Karl Barth on Kant’s “Biblical Theology”: A Reading with Hermann Cohen

Karl Barth’s most intensive investigation in Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793) is contained in his Protestant Theology in the 19th Century. Its Background and History (1947). Barth seeks to resolve the Kantian tension between Pure Reason and a “non-pure […] religious doctrine” within a synthetic “total survey.” Core issues are Kant’s “radical evil,” his Postulate of God’s Existence and ecclesiology. Barth was influenced by two of Hermann Cohen’s works and Cohen’s lecture course on “Psychology as Encyclopedia of Philosophy” (1908/09). The intellectual contours of these three thinkers emerge here clearly in regard to their shared agreement and differences.