. (ed.), 2006,Hermann Cohen's Ethics, Boston, MA: Brill AcademicPublishing.Guyer, P., 2008, What Happened to Kant in Neo-Kantian Aesthetics? Cohen,Cohn, and Dilthey, The Philosophical Forum, 39(2): 143176.de Launey, M., 2005, The Statute of Music in Hermann Cohen'ssthetik, inR. Munk (ed.),Hermann Cohen's Critical Idealism, Dordrecht: Springer.van der Linden, H., 1988, Kantian Ethics and Socialism, Indianapolis, IN:Hackett.Poma, A., 2000, Lyric Poetry and Prayer in H. Holzhey, G. Motzkin, and H.Wiedebach (eds.), Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums:Tradition und Ursprungsdenken in Hermann Cohens Sptwerk, Hildesheim:Georg Olms.

, 2006, Yearning for Form and Other Essays on Hermann Cohen's Thought,Dordrecht: Springer.Schwarzschild, S., 1975, The Tenability of Herman [sic] Cohen's Constructionof the Self,Journal of the History ofPhilosophy, 13: 361384.Wiedebach, H., 1997,Die Bedeutung der Nationalitt fr Hermann Cohen,Hildesheim: Georg Olms.

, 2002, Aesthetics in Religion: Remarks on Hermann Cohen's Theory ofJewish Existence, The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 11(1): 6373.

Religion


21/22

21

Bonaunet, K., 2004,Hermann Cohen's Kantian Philosophy of Religion, Bern:Peter Lang.Dietrich, W., 1986, Cohen and Troeltsch: Ethical Monotheistic Religion andTheory of Culture, Providence, RI: Brown University Press.

, 2000, Preface, in M. Zank, The Idea of Atonement in the Philosophy ofHermann Cohen, Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies.

Holzey, H., 2000, Der systematische Ort derReligion der VernunftimGesamptwerk Hermann Cohens, in H. Holzhey, G. Motzkin, and H. Wiedebach(eds.), Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums: Tradition undUrsprungsdenken in Hermann Cohens Sptwerk, Hildesheim: Georg Olms.Holzhey, H., Motzkin, G., and Wiedebach, H. (eds.), Religion der Vernunft ausden Quellen des Judentums: Tradition und Ursprungsdenken in HermannCohens Sptwerk, Hildesheim: Georg Olms.Horwitz, R, 2000, Two Models of Atonement in Cohen'sReligion of Reason:One according to Ezekiel, the other joyful sufferings according to Job, in H.Holzhey, G. Motzkin, and H. Wiedebach (eds.), Religion der Vernunft aus denQuellen des Judentums: Tradition und Ursprungsdenken in Hermann Cohens

Sptwerk, Hildesheim: Georg Olms.Kepnes, S., 2007,Jewish Liturgical Reasoning, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.Kluback, W., 1884,Hermann Cohen: The Challenge of a Religion of Reason,Atlanta, GA: Scholar's Press.

, 1987, The Idea of Humanity: Hermann Cohen's Legacy to Philosophy andTheology, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

, 1989, The Legacy of Hermann Cohen, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.Melber, J., 1968,Hermann Cohen's Philosophy of Judaism, New York, NY:Yeshiva University Press.Moses, S. and Wiedebach, H. (eds.), 1997,Hermann Cohen's Philosophy of

Religion, Hildesheim: Georg Olms.Rosenzweig, F., 1924, Einleitung, in B. Strauss,Hermann Cohens JdischeSchriften, Berlin: Schwetchke.Schwarzschild, S., 1979, Germanism and Judaism Hermann Cohen'sNormative Paradigm of the German-Jewish Symbiosis, in D. Bronson (ed.),

Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933: The Problematic Symbiosis, Heidelberg:Carl Winter Universitt.Vial, M and M. Hadley (eds.), 2001,Ethical Monotheism, Past and Present:

Essays in Honor of Wendell Dietrich, Providence, RI: Brown University Press.Zank, M., 1996, The Individual as I in Hermann Cohen's Jewish Thought,The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy

, 5(2): 281296., 2000, The Idea of Atonement in the Philosophy of Hermann Cohen,Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies.

Other Works Cited

Allison, H., 1983/2004, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation andDefense, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Buber, M., 1971 (1923),I and Thou, trans. W. Kaufmann. Free Press.Edel, G., 1993, Cohen und die analytische Philosophie der Gegenwart, in R.Brandt and F. Orlik (eds.), Philosophisches DenkenPolitisches Wirken:

Hermann-Cohen-Kolloquium Marburg 1992, Hildesheim: Georg Olms.


22/22

22

Friedman, M., 1999, Carnap's Aufbau Reconsdiered,Reconsidering LogicalPositivism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

, 2000,A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, Heidegger, Chicago: OpenCourt.

, 2001,Dynamics of Reason, Palo Alta, CA: Stanford University Press.Gay, P., 1970, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's

Challenge to Marx, New York, NY: Columbia University Press.Hatfield, G., 1990, The Natural and the Normative: Theories of SpatialPerception from Kant to Helmholtz, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Kant, I., 1997 (1781/1787), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A.Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

, 2002 (1783), Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that will be able toCome Forward as Science, trans. G. Hatfield, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.Khnke, K.C., 1991, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism: German AcademicPhilosophy Between Positivism and Idealism, trans. R.J. Hollingdale,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Richardson, A., 1998, Carnap's Construction of the World, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.Stammler, R., 1925 (1902), The Theory of Justice, trans. Issak Husik, NewYork, NY: MacMillan.

Other Internet Resources

Critical Idealism: The North American Hermann Cohen Society

Related Entries

Buber, Martin|Cassirer, Ernst|Helmholtz, Hermann von|Kant, Immanuel|Kant,Immanuel: moral philosophy|Kant, Immanuel: views on space and time|Lange,Friedrich Albert|monotheism|Natorp, Paul|psychologism|Rosenzweig, Franz

Copyright 2010byScott Edgar
http://criticalidealism.blogspot.com/http://criticalidealism.blogspot.com/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/buber/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/buber/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/cassirer/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/cassirer/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/cassirer/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/hermann-helmholtz/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/hermann-helmholtz/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/hermann-helmholtz/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant-moral/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant-moral/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant-moral/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant-moral/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant-spacetime/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant-spacetime/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant-spacetime/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/friedrich-lange/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/friedrich-lange/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/friedrich-lange/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/friedrich-lange/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/monotheism/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/monotheism/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/monotheism/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/natorp/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/natorp/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/natorp/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/psychologism/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/psychologism/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/psychologism/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/rosenzweig/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/rosenzweig/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/rosenzweig/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/info.html%23chttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/info.html%23cmailto:swedgar%40interchange.ubc.camailto:swedgar%40interchange.ubc.cahttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/info.html%23chttp://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/rosenzweig/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/psychologism/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/natorp/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/monotheism/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/friedrich-lange/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/friedrich-lange/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant-spacetime/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant-moral/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant-moral/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/kant/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/hermann-helmholtz/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/cassirer/http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrador/Mis%20documentos/buber/http://criticalidealism.blogspot.com/