Morris Raphael Cohen (; July 25, 1880 – January 28, 1947) was a Russian-born American judicial philosopher, lawyer, and legal scholar who united pragmatism with logical positivism and linguistic analysis. This union coalesced into the "objective relativism" fermenting at Columbia University before and during the early twentieth-century interwar period. He was father to Felix S. Cohen and Leonora Cohen Rosenfield.

Life and career

Cohen was born in Minsk, Imperial Russia (present-day Belarus), the son of Bessie (Farfel) and Abraham Mordecai Cohen. He moved with his family to New York at the age of 12. He attended the City College of New York (CCNY) and Harvard University, where he studied under Josiah Royce, William James, and Hugo Münsterberg. He obtained a PhD from Harvard in 1906, with a dissertation titled Kant's Doctrine as to the Relation between Duty and Happiness.

He was Professor of Philosophy at CCNY from 1912 to 1938. He also taught law at City College and the University of Chicago 1938–41, gave courses at the New School for Social Research, and lectured in Philosophy and Law at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and other universities.

Cohen was legendary as a professor for his wit, encyclopedic knowledge, and ability to demolish philosophical systems. "He could and did tear things apart in the most devastating and entertaining way; but...he had a positive message of his own", said Robert Hutchins. Bertrand Russell said of Cohen that he had the most original mind in contemporary American philosophy.

In 1923 he edited and penned an introduction to a collection of Charles Sanders Peirce essays entitled Chance, Love and Logic.

In the 1930s, Cohen helped give CCNY its reputation as the "proletarian Harvard," perhaps more than any other faculty member. He advocated liberalism in politics but opposed laissez-faire economics. Cohen also defended liberal democracy and wrote indictments of both fascism and communism. Cohen's obituary in the New York Times called him "an almost legendary figure in American philosophy, education and the liberal tradition".

Cohen helped, with Professor Salo W. Baron, organize the Conference on Jewish Relations to study modern Jewry scientifically; he also edited its quarterly journal Jewish Social Studies.

Cohen died on January 28, 1947, in Washington, D.C.

According to Richard T. Hall, he was buried in Mount Zion Cemetery in Maspeth, New York.

Main works

  • Zionism: tribalism or liberalism (1919)
  • Reason and Nature (1931, rev. 1953), his major philosophical work.
  • Law and the Social Order (1933)
  • An Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method, with Ernest Nagel (1934)
  • Random thoughts : Liberalism in life and philosophy (1936)
  • Jewish studies of peace and post-war problems (1943)
  • The Faith of a Liberal (1945)
  • A Preface to Logic (1945)
  • The Meaning of Human History (1947)

Published posthumously

  • A source book in Greek science (1948)
  • A Dreamer's Journey (1949), his autobiography.
  • Studies in philosophy and science (1949)
  • Reason and Law (1950)
  • Reflections of a wondering Jew (1950)
  • King Saul's daughter, a Biblical dialogue (1952)
  • American Thought, a Critical Sketch (1954)

Notes

References

Further reading

  • Salo W. Baron, Ernest Nagel, and Koppel S. Pinson (editors). Freedom and reason : studies in philosophy and Jewish culture, in memory of Morris Raphael Cohen (Glencoe, Ill : Free Press, 1951)
  • Morris Raphael Cohen - Encyclopedia.com page hosting several entries on Cohen from published reference works.
  • "Morris Raphael Cohen: The Golden Age of Philosophy at CCNY 1906-1938 - City College of New York Libraries
  • "Professor Morris Raphael Cohen, Noted Philosopher and Author, Dies at 66" obituary from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
  • "The Philosophy of Morris R. Cohen" by Sidney Hook in The New Republic (originally published 23 July 1930)
  • ."Morris R. Cohen in Retrospect" [$] (1957) by Ernest Nagel, Journal of the History of Ideas, 18(4), 548–551. doi:10.2307/2707565 [available to read online free, with registration, at JSTOR]
  • Guide to the Morris Raphael Cohen Papers 1898-1981 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center