Friedrich Paulsen

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Friedrich Paulsen, 1907
Friedrich Paulsen's signature

Friedrich Paulsen (born July 16, 1846 in Langenhorn near Niebüll ( North Friesland ), † August 14, 1908 in Steglitz near Berlin ) was a German educator and philosopher .

Life

Friedrich Paulsen was the son of the small farmer Paul Frerck Paulsen and his wife Christine Ketelsen. He attended the village school from the age of five and in 1859 switched to the school of teacher Sönke Brodersen. This promoted Paulsen to the best of his ability and so from 1863 he was able to attend the Seconda of the Christianeum in Altona . Three years later Paulsen successfully finished his school days with the Abitur.

In the same year Paulsen began to study theology at the University of Erlangen , where he became a member of the Bubenreuther fraternity . After three semesters he switched to philosophy at the Berlin Friedrich Wilhelms University . He successfully completed his studies in 1871 with his dissertation with Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg on the form and method of Aristotelian ethics ( Symbolae ad systemata philosophiae moralis historicae et criticae ). In 1875 he was able to do his habilitation with a thesis on the epistemology of Immanuel Kant ( attempt at a development history of the Kantian epistemology ).

In 1877 he married Emilie Ferchel, a foster daughter of the politician Justus von Gruner, in Berlin . With her he had two daughters and two sons; one son, Rudolf , later also became a philosopher. After Paulsen's wife died in 1883, he married his sister-in-law Laura Ferchel in 1892, who had been running the household for him since her sister's death.

  • Friedrich Paulsen with his parents, around 1860

  • Friedrich Paulsen's birthplace in Langenhorn (around 1900)

  • Friedrich Paulsen as private lecturer, 1877

In the year of his first wedding, he was entrusted, as the first professor in Germany, with a teaching position in pedagogy, which in the following year was expanded to become an associate professor for philosophy and pedagogy. In 1894 he was appointed full professor of philosophy and education in Berlin . Here Paulsen became one of the most influential professors of his time in the years that followed. In the following years Paulsen repeatedly turned down calls to the universities of Breslau , Würzburg , Munich , Kiel and Leipzig , as well as the invitation to a visiting professorship at Harvard , Yale and Cornell (1905). His students included Jonas Cohn , Kurt Eisner , Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster , Paul Hinneberg , Edmund Husserl , Theodor Litt , George Herbert Mead , Herman Nohl , Berthold Otto , Albert Schweitzer , Eduard Spranger , William Stern , George Santayana , Ferdinand Tönnies - him soon Lifelong friend and the founder of sociology in Germany - and Alfred Wegener .

Paulsen, whose works have been translated into several world languages, is considered a representative of new idealism . It is rumored that even Mao Zedong made some of Paulsen's socially critical positions his own. Paulsen himself listed Baruch Spinoza , John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant as his roots. He was a proponent of reform pedagogy and turned, among other things, in favor of the "German essay" successfully against the "Latin essay" as an Abitur achievement (cf. Neuhumanismus ). His History of Learned Education (1885) achieved classic status.

Paulsen can be considered the spiritual father of the modern school are where the modern languages and science the ancient languages on an equal footing to face.

With many of his writings, especially the System of Ethics and Introduction to Philosophy , Paulsen aimed for a broad impact through general comprehensibility, which earned him extraordinarily high editions, but also criticism from his colleagues.

"[He] did not offer a closed system of philosophy, but real help in life that could also be understood by ordinary people in their respective social reality."

- Reinhard Kränsel : NDB 20, p. 128.

Friedrich Paulsen died on August 14, 1908 in Steglitz at the age of 62. His grave in the Old St. Matthew Cemetery has been preserved. It was dedicated to the city of Berlin as an honorary grave from 1956 to 2014 . In 1908 a secondary school in Steglitz near Berlin was named after him (today: Paulsen-Gymnasium ). This school tried to implement its educational reform ideas, as did the Friedrich Paulsen School in Niebüll , which was founded in 1925 . In 1931 the school in his native Langenhorn was named after him. In 1911 a memorial for Paulsen was erected on behalf of the “German senior teachers” in the “Park am Fichtenberg” (today Ruth-Andreas-Friedrich- Park) in Steglitz. The lost original bust was replaced in 1959 by a bust of Paulsen by the hand of the sculptor Magdalena Müller-Martin. In Langenhorn, a "Friedrich-Paulsen-Platz" at the church and a memorial to the son of the village have been commemorating since 2012. The bust there was made by the sculptor Ferdinand Seeboeck and was donated to the Nordfriisk Instituut in Bredstedt by the descendants of Paulsen.

reception

Paulsen's works were particularly popular in the USA, while in Germany he was largely forgotten. Paulsen left behind an extensive manuscript with his memoirs, from which the Diederichs-Verlag in Jena published the chapters in 1909 in which Paulsen had described his childhood and youth. The more comprehensive part about his scientific work remained unprinted in Germany. Paulsen's student Theodor Lorenz, who had emigrated to the USA, recognized the meaning of the text and translated the entire autobiography, albeit with many abbreviations, into English; It was published in New York in 1938. Therefore, the memoirs were quoted in English for 70 years, but not in the original German version. On the 100th anniversary of Paulsen's death, his memoirs were published in full for the first time in 2008. Thomas Steensen , Director of the Nordfriisk Instituut in Bredstedt, found the manuscript in Paulsen's villa in Berlin-Steglitz and published it together with Dieter Lohmeier .

  • Paulsen bust in Langenhorn

  • Paulsen bust in Langenhorn

  • Paulsen bust by Magdalena Müller-Martin in Berlin-Steglitz

  • Paulsen bust by Magdalena Müller-Martin in Berlin-Steglitz

Quotes

“I heartily grant the troubled human race every dream of future happiness. But it seems to me that this is not entirely safe: he would like to create an all too unreasonable dissatisfaction with real life as it is offered by the present, and he would, if mankind, filled with those images, set off for the dreamland seek, lead to an awakening that is too painful. I doubt whether heaven will come on earth at all. "

Works

Paulsen's grave in the old St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof in Berlin-Schöneberg
  • Symbolae ad systemata philosophiae moralis historicae et criticae . Schade, Berlin 1871.
  • Attempt of a development history of the Kantian theory of knowledge . Fues, Leipzig 1875.
  • History of the teaching at German schools and universities from the end of the Middle Ages to the present. With special consideration for classical teaching . 2 vol., Veit / Metzger & Wittig, Leipzig 1885.
  • System of ethics . With an outline of the doctrine of the state and society . Hertz, Berlin 1889.
  • Introduction to philosophy . Dedicated to Ferdinand Tönnies . Hertz, Berlin 1892; later more than 40 editions.
  • Immanuel Kant . His life and his teaching . Stuttgart 1898.
  • Philosophia militans. Against clericalism and naturalism . Berlin 1901
  • The German universities and university studies . Asher, Berlin 1902.
  • The German education system in its historical development . Teubner, Leipzig 1906.

First published posthumously:

  • Out of my life. Childhood memories . Diederichs, Jena 1909 ( online at zeno.org).
  • Out of my life . Complete edition. Edited by Dieter Lohmeier and Thomas Steensen. Verlag Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2008. ISBN 978-3-88007-346-3
  • Pedagogy . Cotta, Stuttgart 1911.
  • Ferdinand Tönnies / Friedrich Paulsen: Correspondence 1876–1908 . Edited by Olaf Klose , Eduard Georg Jacoby , Irma Fischer. Hirt, Kiel 1961.
  • An autobiography . Translated u. ed. by Theodor Lorenz. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1938.

Influential translations:

  • A System of Ethics . New York and Chicago: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899. (Translation of the 3rd German edition into English by Frank Thilly).
  • 倫理學 原理Rinrigaku taikei . Tokyo: Hakubunkan, Meiji 37 (= 1904). (Incomplete translation of “System der Ethik” from German into Japanese by 蟹 江 義 丸 Kanie Yoshimaru and others).
  • 伦理学 原理Lunli xue yuanli . Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1909. (Incomplete translation of “System der Ethik” from the Japanese and German editions into Chinese by 蔡元培Cai Yuanpei ).

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Friedrich Paulsen: From my life (Jena 1910) p. 139 (via zeno.org); see also: Heinrich Wiegandt: History of the Erlanger fraternity. Part 2 - The Bubenreuthers . Bremen 1883
  2. ^ Friedrich Paulsen: System of ethics with an outline of the state and social theory . Berlin 1889, p. 723.

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Paulsen, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German educator and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH July 16, 1846
PLACE OF BIRTH Langenhorn near Niebüll ( North Friesland )
DATE OF DEATH August 14, 1908
Place of death Steglitz b. Berlin