 Born in 1842 in Coswig, Germany, Cohen was raised in a devout family. His father was a synagogue cantor, and Cohen left Gymnasium in order to attend a rabbinical seminary in Breslau, Silesia (now Wrocław, Poland). But he decided against becoming a rabbi, and enrolled in university first in Breslau and then in Berlin, where he attended classes taught by a leading light in the history of philosophy, the Aristotelian scholar and metaphysician Adolf Trendelenburg. He received his doctorate from the University of Halle, after which, encouraged by Heymann Steinthal, he studied Völkerpsychologie, a philological and anthropological investigation of the origins of cultural products such as art and literature. It was in a journal of Völkerpsychologie and linguistics that he published his first major work of Kant interpretation, an intervention in Trendelenburg’s and Kuno Fischer’s debate about Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic (see §2 below). That essay also marked a decisive turn in Cohen’s philosophical orientation, and after two years in which he wrote on both Kant’s pre-critical philosophy and the Critique of Pure Reason, he was appointed lecturer at the University of Marburg. Three years later, he was promoted to full Professor, a rank that was at that time in Germany almost never granted to unconverted Jews in philosophy departments. It was no coincidence that Cohen’s appointment and subsequent promotion took place during Bismark’s anti-Catholic Kulturkampf, a brief period of relatively liberal attitudes toward Jews. But following Heinrich von Treitschke’s notorious 1879 anti-Semitic attack on German-Jewish writers and intellectuals, Cohen was compelled to enter the public debate about the Jews’ place in Imperial Germany. His “Declaration on the Jewish Question” appeared in 1880, and questions of German-Jewish identity would occupy him throughout his career (Schwarzschild 1979; Wiedebach 1997, Pts. 4–5; and Beiser 2018). He remained at Marburg for almost four decades. After retiring from Marburg in 1912, Cohen returned to Berlin in order to teach at a rabbinical seminary, the Academy of Jewish Sciences. He spent four years there, writing principally about religious problems, until his death in 1918.