Hermann Cohen

Hermann Cohen (German: [ˈkoːən]; 4 July 1842 – 4 April 1918) was a German Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, and he is often held to be "probably the most important Jewish philosopher of the nineteenth century".

Biography

Cohen was born on 4 July 1842, in Coswig, in Anhalt-Bernburg. He began to study philosophy early on, and soon became known as a profound Kant scholar. He was educated at the Gymnasium at Dessau, at the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, and at the universities of Breslau, Berlin, and Halle. In 1873, he became Privatdozent in the philosophical faculty of the University of Marburg; the habilitation thesis with which he obtained the venia legendi being Die systematischen Begriffe in Kant's vorkritischen Schriften nach ihrem Verhältniss zum kritischen Idealismus. Cohen was elected professor extraordinarius at Marburg in 1875 and professor ordinarius the following year.

He was one of the founders of the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judenthums, which held its first meeting in Berlin in November 1902.

Cohen edited and published Friedrich Albert Lange's final philosophical work, Logische Studien (Leipzig, 1877), and edited and wrote several versions of a long introduction and critical supplement to Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus.

In 1878 the thirty-six-year-old Hermann Cohen married the eighteen-year-old pianist Martha Lewandowski (1860-1942). She was the daughter of Louis Lewandowski, the chief cantor of Berlin and a celebrated composer of Jewish liturgical music. Martha was deeply connected to Hermann’s life and intellectual legacy, surviving him long after his death in 1918. Tragically, as an elderly widow decades later, she became a victim of the Nazi regime and died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp during the Holocaust. The marriage between Hermann and Martha Cohen was childless.