COHEN, MORRIS RAPHAEL

COHEN, MORRIS RAPHAEL (1880–1947), U.S. naturalist philosopher. Born in Minsk, Belorussia, Cohen went to New York at the age of 12. He studied at City College, and later with the Scottish philosopher Thomas Davidson. At Harvard University, where Cohen earned his doctorate, he studied under William James and Josiah Royce. Cohen, known as an outstanding teacher, was appointed professor of philosophy at City College in New York in 1912 and continued teaching there until 1938. From 1938 to 1941 he was professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He was president of the American Philosophical Association in 1928. In the later years of Cohen's life, as a result of the rise of Nazism, he began to champion Jewish interests. In 1933 he founded the Conference on Jewish Relations, an organization that assumed responsibility for scientific research on Jewish problems. He relates the details of this organization's activity in his autobiography, A Dreamer's Journey (1949), which also is valuable for its commentary on the Jews of Cohen's generation. An early interest in the plight of the working class – his parents had actively participated in the Jewish workers' movement in New York – eventually led Cohen to the study of legal philosophy. Reacting to the conservatism of American judges, who at that time tended to support anti-labor legislation, Cohen attacked the 18th-century concepts of natural law upon which this conservatism rested. He analyzed legislation strictly according to empirical criteria and his results were clearly socialistic; the sum of his work in this field is found in Law and the Social Order (1933). Cohen's naturalistic viewpoint and involvement with scientific methods as exemplified in his work in legal philosophy had been worked out earlier in his first, and perhaps most important, work, Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method (1931). An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934), written together with the American philosopher ernest nagel , became a standard textbook in American universities and in the armed forces. A Preface to Logic (1945) is about the foundations of logic and its relation to the sciences. Cohen's interests also include ethics and the philosophy of history. In his work The Meaning of Human History (1947) he develops the theory that human history is expressed by a cyclical process of fruition and degeneration, not by a lineal progression. The optimistic note in this otherwise discouraging view is that   Truth, despite its continuous repression and opposition, succeeds in reasserting itself from time to time. Similar views are expressed in his collection of essays The Faith of a Liberal (1946). In 1939 Cohen founded the organ for Jewish social research, Jewish Social Studies. He was also one of the editors of the Journal of the History of Ideas. Reflections of a Wandering Jew, a collection of short essays on Judaism, was published posthumously in 1950. (Samuel Hugo Bergman) His son, FELIX (1907–1953), was a legal philosopher. Born in New York, he was a solicitor in the U.S. Department of the Interior, 1933–48. He wrote Ethical Systems and Legal Ideals (1933), Handbook of Federal Indian Law (1941), and Readings in Jurisprudence and Legal Philosophy, which he edited with M.R. Cohen (1951). After his death, a collection of Cohen's articles was published as The Legal Conscience (1960), edited by L.K. Cohen and with a foreword by felix frankfurter . The divisions of this work show the range of Cohen's interests: Logic, Law and Ethics, the Indian's Quest for Justice, and the Philosophy of American Democracy. Like his father, Cohen was a legal realist, who insisted that law cannot escape dealing with ethics. (Richard H. Popkin) -BIBLIOGRAPHY: A Tribute to Professor Morris Raphael Cohen: Teacher and Philosopher (1928); Feuer, in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 11 (1949–50), 471–85; S.W. Baron et al. (eds.), Freedom and Reason: Studies in Philosophy and Jewish Culture in Memory of Morris Raphael Cohen (1951); M.A. Kuhn, Journal of the History of Ideas (1957), supplement; H. Cairns, in: Vanderbilt Law Review, 14 (1960–61), 239–62; L. Rosenfield (Cohen), A Portrait of a Philosopher: Morris R. Cohen in Life and Letters (1962).