Morris Raphael Cohen was an American philosopher, lawyer

Lawyer

A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...

 and legal scholar who united pragmatism

Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...

 with logical positivism

Logical positivism

Logical positivism is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology.It may be considered as a type of analytic...

 and linguistic analysis

Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event....

. He was father to Felix S. Cohen

Felix S. Cohen

Felix Solomon Cohen was an American lawyer and scholar who made a lasting mark on legal philosophy and fundamentally shaped federal Indian law and policy.- Biography :...

.

Cohen was born in Minsk

Minsk

- Ecological situation :The ecological situation is monitored by Republican Center of Radioactive and Environmental Control .During 2003–2008 the overall weight of contaminants increased from 186,000 to 247,400 tons. The change of gas as industrial fuel to mazut for financial reasons has worsened...

, Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

, but moved with his family to New York, at the age of 12. He was educated at the City College of New York

City College of New York

The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...

 and Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, where he studied under Josiah Royce

Josiah Royce

Josiah Royce was an American objective idealist philosopher.-Life:Royce, born in Grass Valley, California, grew up in pioneer California very soon after the California Gold Rush. He received the B.A...

, William James

William James

William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...

, and Hugo Münsterberg

Hugo Münsterberg

Hugo Münsterberg was a German-American psychologist. He was one of the pioneers in applied psychology, extending his research and theories to Industrial/Organizational , legal, medical, clinical, educational and business settings. Münsterberg encountered immense turmoil with the outbreak of the...

. He obtained a PhD

PHD

PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 from Harvard in 1906.

He was Professor of Philosophy at CCNY from 1912-38. He also taught Law at City College and the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 1938-41, gave courses at the New School for Social Research, and lectured in Philosophy and Law at Columbia

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, Cornell

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

, Harvard, Stanford

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, Yale

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

, 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," Robert Hutchins

Robert Hutchins

Robert Maynard Hutchins , was an educational philosopher, dean of Yale Law School , and president and chancellor of the University of Chicago. He was the husband of novelist Maude Hutchins...

. Cohen helped give CCNY in the 1930s its reputation as the "proletarian Harvard," perhaps more than any other faculty member. The Cohen Library at CCNY is named for him. Cohen was an advocate of liberalism

Liberalism

Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...

 in politics, and was opposed to Laissez-faire

Laissez-faire

In economics, laissez-faire describes an environment in which transactions between private parties are free from state intervention, including restrictive regulations, taxes, tariffs and enforced monopolies....

 economics.
Cohen also defended liberal democracy

Liberal democracy

Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive...

 and wrote indictments of both fascism

Fascism

Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...

 and
communism

Communism

Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

. Cohen's obituary in the New York Times stated that long before his death, Cohen had become "an almost legendary figure in American philosophy, education and the liberal tradition".

From his work, Reason and Nature:

To be sure, the vast majority of people who are untrained can accept the results of science only on authority. But there is obviously an important difference between an establishment that is open and invites every one to come, study its methods, and suggest improvement, and one that regards the questioning of credentials as due to wickedness of heart, such as Cardinal Newman attributed to those who questioned the infallibility of the Bible... Rational science treats its credit notes as always redeemable on demand, while non-rational authoritarianism

Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism is a form of social organization characterized by submission to authority. It is usually opposed to individualism and democracy...

 regards the demand for the redemption of its paper as a disloyal lack of faith.

Main works

• 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
  Ernest Nagel
  Ernest Nagel was a Czech-American philosopher of science. Along with Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel, he is sometimes seen as one of the major figures of the logical positivist movement....
  
  (1934)
• The Faith of a Liberal (1945)
• A Preface to Logic (1945)
• The Meaning of Human History (1947)

Published posthumously:

• A Dreamer's Journey (1949), his autobiography.
• Reason and Law (1950)
• American Thought, a Critical Sketch (1954)

External links

• "Who Was Morris Raphael Cohen?" by Leonora Davidson Cohen Rosenfield
• "Morris Raphael Cohen: The Golden Age of Philosophy at CCNY 1906-1938 - City College of New York Libraries