Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) was a leading figure in the Neo-Kantian philosophical movement that dominated European thought before 1918. He is also the inaugural figure for what is meant by "modern Jewish philosophy" in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book explores Cohen’s striking claim that ethics is rooted in law – a claim developed in both his philosophical ethics and his philosophy of Judaism, in particular in his writings on "love-of-neighbor," up to and including his well-known Religion of Reason. Dana Hollander proposes that neither Cohen’s systematic philosophy nor his "Jewish" philosophy should be seen as the dominant framework for his oeuvre as a whole, but that his understanding of key philosophical questions takes shape in the passages between both corpuses, a trait that could be seen as paradigmatic for modern Jewish philosophy. Ethics Out of Law taps into one of the prime topics of current interest in the field of Jewish philosophy: the nature of Jewish political existence and the changing configurations of "law" that this entails.

Hermann Cohen’s essay on Maimonides’ ethics is one of the most fundamental texts of twentieth-century Jewish philosophy, correlating Platonic, prophetic, Maimonidean, and Kantian traditions. Almut Sh. Bruckstein provides the first English translation and her own extensive commentary on this landmark 1908 work, which inspired readings of medieval and rabbinic sources by Leo Strauss, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas. Cohen rejects the notion that we should try to understand texts of the past solely in the context of their own historical era. Subverting the historical order, he interprets the ethical meanings of texts in the light of a future yet to be realized. He commits the entire Jewish tradition to a universal socialism prophetically inspired by ideals of humanity, peace, and universal justice. Through her own probing commentary on Cohen’s text, like the margin notes of a medieval treatise, Bruckstein performs the hermeneutical act that lies at the core of Cohen’s argument: she reads Jewish sources from a perspective that recognizes the interpretive act of commentary itself.

"Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) was among the most accomplished Jewish philosophers of modern times. This newly translated collection of his writings illuminates his achievements for student readers and rectifies lapses in his intellectual reception by prior generations"--

This is a translation of Andrea Poma's La filosofia critica di Hermann Cohen, which first appeared in 1988. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the German philosophical scene had witnessed the extinction of absolute idealism and the predominance of the naive materialism of the adherents of scientism. Hermann Cohen's philosophy stood out in favor of the value of critical reason, on which scientific idealism, in the form of a revival of authentic rational idealism, is founded. His standpoint rejected the opposite extremes of both absolute idealism and naive materialism. The Marburg school, one of the great German philosophical schools at the turn of the century, grew out of Cohen's philosophy, which inspired a large number of twentieth-century thinkers. Cohen was, without doubt, one of the principal adherents of the "return to Kant" as a fundamental point of reference of "Critical Idealism." He based this revival on a long, historical, philosophical tradition, represented by Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, and others, apart from Kant himself. Although Cohen saw himself as Kant's heir, he went beyond Kant in his development and deepening of the meaning of critical philosophy in his own philosophical system. He followed an original path, which revealed a great deal of the hitherto concealed potential of this type of philosophy. In his later years Cohen turned his attention mainly to the philosophy of religion, but his last works are not simply what would be termed the Summa theologica of contemporary Judaism. They also belong to a continuous line connecting them to his previous thought, deepening the meaning and extending the potentiality of critical philosophy and its connection to religious problems, satisfactorily developing the aspect of thought on the limit of reason, which, for critical philosophy, is a necessary complement to thought within the limits of reason.

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) is often held to be one of the most important Jewish philosophers of the nineteenth century. Paul E. Nahme, in this new consideration of Cohen, liberalism, and religion, emphasizes the idea of enchantment, or the faith in and commitment to ideas, reason, and critique—the animating spirits that move society forward. Nahme views Cohen through the lenses of the crises of Imperial Germany—the rise of antisemitism, nationalism, and secularization—to come to a greater understanding of liberalism, its Protestant and Jewish roots, and the spirits of modernity and tradition that form its foundation. Nahme's philosophical and historical retelling of the story of Cohen and his spiritual investment in liberal theology present a strong argument for religious pluralism and public reason in a world rife with populism, identity politics, and conspiracy theories.

Exemplarity and Chosenness is a combined study of the philosophies of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) that explores the question: How may we account for the possibility of philosophy, of universalism in thinking, without denying that all thinking is also idiomatic and particular? The book traces Derrida's interest in this topic, particularly emphasizing his work on "philosophical nationality" and his insight that philosophy is challenged in a special way by its particular "national" instantiations and that, conversely, discourses invoking a nationality comprise a philosophical ambition, a claim to being "exemplary." Taking as its cue Derrida's readings of German-Jewish authors and his ongoing interest in questions of Jewishness, this book pairs his philosophy with that of Franz Rosenzweig, who developed a theory of Judaism for which election is essential and who understood chosenness in an "exemplarist" sense as constitutive of human individuality as well as of the Jews' role in universal human history.

Steven S. Schwarzschild (1924–1989) was arguably the leading expositor of German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), undertaking a lifelong effort to reintroduce Cohen's thought into contemporary philosophical discourse. In The Tragedy of Optimism, George Y. Kohler brings together all of Schwarzschild's work on Cohen for the first time. Schwarzschild's readings of Cohen are unique and profound; he was conversant with both worlds that shaped Cohen's thought, neo-Kantian German idealism and Jewish theology. The collection covers a wide range of subjects, from ethics, socialism, the concept of human selfhood, and the mathematics of the infinite to more explicitly Jewish themes. This volume includes two of Schwarzschild's previously unpublished manuscripts and a scholarly introduction by Kohler. Schwarzschild shows that despite its seeming defeat by events of the twentieth century, Cohen's optimism about human progress is a rational, indeed necessary, path to peace.

This book is the first complete intellectual biography of Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) and the only work to cover all his major philosophical and Jewish writings. Frederick C. Beiser pays special attention to all phases of Cohen's intellectual development, its breaks and its continuities, throughout seven decades. The guiding goal behind Cohen's intellectual career, he argues, was the development of a radical rationalism, one committed to defending the rights of unending enquiry and unlimited criticism. Cohen's philosophy was therefore an attempt to defend and revive the Enlightenment belief in the authority of reason; his critical idealism an attempt to justify this belief and to establish a purely rational worldview. According to this interpretation, Cohen's thought is resolutely opposed to any form of irrationalism or mysticism because these would impose arbitrary and artificial limits on criticism and enquiry. It is therefore critical of those interpretations which see Cohen's philosophy as a species of proto-existentialism (Rosenzweig) or Jewish mysticism (Adelmann and Kohnke). Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography attempts to unify the two sides of Cohen's thought, his philosophy and his Judaism. Maintaining that Cohen's Judaism was not a limit to his radical rationalism but a consistent development of it, Beiser contends that his religion was one of reason. He concludes that most critical interpretations have failed to appreciate the philosophical depth and sophistication of his Judaism, a religion which committed the believer to the unending search for truth and the striving to achieve the cosmopolitan ideals of reason.

For thousands of years the Jewish tradition has been a source of moral guidance, for Jews and non-Jews alike. As the essays in this volume show, the theologians and practitioners of Judaism have a long history of wrestling with moral questions, responding to them in an open, argumentative mode that reveals the strengths and weaknesses of all sides of a question. The Jewish tradition also offers guidance for moral conduct by individuals, communities, and countries and shows how to motivate people to do the good and right thing. The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality is a collection of original essays addressing these topics--historical and contemporary, as well as philosophical and practical--by leading scholars from around the world. The first section of the volume describes the history of the Jewish tradition's moral thought, from the Bible to contemporary Jewish approaches. The second part includes chapters on specific fields in ethics, including the ethics of medicine, business, sex, speech, politics, war, and the environment.