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On 7 June
2002, the “Hermann Cohen
Gesellschaft” was established at the Department
of Philosophy of the University of Zurich. It has an
international executive board made up of scholars from
Germany, Italy, France, Israel, the United States and other
countries. The aim of this new society is to promote
research on Hermann Cohen’s work and help bring his
philosophy to bear in the forum of current debate
Hermann Cohen
was
one of the most eminent academic philosophers in Germany at
the turn of the twentieth century. From 1875 to 1912, he
taught at the University of Marburg, then relocating to
teach at the College for the Science of Judaism (Lehranstalt
für die Wissenschaft des Judentums) in Berlin
(1913–1918). As a prominent exponent of neo-Kantian thought
and a philosophically oriented “science of Judaism”, Cohen
laid important foundations for theoretical and ethical
orientation in modern scientific-technological civilization.
From the first edition of his "Kants Theorie der Erfahrung"
(1871), a book that made him famous, Cohen saw his
continuous rethinking and transformation of the Kantian
heritage not only as a historical or philological task: he
pursued his philosophical study also as a critical analysis
of contemporary cultural consciousness. At the beginning of
the new century this approach culminated in his "System der
Philosophie", originally envisaged in four parts, with three
of them finally published between 1902 and 1912.
He gained close familiarity with Jewish
tradition at an early age through his father and his studies
at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau. On the basis
of this knowledge, Cohen, in a number of publications,
developed his conception of the religion of reason from the
sources of Judaism, an uncompromisingly humane monotheism
that excluded any form of fundamentalism. Neither the
philosophical zeitgeist, which for many years stood opposed
to Cohen’s work, nor National Socialism proved able to
suppress the powerful impact of his thought. Diverse
thinkers such as Shmuel Hugo Bergman, Ernst Cassirer, Jacob
Gordin, Albert Görland, Nicolai Hartmann, Heinz
Heimsoeth, Jacob Klatzkin, Paul Natorp, David
Neumark, José Ortega y Gasset, Franz Rosenzweig, Josef D.
Soloveitchik, Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, Karl Vorländer, Max
Wiener, and others had, early on in their development,
crystallized their positions in significant measure in
critical confrontation with the work of Hermann Cohen. They
in turn went on to become key mentors of later generations
in Europe, Israel and the United States..
In 1969, a centre for Cohen research became a
reality with the establishment by Helmut Holzhey of the
Hermann Cohen Archive in Zurich. The HCA began with the
systematic publication of Cohens
works, inaugurating the series of the planned 21
volumes with the publication in 1977 of his methodological
opus magnum, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis. It seemed only
fitting to establish the Hermann Cohen Society in Zurich as
well. Yet the Society is not organized along centralistic
lines, and its founders would welcome the creation of
national sections of the Hermann Cohen Society outside of
Switzerland. Members of the executive board resident in a
given country will have a free hand in this regard.
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