Jonas Cohn

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Jonas Cohn (born December 2, 1869 in Görlitz , † January 12, 1947 in Birmingham , England ) was a German philosopher and educator . He was considered a neo-Kantian and he represented the never-ending interaction of conflicting principles in philosophy, education and psychology .

Life

The Cohn family had been a wealthy Jewish merchant and scholarly family since the early 18th century. They were educated in German and they saw themselves as Germans. Cohn grew up as the eldest son of a liberal and nationally thinking family. The parents shared free religious views of their time, they valued Lessing and Kant. The father died when Cohn was 7 years old. The mother and her son moved to Berlin in 1878. In 1883 he became a student of the Askanisches Gymnasium there . In 1888 Cohn passed the Abitur. He received the best degree since the school was founded in 1875.

Cohn studied from 1888 to 1892 at the universities of Leipzig , Heidelberg and Berlin . It was in 1892 in the subject Systematic Botany at the University of Berlin with Simon Schwendener with a study on plant physiology PhD . Cohn left the natural sciences and was a humanities scholar from then on. He had considered the change - as was his way - in all directions, struggled with himself and then took the step without wavering. From 1892 to 1894 he was a research assistant in Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory in Leipzig , which was the first of its kind in the world. In 1897 he completed his habilitation in philosophy, psychology and education with Wilhelm Windelband in Freiburg.

Cohn married Elise Ebstein in 1903. Elise Ebstein had passed the teacher examination in 1896, then studied medicine in Breslau, Berlin and Freiburg and had just passed the medical pre-examination when she met Cohn. She came from Upper Silesia and was born in 1872 as the daughter of a glass manufacturer in Murów (now Poland). In 1904 the son Hans Ludwig was born. He remained the only child of the two. Elise stopped studying. In 1933 she published letters from Anna Luise Karschin under her maiden name : The Karschin: The people's poet of Frederick the Great . After Cohn died in 1947, she returned from Birmingham to Freiburg in 1948, where she died in 1953.

Cohn described himself as a philosophical autodidact. During his studies in Leipzig, Heidelberg and Berlin he attended philosophical lectures and exercises that did not "permanently determine" him.

From 1897 to 1933, Cohn was assistant or associate professor at the University of Freiburg , where he worked at the Institute of Psychology. He held lectures on "Psychology", "The Adolescent Mental Life", "Psychology and Economy", "Introduction to Experimental Psychology with Demonstrations". From 1916 he was Edmund Husserl's assistant in the Freiburg laboratory, from 1920 he was head of the laboratory until he was forced to retire for racist reasons on August 24, 1933, when he was dismissed by the new rector Martin Heidegger . Both Husserl and Heidegger had a distanced to negative relationship to experimental psychology in the context of their philosophical views. Neo-Kantians like Cohn were more open-minded. Cohn's efforts to get a chair during the Freiburg years had also been unsuccessful for racist reasons, although friends and colleagues like Edmund Husserl, Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer had supported him. "I lack any feeling of belonging" to the Jewish religion, he said. On the other hand, he feels obliged to his autonomy and his world piety.

In 1939 he emigrated to Great Britain . In 1946 Cohn was refused an academic return to the university because of his experience-oriented, dialectical-open philosophizing. German philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, played a key role in this. Cohn shared this fate with other philosophers who were forced to emigrate. A year later, Cohn died in Birmingham. Ten years later, on the occasion of the death of Siegfried Marck, Theodor Litt pointed to the "bloodletting" of German philosophy under National Socialist rule. He also mentioned that the philosophers who had been forced to emigrate and their works have not received adequate reparation and appreciation.

His estate of diaries, book manuscripts, personal documents, letters and essays from the years 1890–1947 is in the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute as a gift from Dieter-Jürgen Löwisch . The estate is accessible online. With the help of the material, a critical new edition of selected works and manuscripts is planned.

Aspects of his thinking

philosophy

Like Windelband and Rickert, Cohn represented Neo-Kantian views. In his epistemological assumptions, he followed Kant's transcendental philosophy . In contrast, he considered the Kantian ethical formalism to be useless as a basis for ethics , aesthetics and pedagogy . He developed a " dialectical theory of values ". In contrast to Hegel's dialectic, Cohn's dialectic was open; that is, it continued to develop. According to this, human action was determined both by experience and experience, as well as by the normative "self-generation of consciousness ". The latter was anchored in " transcendental ideality". The competition between experience and normative self-generation should advance human action. In this context he wrote articles on philosophy.

Among other things, about " terms ". The subject of "concept" is of fundamental importance in philosophy - especially in the philosophy of mind . "Concept" is usually used to describe an idea that is linked to a name by precisely determining ( defining ) its content. As a rule, it is assumed that these are logical constructs. Cohn assumed that philosophers, like other people, function alogically . In other words, they use terms to connect experiences and sensations or feelings. For philosophy it follows: "The name, which the term represents, combines ... with all kinds of secondary ideas that are difficult to control and, as a result, it also gains a relationship to the emotional life. It receives an emotional value that is always too clear without the thinker admitted consciousness, but has the most significant consequences in his thinking. ... This relationship makes the already important task of a clear presentation of the prevailing value principles for any future philosophy all the more urgent. "

pedagogy

Dialectical processes also played a central role here. The objective was to develop children into autonomous adults through upbringing and schooling .

“ The pupil should be made an autonomous member of the historical cultural communities to which he will belong. "

The way there comprised educational concepts which, on the one hand , had to stimulate and support the individual freedom of the individual and, on the other hand, should be based on timeless values ​​of the cultural community. The opposition between individual freedom and norm should be productive for society and the individual. This contrast forms the dialectical framework for the further development of the theoretical idea and the practical form of education.

The distance of each individual to the society or community in and with which he lives is important in order to allow community to emerge and advance it. Educators who assume that society does not need to be improved are not suitable to be educators. The individual who mindlessly adjusts instead of reflecting and behaving according to the peculiarities of a community, does not act autonomously.

psychology

The contradicting dialectic between experience on the one hand and objective ideality on the other determined Cohn's psychological principles. Like Gustav Theodor Fechner , Wilhelm Wundt , Hermann Ebbinghaus and Oswald Külpe , he participated in the expansion of the experimental psychology that was emerging at the time. Among other things, he dealt with the question of how acoustic-motor and visual memory are mutually dependent. He also investigated the connection between feeling and perceiving. Cohn was particularly interested in obtaining psychological material for philosophical cognitive processes. This also corresponded to the ideas of Edmund Husserl. Heidegger, on the other hand, considered such a thing superfluous. Cohn stayed in the experimental tradition of the laboratory introduced by Hugo Münsterberg . Instead of testing human attention and resilience, etc. like Münsterberg, Cohn wanted to investigate experimentally how people come to their values ​​and what can be philosophically concluded from them.

Works

  • Bourdon: La sensation de plaisir. Rev. Philos. Vol. 36, pp. 225-237, Oct. 1893.
  • Experimental studies on the emotional emphasis of colors, brightnesses and their combinations. Philosophical Studies Vol. X, 1894, pp. 562-603.
  • The feeling of the terms. Philosophical Studies, Vol. 12, Leipzig 1896.
  • History of the infinity problem in occidental thought up to Kant. Leipzig 1896. Unchanged photomechanical reprint Darmstadt: WBG 1960.
  • Experimental investigations into the interaction of acoustic-motor and visual memory. 1897. In: Journal of Psychology and Physiology of the Sensory Organs 15: 161-183.
  • General aesthetics. Leipzig: Engelmann 1901.
  • W. Ostwald: Lectures on natural philosophy. Held in the summer of 1901 at the University of Leipzig. Leipzig, 1902.
  • Leading thinkers. Historical introduction to philosophy In: Nature and Spiritual World, Collection of Scientific and Commonly Understandable Representations, 176 Vol., Publisher: BG Teubner, Leipzig 1907.
  • Requirements and goals of cognition. Investigations into the basic questions of logic. Leipzig 1908.
  • The meaning of contemporary culture. A philosophical attempt. Leipzig: Mine 1914.
  • Religion and cultural values. Lecture given on October 10 [1914] in the Berlin department of the Kant Society. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard 1914.
  • Spirit of education. Pedagogy on a philosophical basis. Leipzig [u. a.]: Teubner 1919.
  • Social education . Langensalza: Beyer & Sons 1920.
  • Theory of dialectics. Form theory of philosophy. Leipzig: Mine 1923.
  • Free and bind. Time issues of upbringing viewed over time. Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer 1926.
  • Value science. Stuttgart 1932.
  • Reality as a task . Stuttgart undated (preliminary remark dated Birmingham 1940 and afterword by Jürgen von Kempski as editor from 1955)
  • On the meaning of education: selected texts . Concerned by Dieter-Jürgen Löwisch. Schöningh, Paderborn 1970

Letter issues

  • The correspondence between William Stern and Jonas Cohn. Documents of friendship between two scientists. Edited by Helmut E. Lück. Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1994 (contributions to the history of psychology 7). ISBN 3-631-45897-5

literature

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Exile archive: "Center for the Persecuted Arts" [1]
  2. ↑ Margret Heitmann: There is no sense of belonging. Contributions to German-Jewish history from the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute Online
  3. ↑ Cf. Luise Hirsch: From the Shtetl to the Lecture Hall: Jewish Women and Cultural Exchange. Plymouth / United Kingdom 2013, p. 237. [2]
  4. ↑ Cf. Anselm Model: Self-transgression: Jonas Cohn's philosophy of values ​​and pedagogy against the background of Friedrich Nietzsche's ethics. Lecture at the 'Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy'. Boston MA, August 10-15, 1998, see web links
  5. ↑ Uwe Wolfradt, Elfriede Billmann-Mahecha, Armin Stock, German-speaking psychologists 1933–1945 , Wiesbaden, 2015, p. 435 : “retired by Rector Martin Heidegger”; Johann Aichinger, The Path of Dialectics from the Pre-Socratics to Jonas Cohn (traced using selected examples) (Master's thesis), University of Vienna, 2008; P. 52 : “The retirement was announced in a provisional form on April 20, 1933, and finally on August 24. The letter of resignation was signed by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) as the university rector. The faculty turned away from Cohn ”; Website of the University of Freiburg: History of the Institute for Psychology. [3]
  6. ↑ On the theoretical history of the Freiburg laboratory cf. Harald Walach: Psychology - philosophy of science, philosophical foundations and history. Stuttgart 2009, 2nd edition, pp. 185-188. [4]
  7. ↑ Margret Heitmann: There is no sense of belonging. Articles on German-Jewish history from the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute online
  8. ↑ Cf. Christa Kersting: Pedagogy in Post-War Germany. Bad Heilbrunn 2008, pp. 144–147.
  9. ↑ Online
  10. ↑ See Siegfried Marck, At the exit of the younger Neo-Kantianism. A memorial sheet for Richard Hönigswald and Jonas Cohn, Archive for Philosophy 3/1949, pp. 144–164. [5]
  11. ↑ Cf. Jonas Cohn, The feeling effect of the terms: a contribution to the psychological comprehension of the history of philosophy. Phil. Stud. XII. Pp. 297-306. 1896 '. Journal for Psychology and Physiology of the Sensory Organs, 12, Leipzig 1896. [6]
  12. ↑ Jonas Cohn quoted. according to Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik: The dialectical relationship between theory and practice in education. Kassel 2008. S, 91.
  13. ↑ Cf. Jonas Cohn: Spirit of Education. Leipzig / Berlin 1919, p. 40 and 45.
  14. ↑ See the last sections: Kautz, Heinrich, “Cohn, Jonas”, in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 3 (1957), p. 316 [online version]; URL: http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd118669664.html
  15. ↑ Cf. Jonas Cohn: Experimental investigations into the interaction of acoustic-motor and visual memory. 1897. In: Journal of Psychology and Physiology of the Sensory Organs 15: 161-183.
  16. ↑ cf. Jonas Cohen: Experimental investigations on the emotional emphasis of colors, brightness and their combinations. Philosophical Studies Vol. X, 1894, pp. 562-603.
  17. ↑ See Harald Walach: Psychology - Theory of Science, Philosophical Foundations and History. Stuttgart 2009, 2nd edition, pp. 185-188. [7]
  18. ↑ [8] from the Gutenberg project digitized and available online.
personal data
SURNAME Cohn, Jonas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher and educator and university lecturer
DATE OF BIRTH December 2, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Goerlitz
DATE OF DEATH January 12, 1947
Place of death Birmingham