 The concept of pure thinking, and the closely related concepts of generation and origin, are central to Cohen’s project in the Logic. All three concepts have to do with the principles that, on Cohen’s view, define what an object is for mathematical natural scientific theories. In Kant’s Theory of Experience, Cohen had been content to identify and exhibit synthetic a priori principles as “present” in experience. But now in the Logic, he is concerned with the question of those principles’ foundation – that is, with their “origin.” Cohen now argues that pure thinking generates those principles from itself. Or in his preferred idiom, pure thinking is “generation.”