Morris R. Cohen in Retrospect
By Ernest Nagel

The decade that has elapsed since the death of Morris R. Cohen has been crowded with events that have transformed in important ways the world which heard his living voice. During his lifetime he appeared to many of
us who knew him personally, or even only through his writings, as a thinker of first-rate importance on the American scene. It is perhaps inevitable that a man's stature should seem less large to succeeding generations
than it does to his own contemporaries. Indeed, if frequency of references to him in the current literature is a safe basis for judgment, it must be admitted that few professional philosophers continue to read Cohen or to be
influenced by his ideas. However this may be, it still seems to me, looking back across these ten years, that the estimate we then formed of him is not simply the product of a myopic perspective, and that Cohen's conception of
philosophy and his contributions to it continue to be of the highest value even in this altered world we now inhabit. It is fitting on this occasion to recall the philosophical ideals Cohen represented, and to indicate if only briefly why his memory deserves to be cherished by all who prize the achievements of intellectual excellence. Cohen did not think of philosophy as a discipline competing with the various sciences for obtaining authentic knowledge of the world about us. He did not believe that philosophy yields positive information about the primary subject-matters of the sciences, or that it possesses special sources of truth which enable it to pass judgment on the factual claims of science and to set bounds to the scope of its methods. As he conceived and practiced it, philosophy is the disciplined critical reflection upon the interpretations men place on the primary material of their experience—interpretations which are codified in the bodies of knowledge we call the sciences, in the system of rules we designate as morals or problems.

He was fond of noting the vigor and impressive accomplishments in the history of civilization of so-called "mixed races." Analagously, his own thought was vigorous and stimulating, in considerable measure because he did not fear contamination from exposure to concrete subject-matters, and because he pursued the task of criticism and clarification without hesitating to cross conventional boundaries between disciplines. He possessed unusual historical erudition, and did much to encourage inquiry into neglected sectors of intellectual history. But he did not think of philosophy as being primarily the custodian of the sacred cows of philosophical schools, whether ancient or modern; and he did not fall victim to the folly of supposing that a historical account of an idea is a substitute for an analysis of the idea's adequacy and truth.

In the light of all this, it is perhaps superfluous to add that Cohen prized and extolled the role of reason in the development of civilized life. Reason as he conceived it is not a substantial agent, which generates whateverorder there is in the world, but is a type of behavior manifested by certain organisms. He was fully aware that the rational element does not exhaust the dimensions of human life. But he was fully convinced that it is through the exercise of our capacity to reflect, to trace out the consequences of beliefs, and to test them against the flux of experience, that human life acquires dignity and nobility. Cohen was not one to jump on band wagons, whether radical or conservative, and he neither followed not led the current intellectual fashions. He was true to his ideal of the intellectual in society—an ideal which required of the philosopher not that he be a bellwether leading men into what is so often disaster, but that he be a dispassionate critic of established beliefs and institutions who sifts the grain from the chaff.