Abstract

Cohen′s critical remarks on natural-law theories argue that the identification between unwritten law and written Torah, which he suggests in his opus postumum, cannot mean that written Torah should be understood as a dogmatic code of natural law. This identification has to be understood on the basis of the constitutive relation of the written Torah to the oral one and has implications in view of a theory of reason: following the analogy of written Torah, the a priori of reason turns out to be like a code, whose canonical authority is always presupposed although it is rewritten like a palimpsest at every new application