“Let the Historian Be a Philosopher!”

Abstract

Abstract Spinoza developed a method of biblical interpretation that posited a strict division between Scripture’s history and philosophy’s history. Nineteenth-century philosophy’s more expansive sense of philosophy’s history created an opportunity to revisit Spinoza’s separation of philosophy from historical-philological sources such as the Bible. Hermann Cohen, with his unique background in philosophy as well as in classical and Hebrew philology, seized this opportunity in his extensive engagement with Spinoza in the final decade of his life. This chapter uncovers the methodological critique of Spinoza’s scriptural exegesis that is at the core of Cohen’s 1915 harshly critical monograph on Spinoza. To see the primarily philosophical-methodological aspect of Cohen’s work, it must especially be situated within a general methodological commitment to reading historical-philological sources philosophically, and vice versa, that he first developed in the 1870s and was central to Marburg neo-Kantianism.