赫尔曼·科恩

作品

• 1871康德的经验理论

  对《纯粹理性批判》的解读，奠定了马堡学派：先天的东西不是心灵与生俱来的装备，而是使经验——作为科学知识——成为可能的条件的总和；1885年改写为“先验方法”。

• 1919出自犹太教源泉的理性宗教

  他宗教哲学的遗著主作：科恩从《圣经》、先知、拉比文献和迈蒙尼德出发，把一神论发展为一种理性宗教，其核心是神与人的相关性、悔改以及对同胞的同情。

立场

Cohen is on the map as the founder of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism and as a modern Jewish philosopher. He read Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” not as a psychology of the knowing mind but as a theory of the conditions that make scientific knowledge possible: the “transcendental method” starts from the fact of mathematical natural science and asks for the principles on which its objectivity rests. In his own system – “Logic of Pure Knowledge” (1902), “Ethics of Pure Will” (1904), “Aesthetics of Pure Feeling” (1912) – he went beyond Kant by giving up a sensibility that receives what is given: pure thought produces its content from an “origin”, a principle he developed from the infinitesimal calculus. His ethics took Kant’s formula of humanity as the basis of a democratic “ethical socialism”; in 1896 he called Kant “the true and actual originator of German socialism”. In his late works he read Judaism, from the prophets to Maimonides, as the historical source of a religion of reason: the one God guarantees the ethical ideal, and God and human being stand in “correlation”, in which the individual becomes a self through repentance and the other becomes a fellow human through compassion. He opposed Zionism, holding that Jews should remain citizens of their countries; Buber replied in 1916. Cassirer, his student, carried the Marburg approach into a philosophy of culture; Rosenzweig took up his philosophy of religion.

生平与背景

Hermann Cohen was born on 4 July 1842 in Coswig in Anhalt, the son of a cantor. He studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, intending to become a rabbi, then philosophy in Breslau and Berlin, and took his doctorate in Halle in 1865. His “Kant’s Theory of Experience” (1871) won the support of Friedrich Albert Lange, who brought him to Marburg: he qualified there in 1873, became extraordinary professor in 1875 and in 1876 succeeded Lange to the chair. With Paul Natorp he made Marburg a centre of neo-Kantianism; among the students were Ernst Cassirer, Nicolai Hartmann and José Ortega y Gasset. In 1880 he answered Heinrich von Treitschke’s antisemitic attacks with “Ein Bekenntnis in der Judenfrage”. After retiring in 1912 he taught at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, where Franz Rosenzweig attended his lectures. He died in Berlin on 4 April 1918.

其他主要作品

• Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (1871; 2nd ed. 1885)
• Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte (1883)
• Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (1902)
• Ethik des reinen Willens (1904)
• Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls (1912)
• Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (1919)