Background
Cohen was born on July 25, 1880, in Minsk, Belarus, the son of Bessie (Farfel) and Abraham Mordecai Cohen. He spent his first years in a Jewish ghetto, moving with his family to New York at the age of 12.
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Cohen entered the College of the City of New York in 1895 and received his Bachelor of Arts in 1900.
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Cohen studied at Columbia University, receiving Master of Arts in 1902.
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Cohen received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1906.
(Over the past two centuries the field of logic has develo...)
Over the past two centuries the field of logic has developed at an explosive pace into new areas far removed from the traditional syllogism and formal proof. The purpose of this well-known introductory treatment is to chart, clearly and lucidly, this new domain of today's vastly sophisticated logic. Author Morris R. Cohen explores "the periphery of logic, the relations of logic to the rest of the universe, the philosophical presuppositions which give logic its meaning, and the applications which give it importance."
https://www.amazon.com/Preface-Logic-Morris-R-Cohen/dp/0486235173/?tag=2022091-20
1945
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Cohen was born on July 25, 1880, in Minsk, Belarus, the son of Bessie (Farfel) and Abraham Mordecai Cohen. He spent his first years in a Jewish ghetto, moving with his family to New York at the age of 12.
Cohen entered the College of the City of New York in 1895. His family's penurious, hand-to-mouth existence stimulated Cohen's interest in socialism. From his study of Marx and Hegel developed his earliest preoccupation with the technical aspects of philosophy. In 1898 he met Thomas Davidson, the Scottish scholar whose example would inspire Cohen throughout his life; under his tutelage Cohen read Aristotle, Plato, Hume, and Kant.
He received his Bachelor of Arts from the City College of New York in 1900; he continued his studies, first at Columbia University (Master of Arts, 1902), and then at Harvard (Ph.D., 1906), where he was assistant to such leading philosophers as William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, and Hugo Munsterberg.
After graduating in 1900, Cohen continued his pursuit of philosophy, discovering in Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics a "renewed faith" in logic. In 1904 the Ethical Culture Society awarded Cohen a fellowship to do graduate work at Harvard.
Ensconced in the philosophy department of the College of the City of New York, Cohen came into his own as a teacher. Demanding of his students and responding sarcastically to careless thinking, he nonetheless drew overflow crowds of students and won great affection and respect. He was one of the founding members of the American Association of University Professors.
Meanwhile Cohen was writing scholarly articles and books. In 1923 his edition of C. S. Peirce's essays, Chance, Love and Logic, appeared. In 1931 in his most important work, Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method, he developed the concept that characterized all his thought and came closest to representing a metaphysical position. That concept, polarity, held that ideas such as "unity and plurality, similarity and difference, dependence and independence, form and matter, change and permanence" were "equally real," and "the way to get at the nature of things" was to "reason" from such "opposing considerations." Hence the necessity of society's tolerating conflicting points of view.
Ever since he had shared a room with Felix Frankfurter at Harvard, Cohen had indulged a lively interest in jurisprudence, which resulted in Law and the Social Order: Essays in Legal Philosophy (1933). He believed that logical reasoning was critically important to all fields of thought. An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934), written with a former student, Ernest Nagel, became a popular college textbook.
In 1938 Cohen left teaching to devote himself to writing. His Preface to Logic (1944) elucidated logic's place in the universe. Faith of a Liberal (1946) sought to rescue the term "liberal" from connotations of sentimentality. Cohen had already manifested his lifelong fascination with history by helping found the Journal of the History of Ideas. He selected the philosophy of history as his topic when the American Philosophical Association chose him to deliver its Carus Lectures, later published as The Meaning of Human History (1947).
Cohen died on January 28, 1947. He left many works half finished, which his son Felix, a scholar in his own right, published. Cohen's publications stand as a positive statement of his faith in a liberal civilization and answer those critics who found in him only the sharp tongue of a nihilist.
(Over the past two centuries the field of logic has develo...)
1945Cohen's education was that of an Orthodox Jew. In 1892 the family emigrated to New York, where, during the next 7 years, he drifted away from organized religion and eventually gave up all belief in a personal God.
Although Cohen was a socialist in his youth, he was highly critical in his later life of most philosophical systems. He developed a philosophy of his own in which he combined elements of pragmatism with logical positivism and linguistic analysis.
This philosophy had important ramifications for the legal system. As a specialist in legal philosophy, Cohen, raised awareness in America of the importance of a philosophy of law underlying any legal system. He claimed that law was not an imposition of random will but the result of continuing development based in philosophy.
Outside the classroom he led the struggle to uphold academic freedom against authoritarian interference. As a tide of anti-Semitism rose in the 1930's, he helped organize the Conference on Jewish Relations to study modern Jewry scientifically; he was also editor of its journal, Jewish Social Studies.
Cohen married Mary Ryshpan; the couple had three children.
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