Hermann Cohen

Born in Coswig, Anhalt, in 1842, he became one of the central figures of German philosophy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He taught for many years at the University of Marburg, where he was a key founder of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, a movement that returned to Kant to rethink knowledge, science, and ethics in the modern world.

His writing ranged widely, but several themes stand out: the role of reason, the foundations of ethics, and the relationship between philosophy and religion. Later in life, he devoted increasing attention to Jewish thought and is widely remembered as an important modern Jewish philosopher as well as a major academic thinker.

He died in 1918, but his influence continued through students, readers, and later philosophers who engaged with his ideas about logic, morality, and the ethical meaning of community.