Hermann Cohen was a star pupil of the great composer/pianist Franz Liszt in Paris in the mid 1800s. Cohen became an international concert pianist in his own right and mixed with many of the famous names of the day. He provided piano accompaniment for Giovanni Mateo De Candia ( Mario), the Pavarotti of his day, on concert platforms in Paris and London. After converting to Catholicism, Cohen became a Carmelite and preached throughout Europe. In1862, he officially restored the Carmelite Order to England (Kensington Church and Priory). In France, he became friends with many future French saints. These will all be mentioned in the course of our story. One of his many Canticles, the The Divine Prisoner`s Little Flower, greatly influenced St. Thrse of Lisieux, often known as the Little Flower. Cohen inspired Raphael Kalinowski to turn from a worldly life and become a Carmelite like himself. Timothy wrote a biography of St. Raphael Kalinowski published last year by Balboa Press. In Timothy Tierney`s book you will witness, through his rich and fluent narrative, the encounter with Cohen, a genius who savoured the intoxicating highs of success as an artist and the despairing depths of a gambler enslaved by his addictions.. Through music, the atheistic Cohen experienced and discovered the spiritual realm (Luis Jorge Gonzalez, OCD, emeritus professor of the Teresianum, Rome).

This book is the first complete intellectual biography of Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) and the only work to cover all his major philosophical and Jewish writings. Frederick C. Beiser pays special attention to all phases of Cohen's intellectual development, its breaks and its continuities, throughout seven decades. The guiding goal behind Cohen's intellectual career, he argues, was the development of a radical rationalism, one committed to defending the rights of unending enquiry and unlimited criticism. Cohen's philosophy was therefore an attempt to defend and revive the Enlightenment belief in the authority of reason; his critical idealism an attempt to justify this belief and to establish a purely rational worldview. According to this interpretation, Cohen's thought is resolutely opposed to any form of irrationalism or mysticism because these would impose arbitrary and artificial limits on criticism and enquiry. It is therefore critical of those interpretations which see Cohen's philosophy as a species of proto-existentialism (Rosenzweig) or Jewish mysticism (Adelmann and Kohnke). Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography attempts to unify the two sides of Cohen's thought, his philosophy and his Judaism. Maintaining that Cohen's Judaism was not a limit to his radical rationalism but a consistent development of it, Beiser contends that his religion was one of reason. He concludes that most critical interpretations have failed to appreciate the philosophical depth and sophistication of his Judaism, a religion which committed the believer to the unending search for truth and the striving to achieve the cosmopolitan ideals of reason.

"Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) was among the most accomplished Jewish philosophers of modern times. This newly translated collection of his writings illuminates his achievements for student readers and rectifies lapses in his intellectual reception by prior generations"--

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) is often held to be one of the most important Jewish philosophers of the nineteenth century. Paul E. Nahme, in this new consideration of Cohen, liberalism, and religion, emphasizes the idea of enchantment, or the faith in and commitment to ideas, reason, and critique—the animating spirits that move society forward. Nahme views Cohen through the lenses of the crises of Imperial Germany—the rise of antisemitism, nationalism, and secularization—to come to a greater understanding of liberalism, its Protestant and Jewish roots, and the spirits of modernity and tradition that form its foundation. Nahme's philosophical and historical retelling of the story of Cohen and his spiritual investment in liberal theology present a strong argument for religious pluralism and public reason in a world rife with populism, identity politics, and conspiracy theories.

Through explorations of Hermann Cohen’s Ethics of Pure Will, an international set of scholars opens questions both about the text itself and about the relation of ethics and the Jewish tradition. Originally published as Volume 13 (2005) of The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy.

Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) is an original systematic thinker and representative of the Marburg School of Critical Idealism. The Marburg School was a leading school in German academic philosophy and in German Jewish philosophy for a period of over thirty years preceding the First World War. Initially standing at the front of the ‘Return to Kant’ movement, Cohen subsequently went beyond Kant in developing a system of critical idealism in which he offered a critique of and alternative to absolute idealism, positivism, and materialism. A critical idealist in heart and soul, Cohen is also recognized as a man who embodied German Jewish culture. Publications on Cohen in the English language are small in number and this volume aims to fill the gap. It offers an analysis of Cohen’s System of Philosophy - the three-volume classic on logic, ethics, and aesthetics - and his writings on Judaism and religion. The book highlights Cohen’s contributions in these fields, including his discussions with Maimonides, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel. It demonstrates the congeniality of Cohen’s critical idealism as expounded in the System and his writings on Judaism, and offers an overview of contemporary Cohen research.

The volume collects a series of groundbreaking new studies which delve into the work of Franz Rosenzweig and assess its enduring yet still unacknowledged value for Epistemology, Aesthetics, Moral and Political Philosophy, going far beyond Theology and Philosophy of Religion.

With resonance for today, this book explores a significant crisis of German philosophy and national identity in the decades around World War II. German philosophy, famed for its high-minded Idealism, was plunged into crisis when Germany became an urban and industrial society in the late nineteenth century. The key figure of this shift was Immanuel Kant: seen for a century as the philosophical father of the nation, Kant seemed to lack crucial answers for violent and impersonal modern times. This book shows that the social and intellectual crisis that overturned Germany’s traditions—a sense of profound spiritual confusion over where modern society was headed—was the same crisis that allowed Hitler to come to power. It also describes how German philosophers actively struggled to create a new kind of philosophy in an effort to understand social incoherence and technology’s diminishing of the individual.

Study program specially geared to the group of adults becoming adult Bar/Bat mitzvot.

Ignaz Maybaum (1897-1976) is widely recognized as one of the foremost Jewish theologians of the post-Holocaust era. Although he is mentioned in most treatments of post-Holocaust Jewish theology, his works are out of print and are only accessible to a small readership. Nicholas de Lange (who worked closely with Maybaum in his lifetime), has made a representative selection from his writings, under various headings: Judaism in the Modern Age, Trialogue between Jew, Christian, and Muslim, the Holocaust, and Zion. In an Introduction, he sets Maybaum's thoughts against the background of their time, indicates their main lines, and assesses how much of them is still of value today.