Jonas Cohn: Cirtical Dialectics and Theory of Culture

Jonas Cohn (1869 - 1947) is a representative of the Southwest German School of Neo-Kantianism, whose systematic work covers almost all fields of philosophy. The research project investigated the development of Jonas Cohn`s philosophy, tried to reconstruct the major sources of his epistemology and theory of culture (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and the Southwest German School), and to document Cohn`s main works and their contribution to epistemology and the theory of science, aesthetics, theory of culture, philosophy of religion, ethics, and the theory of pedagogy. These investigations serve the knowledge of a thinker whose academic career was stopped in 1933 and who`s systematically pretentious and allusive Oeuvre did not find any summary representation up to now. The project thus serves one desideratum of research in Neo-Kantianism; furthermore, with regard to the circumstance, that Cohn is an outstanding representative of the "Cultural philosophy of Liberalism" (E. Troeltsch), his theory of culture philosophy is of more general interest, with regard to Cohn`s theory of dialectics and his epistemological investigations, however, his work is also of specific systematic interest, whereby it remains to emphasize that Jonas Cohn in his rather `phaenomenologically` as logically aligned theory of dialectic, which is deeply influenced by the relationship-rich style of thinking of George Simmel, often deals with topics, like the problem of self- consciousness, theory of education, of intersubjectivity and intercultural dialog, that still remain in the focus of current philosophical discussions.