The Young Folk Psychologist

This chapter is an account of Cohen’s early writings as a folk psychologist or anthropologist working within the new discipline of Völkerpsychologie founded by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal (1865–1870). His work was very much historicist and empiricist in orientation and investigated such topics as the origins of religion and poetry. But there was also a direction toward logic and criticism, which evolved from his early interest in epistemology and the critical philosophy. Already in these years Cohen adopted a Kantian interpretation of Plato which will be decisive for all his later philosophy.