COHEN, HERMANN (1842–1918) was a Jewish philosopher of religion and founder and exponent of Marburg Neo-Kantian philosophy. Born into a cantor's family in the small-town Jewish community of Coswig/Anhalt, Germany, Cohen received intense religious training from his father in addition to the general education typical of his time and place. The transition from these beginnings to the modern rabbinical seminary of Breslau was natural. Part of the seminary's curriculum was the requirement of university studies, and while at the University of Breslau, Cohen decided that philosophy, rather than the rabbinate, was his vocation.

Scholar

Transferring to the University of Berlin, Cohen first fell under the influence of the folk-psychological epistemologists Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899) and Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903), but he quickly progressed toward the ideas of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and a more logistic outlook. His habilitation thesis on Kant's theory of experience was published in 1871, and in the context of...