"A creative element is surely present in all great systems, and it does not seem possible that all sympathy or fundamental attitudes of will can be entirely eliminated from any human philosophy"
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The line lands like a polite demolition of the fantasy that philosophy can be sterilized into pure calculation. Cohen, a hard-nosed analytic-minded thinker with a pragmatist streak, grants “systems” their ambition while reminding us what they’re secretly made of: not just logic, but invention. “Creative element” is doing heavy work here. It suggests that even the most rigorous frameworks don’t simply mirror reality; they design it, choosing what counts as a problem, what counts as an explanation, and which distinctions matter. Great systems aren’t neutral machines. They are acts of construction.
The sharper subtext arrives in his double refusal: “surely present” and “does not seem possible.” Cohen isn’t romanticizing subjectivity; he’s limiting the claims of objectivity. “Sympathy” and “fundamental attitudes of will” name the undercarriage philosophers prefer to hide: temperament, moral urgency, social allegiance, the desire for coherence, even the craving to tame anxiety with a clean schema. You can purge bias from an argument’s surface, but you can’t delete the human motives that decide what arguments are worth making in the first place.
Context matters. Cohen wrote in an early 20th-century moment obsessed with scientific authority and formal method, when philosophy was busy proving it could be as disciplined as physics. His point is not anti-science; it’s anti-self-deception. The most honest philosophy, he implies, admits its creative and ethical investments, then subjects them to critique rather than smuggling them in under the banner of inevitability.
The sharper subtext arrives in his double refusal: “surely present” and “does not seem possible.” Cohen isn’t romanticizing subjectivity; he’s limiting the claims of objectivity. “Sympathy” and “fundamental attitudes of will” name the undercarriage philosophers prefer to hide: temperament, moral urgency, social allegiance, the desire for coherence, even the craving to tame anxiety with a clean schema. You can purge bias from an argument’s surface, but you can’t delete the human motives that decide what arguments are worth making in the first place.
Context matters. Cohen wrote in an early 20th-century moment obsessed with scientific authority and formal method, when philosophy was busy proving it could be as disciplined as physics. His point is not anti-science; it’s anti-self-deception. The most honest philosophy, he implies, admits its creative and ethical investments, then subjects them to critique rather than smuggling them in under the banner of inevitability.
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| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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