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

Hermann Cohen and the Redemptive Potentiality of Sin Do I desire the death of the wicked? says the Lord God. Is it not rather in his repenting of his ways that he may live? […] Therefore, every man according to his ways I will judge you […] Cast away from yourselves all your transgressions whereby you have transgressed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit, and why should you die […] For I do not desire the death of him who dies, says the Lord God: so turn away an

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 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 rooted in the prophetic vision of the