Science & Tech Quote by Morris Raphael Cohen

Cohen threads a needle that philosophy is forever accused of dropping: he admits the discipline’s kinship with literature without surrendering its claim to rigor. The line is defensive, but not timid. It anticipates the cheap jab that if philosophy sounds like literature, then it must be mere style, mood, or personal confession. Cohen refuses that binary. Philosophy can borrow literature’s tools - metaphor, narrative framing, the ability to stage competing voices in the mind - while still treating truth as something you argue for, not merely evoke.

The subtext is a turf war. In the early 20th century, “science” was hardening into the prestige language of modernity, and philosophy was being pressured to either become quasi-scientific (logic, analysis, method) or accept marginal status as belles lettres. Cohen, a pragmatist with a logician’s spine, pushes back on both temptations. He’s saying: yes, philosophy traffics in the kinds of questions that resist laboratory closure - values, meaning, concepts, the shape of reason itself. That’s why it can resemble literature. But the resemblance is about subject matter and expression, not standards.

What makes the sentence work rhetorically is its calibrated concession: “of course” signals he knows his audience’s suspicion, then reroutes it. He grants the aesthetic and interpretive dimensions of philosophical writing while insisting that philosophy’s dignity lies in disciplined argument. Not science’s certainty, but science’s scruple.