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

All Things Are Possible: A Brief Biography of Lev Shestov In 1936, two years before his death, the Jewish‑Russian philosopher Lev Shestov was invited by the Histadrut to deliver a series of lectures in Eretz Israel. He was warmly received by audiences in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem — the city that, in his late thought, came to symbolise the liberation of the individual from the tyranny of rational necessity. And yet, despite the intensity of that reception, Shestov and his