New Literature on Hermann Cohen

In 1992, a small group of scholars assembled in the quaint Hessian university town of Marburg in Germany on the occasion of the Marburg philosopher Hermann Cohen’s 150th birthday. The papers given at that conference were eventually published in a volume, edited by Reinhard Brandt and Franz Orlik,¹ that opened a whole slew of publications, which have since appeared, dedicated to one or the other aspect of Hermann Cohen’s philosophy. The conference was accompanied by an exhibit of artifacts, documents, and images from the life of Cohen, who during his lifetime (1842–1918) achieved considerable fame in European circles interested in philosophy and whose work echoes in Jewish philosophy and Kantian studies until today. In 1967, Dieter Adelmann published the first what we might call “modern” dissertation on Hermann Cohen, in which he explained why Cohen’s fame had been eclipsed for the preceding forty years and attributed this fact to the influence of Martin Heidegger, who, in 1929, at the famous student courses in Davos, Switzerland, had declared the death of “Wilhelminian cultural philosophy.” The conference of 1992 signaled that Heidegger’s influence in European academic philosophy was on the wane and that the time had come for philosophers, intellectual historians, and scholars of German cultural history to take a closer a look and give an account of the writings, the thought, the philosophy, and the influence of one of the most outstanding philosophical authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

To give account of a philosopher’s work means to move away from the nostalgia that almost inevitably arises when turning to the end of a thousand years of German Jewish civilization and direct one’s attention instead to the intrinsic value of the philosopher’s work to contemporary thought and scholarship. The two books under review here fall under the category of giving account of Hermann Cohen’s thought. Both books were written by Italians. Andrea Poma teaches philosophy at the university at Torino; Francesca Albertini studied in Freiburg and teaches at the College for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg. Poma has written on Buber and on the problem of evil in Jewish philosophy. Albertini’s training is in phenomenology and in medieval and modern Jewish philosophical traditions. The Italian connection to Cohen is related to an ongoing boom in that country of studies on Kant and neo-Kantianism, including the writings of Cohen, which largely belong in this historical category. What distinguishes these recent studies of Cohen’s work from previous attempts to secure his legacy is that scholars are now more willing than before to consider Cohen’s Jewish commitments as relevant to his philosophical work. This new readiness to reunite the Jewish Cohen with the neo-Kantian philosopher was hailed by the agreement between the late Steven S. Schwarzschild and the University of Zurich philosopher and founder of the Hermann Cohen archive, Professor Helmut Holzey, to overcome the erstwhile editorial separation between Hermann Cohen’s Jewish writings and his philosophical and political writings and to organize the new edition of Cohen’s minor writings in a strictly chronological order.² Recent conferences under the auspices of the Zurich-based International Hermann Cohen Society, the Franz Rosenzweig Research Center in Jerusalem, and other institutions have moved in the same direction.³ Earlier studies attempted to capture Cohen’s “late philosophy” (Spätphilosophie) as driven by “extraphilosophical” motives, most notably a perceived need to respond to a rise in anti-Semitism or a “return” of the septuagenarian to Judaism...