Frederick Beiser, "Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography" (Oxford UP, 2018)
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Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Books in Religion and in Jewish Studies. My name is Avi Bernstein. I'm the director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Brandeis, or BOLI for short. BOLI is a small liberal arts college for older adults embedded at Brandeis, a world-class research university in Waltham, Massachusetts. To find us on the web, go to brandeis.edu backslash B-O-L. And now I want to welcome Fred Beiser. Fred, welcome to the show and congratulations on the publication of Herman Cohen, An Intellectual Biography with Oxford University Press in 2018. To begin with, would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself, Fred?
Okay, I'm the professor of philosophy at Syracuse University. I've been here nearly 19 years now and thinking of retiring soon. I got my BA and DPhil or PhD in Oxford in And after that, Margaret Thatcher came to power in England. There were no jobs in philosophy. And after that, I went off to live in Berlin. And I did research there for many years. I lived basically in poverty for a while. But I was rescued by the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung. And so I had a stipend to write my first book, The Fate of Reason. Since 1984, I've had a series of jobs in the United States. I've taught at a total of about seven American universities so far. I taught at Harvard, at Yale, at Penn, at the University of Colorado, the University of Wisconsin, and then Indiana University.
After I went to, I taught at these seven universities, I came and I ultimately ended out in Syracuse. And I've been here now for about 18, as I say, 18 years. I mainly publish on the history of German philosophy, the 18th and 19th centuries. And I have one book, however, I'd also work on the early English. enlightenment and i published one book on that the sovereignty of reason but on the whole i have about 17 books and they're on german philosophy in this in the 18th and 19th centuries
So I can say, Professor Beiser, as a reader of your books and as someone who knows a little bit about the readership, that you've had a very distinguished career and your books are widely read and appreciated. And I'm thrilled that you chose to write this book on Herman Cohen. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about how you came to write this particular book?
Yes. Well, I had long had an interest in neocontianism, and I've written a book on neocontianism that appeared before the Cohen book. And on the basis of that, I was asked to come to – there was a Cohen conference at Princeton, and I was asked to give the keynote address – And it was a conference particularly on Cohen. And I was asked to give the keynote address and I was honored. I didn't really expect that. I didn't think I deserved it, but anyway.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–14:20
2
Who is Frederick Beiser and what motivated him to write an intellectual biography of Hermann Cohen?
14:20–33:07
3
How did Beiser discover the need for a biography of Cohen at the Princeton conference?
33:07–43:59
4
What impact did the loss of Cohen’s family archives have on the biography’s focus?
43:59–50:17
5
How did Cohen’s years at the Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary shape his philosophical career?
50:17–55:03
Speakers
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Rivka Weinberg, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time" (Oxford UP, 2026)
PJ DiPietro, "Sideways Selves Travesti and Jotería, "Struggles Across the Américas" (U Texas Press, 2025)