A Vagabond Jew from Lithuania: A Poem on Salomon Maimon It took a vagabond Jew from Lithuania to strike the wick that Königsberg’s sage had hid and let go out in dark’s old age. Said the synagogue’s rude son: Let there be German with a Yiddish tongue, and from his restless mind concepts flowed like fire onto the page. With quid facti? and quid juris? as his lamps, he lit the lecture halls and shadowed nooks of Europe with flame incandescent, a

Academia.edu: Leibniz and the Best of All One-Monad Universes The purpose of this essay is to make the case for a heterodox reading of Leibniz’s The Monadology (published 1720) through the lens of Professor John Wheeler’s hypothesis of the one-electron universe (proposed in 1940). My conjecture is this: That there exists in the knowable universe only one monad; that this monad traverses time in both directions, eventually criss-crossing the entire past and future history of t

Leibniz and the Best of All One-Monad Universes The purpose of this essay is to make the case for a heterodox reading of Leibniz’s The Monadology (published 1720) through the lens of Professor John Wheeler’s hypothesis of the one-electron universe (proposed in 1940). My conjecture is this: That there exists in the knowable universe only one monad; that this monad traverses time in both directions, eventually criss-crossing the entire past and future history of the universe; a

The Messianic Imperative: Reason, Law, and the Ethics of Hermann Cohen This is a collated version of parts one, two and three of my mini-series on the Jewish neo-Kantian ethicist Hermann Cohen. The Messianic Imperative: Reason, Law, and the Ethics of Hermann Cohen Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918) was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and an intellectual precursor to the 20th century Jewish existentialist humanism of Martin Bu

Hermann Cohen and the Redemptive Potentiality of Sin Part Three of a series on Hermann Cohen Hermann Cohen (b.1842 – d.1918) was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and the intellectual precursor to the Jewish existentialist humanism of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. Starting from the proposition that ethics had to be universal, Cohen outlined a Kantian (and non-Marxist) ethical socialism rooted in the

The Correlation of Science and Ethics in Hermann Cohen's Philosophy Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918) was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and the intellectual precursor to the Jewish existentialist humanism of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. Starting from the proposition that ethics had to be universal, Cohen outlined a Kantian (and non-Marxist) ethical socialism rooted in the prophetic vision of the He

The Ethical Idealism and Prophetic Messianism of Hermann Cohen Part One of a series on Hermann Cohen Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918) was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and intellectual precursor to the 20th century Jewish existentialist humanism of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. Starting from the proposition that ethics had to be universal, Cohen outlined a Kantian (and non-Marxist) ethical socialism