A New Books in Jewish Studies Podcast:
Hermann Cohen An Intellectual Biography. With Author Frederick Beiser
Hosted by Avi Bernstein-Nahar
The New Books Network · Jan 6, 2020
In the course of this NBN conversation, Frederick Beiser and Avi Bernstein-Nahar discuss Hermann Cohen’s lifelong quest for a “religion of reason;” his effort to “rescue” Kant from psychologists who had misunderstood him; hostility to Spinoza; interest in the science and math of infinitesimally small quantities; left-of-center Wilhelmine politics; his system of philosophy; his unrequited love affair with German culture; and his ontological argumentation for God. Cohen’s posthumously published Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism is left largely unremarked in Beiser’s book, as the author freely admits. With humility Beiser calls on his colleagues in Jewish Studies to go more deeply than he into this “masterpiece” of Cohen’s dotage, for in his estimation the Religion of Reason contains arguments for the idea of God that remain worthy of readers even today.
Image: Drawing of Hermann Cohen by Max Liebermann via Wiki Commons