Adolf Trendelenburg on an Early Writing by Hermann Cohen

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802-1872) wrote a testimony in 1865 for a student prize essay by Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), who later became the founder of the Marburg School in philosophy. The topic was: “How philosophers have defined and executed chance and the accidental.” The prize essay, framed by a motto from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, was written in the first half of 1865 in Berlin. It has been lost but served as the basis for Cohen’s dissertation, with which he received his doctorate in Halle in the autumn of the same year. However, there he confines himself to a specific area of his subject: antiquity. Trendelenburg’s testimony is the only source on Cohen’s much broader studies regarding the question of chance. It reports significant discussions, e.g., on Democritus, Spinoza, and Kant’s fourth antinomy.