Who Was Morris Raphael Cohen?
By Leonora Davidson Cohen Rosenfield
 Professor Morris Raphael Cohen CCNY Class of 1900 Presented by Alumni and Friends In Commemoration of Twenty-Five Years of Service Departments of Mathematics and Philosophy Oct. 15, 1927 Painted by Joseph Margulies |
Who was Morris Raphael Cohen whose centenary is being celebrated and why is his alma mater's library named after him?
My
father, born on July 25, 1880, led a life seasoned by pride and
prejudice and poverty. His pride as a son of the Cohanem was
set against the prejudice of his time. Discrimination against
Jews, flagrant under the Tsars, was genteel but real in this
country. Poverty stalked the Cohens in the ghetto of Minsk. Malnourished,
often sick and listless, little Morris for a while was called
Kalyleh, Yiddish for half-wit. "Never mind; some
day," predicted his mother Bessie Farfel, "they will
all be proud to have talked to my Meisheleh." Indeed, at
his death, her youngest son was hailed as an encyclopedic scholar,
a kind of twentieth-century Aristotle. He had become a legendary
Socratic teacher and gadfly in American philosophy and education,
a prolific author, a rationalistic animateur of his age.
Morris
was brought to New York City in 1892. In what he called "this
blessed land of opportunity," the City College offered qualified
students tuition-free higher education "without distinction
of race or class or creed." Young Morris passed the entrance
examinations to the College in 1895 with a gold medal from his
grade school, and graduated in the class of "noughty-nought,"
1900, with a B.S. and Phi Beta Kappa. He had already confided
to his youthful diaries his dreams of becoming a philosopher,
teaching at his alma mater, and of being able to support his
parents in their old age.
By
this time a peripatetic Scottish scholar, Thomas Davidson, had
lent my father's life purpose and inspiration. He was encouraged,
ceased brooding and broadened himself in Davidson's "culture
sciences"—classics, philosophy, history and great world
literature. (My parents carried on their teacher's mission after
his death by launching the Breadwinner's College, with its free
cultural education for the wage-earner. They named me after their
mentor.)
From
1902 to 1904, while teaching mathematics at City College, Morris
pursued graduate studies at Columbia. At Felix Adler's recommendation
the New York Society for Ethical Culture awarded him a $750 scholarship
to study at Harvard in its golden age—a good investment.
By June 1906 there was Morris with his doctorate and his bride,
Mary Ryshpan. He had once borrowed a three-cent stamp to write
to her asking for a loan of $30—two more good investments.
Now armed with what President John Finley was to call the finest
recommendations he'd ever seen, my father returned to the College,
where he continued teaching mathematics for the next six years.
In 1912, thanks to Professor Harry Allen Overstreet of the philosophy
department, he was finally appointed to the philosophy faculty—for
a Jew, a precedent-shattering event.
He
promptly initiated two new courses, philosophy of science and
philosophy of law, to which he subsequently added the philosophy
of civilization with, as novel textbook, Santayana's Life
of Reason. Another innovative course was logic and scientific
method, for which he brought out the text, An Introduction
to Logic and Scientific Method, with his gifted former student
Ernest Nagel '23. He also taught four more courses at the College—metaphysics,
ethics, ancient philosophy and history of philosophy.
Despite his asperity in class toward his City College students,
who were at times the butt of his wit, they held a special place
in his heart. I recall, as a six-year-old, spotting members of
the Lavender track team running on the median strip of Broadway
and calling out to my brothers, "Look, there go Papa's boys."
My father drove himself mercilessly for his "boys,"
and served the College that meant so much in his life. His A
Preface to Logic, translated into Italian, Japanese, German
and Spanish, was dedicated to "The College of the City of
New York and its students who gave zest to my life."
In the "outside world," Morris Cohen
served as visiting professor or lecturer at Johns Hopkins, Yale,
Stanford and Harvard, and was elected by the students of the
New School for Social Research as their first professor. He taught
or lectured at leading law schools and delivered innumerable
lectures not only at establishment institutions but also at places
like the Rand School and Cooper Union. He fought many a crusade
for social justice, often side by side with his old friend, John
Dewey. After his retirement from City College in 1938, he became
professor at the University of Chicago.
Morris
Cohen, who called logic the life-blood of philosophy, was a logical
realist for whom relationships and universals were real, not
nominal. He was an interdisciplinary pioneer. The Source-Book
in Greek Science that he edited with his former student Israel
E. Drabkin '24, the classical scholar, demonstrated that science
is not a modern discovery; its history goes back to ancient Greece.
He defined "scientific method," based on systematic
doubt, for The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Above
all, he introduced the concept of philosophy as a critical method
to be applied by Everyman to the problems of man and society,
to life and its pursuits. He sparked others with his inflamed
defense of reason as man's best guide.
Contributing
to The New Republic from its inception, he developed a
clear, pithy style. Much of his work is readable to the layman.
He bucked the tides of his times, sought realization of his projects
rather than credits, eschewed indoctrination and left no school
of followers. Yet his influence remains durable, particularly
in law and jurisprudence. His friendships with the great minds
of his age, Einstein for example, reflected honor on his college.
Bertrand Russell was quoted by Harold Laski as saying that Morris
Cohen was the most significant philosopher in the United States.
On
May 3, 1953, under President Buell Gallagher, the City College
Library was dedicated to and named for Morris Raphael Cohen.
To it he had given the bulk of his life-time collection of books.
At the College hang Joseph T. Margulies' oil portraits of my
father and of my late brother Felix S. Cohen, the editor of our
father's posthumous works and the brilliant successor to him
in legal philosophy and teaching. Also on display in the Cohen
Library is the bronze bust of my father by Anne Wolfe. One might
almost mistake it for another Cohen son, Victor William '31,
the late distinguished nuclear physicist.
Another
posthumous day of triumph is soon to dawn for Morris Raphael
Cohen. The new library in the soon-to-be-completed North Academic
Complex on campus is to be dedicated to him, one of the "sturdy
sons of City College…bound by ties that naught can sever."
The author is professor emerita, University of Maryland
(department of French and Italian language and literature). She
authored the first biography about her father, Portrait of
a Philosopher.
Reprinted from: The City College Alumnus, v. 76 #2,
December 1980, p. 8-9.