Hermann Cohen's Ethics

The essays assembled here represent the leading Hermann Cohen scholars from the United States, Canada, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Israel. Emerging from their efforts is a new set of explorations both in Cohen’s own system and also in his relation to a wide-range of subsequent thinkers. They open Cohen’s Ethics of Pure Will in two ways. First, they show us the deep questions that are operating within Cohen’s texts, and second they raise questions for ethics itself, particularly in relation to Jewish tradition. That specific topic, the primacy of ethics for Judaism, received one of its most philosophically rigorous treatments in Cohen’s work, where thinking of the relation of ethics and Judaism became a truly philosophical task.

Originally published as Volume 13 (2005) of The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy.