 Two further commitments are continuous threads over the course of Cohen’s career and across multiple areas of his philosophical concern: his idealism and (what Frederick Beiser [2018] calls) his “methodological rationalism.” Cohen expresses his idealism in different ways over the course of his career. But we may approximate it as the view that a priori laws of human knowledge determine what counts an an object for us. For Cohen, this idealism is intended to capture Kant’s insight that we can have a priori knowledge only of those features of objects that our own mind contributes to them. But for Cohen, this is not an exclusively Kantian doctrine. He develops it in part out of his early interpretation of Plato, according to which we strive to have things conform to our ideas.