HERMANN COHEN. — German philosopher, born in Coswig on 4 July 1842, died in Berlin on 4 April 1918. From 1879 to 1912 he taught at the University of Marburg, and then until his death at the “Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums” in Berlin.
Principal works: System der Philosophie in three parts: 1) Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Berlin 1902); 2) Ethik des reinen Willens (Vienna 1904); 3) Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls (Vienna 1912). He also wrote: Religion und Sittlichkeit (Vienna 1907); Der Begriff der Religion im System der Philosophie (Giessen 1915), etc.
C. is the founder of the Marburg school (P. Natorp, E. Cassirer), which, opposing naturalism and positivism, inaugurated a new Kantian interpretation in the sense of an extreme logicism devoid of Hegelian influence. The equilibrium of the Kantian system, grounded in the distinction between transcendental aesthetics and analytics—whereby intellectual functions cannot operate unless sensibility supplies them with suitable matter—is shattered by C., who denies this duality. For him, concepts do not represent being but are identical with it; just as thought posits reality, so it is will that produces moral order and aesthetic sense that produces the aesthetic.