Morris Raphael Cohen (1880-1947) was an American naturalist philosopher, lawyer, and legal scholar born in Minsk, Russia. He immigrated to Harlem, New York in 1892 and later attended the City College of New York and received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1906. Cohen went on to become a Professor of Philosophy at CCNY from 1912 to 1938. He also taught Law at City College and the University of Chicago, gave courses at the New School for Social Research, and lectured in Philosophy and Law at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and other Universities.
Cohen’s philosophical interests included the philosophy of science, metaphysics, logic, social philosophy, legal philosophy, and the philosophy of history. In addition to his major philosophical work, Reason and Nature (1931), Cohen wrote Law and Social Order (1933), An Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method (1934), and The Meaning of Human History (1947). He became one of the most well-known figures in American philosophy in the 20th century, and in 1953, the City College of New York Library was dedicated to and named for Morris Raphael Cohen.
