In this essay I offer a partial rehabilitation of Cohen’s Kant interpretation. In
particular, I will focus on the center of Cohen’s interpretation in KTE, reflected in
the title itself: his interpretation of Kant’s concept of experience. “Kant hat einen
neuen Begriff der Erfahrung entdeckt,”7 Cohen writes at the opening of the first
edition of KTE (henceforth, KTE1), and while the exact nature of that new concept
of experience is hard to pin down in the 1871 edition, he states it succinctly in the
second edition (henceforth KTE2): experience is Newtonian mathematical natural
science.8 While this equation of experience with mathematical natural science has
few contemporary defenders, I believe it is substantially correct, with one important
qualification. Kant uses the term Erfahrung in a number of different senses
in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (henceforth, KrV). I will argue that a central, and
neglected, sense of that key technical term aligns with Cohen’s reading; what Kant sometimes refers to as ‘universal experience’ (sometimes, simply ‘experience’) is,
in broad outlines, correctly interpreted by Cohen as mathematical natural science
