Justice & Law Quote by Morris Raphael Cohen

Cohen’s line has the cool menace of a legal warning: declare an idea inadmissible and you haven’t defeated it, you’ve merely postponed its next hearing. The courtroom metaphor matters. “Ruled out of court” isn’t “disproved”; it’s procedural, political, often temporary. Philosophic theories get banished not only for being wrong but for being unfashionable, inconvenient, or corrosive to reigning institutions. Cohen is pointing at the way intellectual life mimics jurisprudence: gatekeepers, standards of relevance, burdens of proof, and the quiet power to decide what even counts as an argument.

The subtext is a critique of academic and cultural amnesia. When a community congratulates itself for having “moved past” a theory, it may be mistaking exhaustion for resolution. That’s how old metaphysics rebrands as “common sense,” how discredited social theories re-emerge as policy instincts, how yesterday’s superstition returns wearing a lab coat. Cohen’s phrasing “no one can tell when” adds a historian’s humility: ideas have long half-lives, and suppression can even increase their mystique.

Contextually, Cohen wrote in a period when logical positivism, pragmatism, and scientific method were reshaping what philosophy was allowed to sound like. His broader project was to defend a disciplined, fallibilist rationalism against both dogma and fashionable dismissals. The line is less nostalgia for lost systems than a warning against intellectual overconfidence: if you exile a theory by fiat rather than by argument, you’re not finishing the job. You’re scheduling a sequel.