Paul Weiss (philosopher)

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Paul Weiss (born May 19, 1901 in New York , † July 5, 2002 in Washington ) was an American philosopher.

Life

Weiss was the son of the Hungarian Jewish immigrant Samuel Weiss and Emma, ​​née Rothschild, from Germany. His father worked as a plumber , his mother as a maid . The family lived in a strongly Jewish environment on the Lower East Side . After the public school, Weiss attended the commercial college, where he learned shorthand and typing. He then held various jobs before enrolling at the College of the City of New York in 1924. Here he was introduced to the philosophy of pragmatism by Morris Raphael Cohen . During this time he met Victoria Brodkin, whom he married in 1928 and with whom he had two children, Judith (1935) and Jonathan (1939). His wife died in 1953.

After graduating from college in 1927 with "cum laude", Weiss went to Harvard , where he studied with Etienne Gilson , William Ernest Hocking , CI Lewis and Ralph Barton Perry , among others . Under Alfred North Whitehead he obtained his PhD in 1929 . As an employee of Charles Hartshorne , Weiss worked in the following years on the preparation and publication of Charles Sanders Peirce's Collected Papers , which appeared in six volumes between 1931 and 1936.

Weiss himself switched to Bryn Mawr College after a year of teaching at Harvard and Radcliffe in 1931 , where he taught philosophy for 15 years. In 1946 he accepted the offer to work at Yale University at the chair of Brand Blanshard . After the initially temporary position was converted to a permanent position, he stayed at Yale until retirement age, most recently as Sterling Professor of Philosophy. At Yale, Weiss founded The Review of Metaphysics in 1947 and the Metaphysical Society of America in 1950. During this time, Weiss supervised a large number of dissertations, including a. that of Richard Rorty (1956). 1966/67 Paul Weiss was President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophers Association. His Presidential Address had the theme: "Separate and Equal, but Integrated".

After leaving Yale, Weiss was offered a chair at Fordham University . However, this was withdrawn after a short time for reasons of age, whereupon Weiss filed a lawsuit in 1971 at the age of 69 for age discrimination. However, he lost the publicly acclaimed trial. Instead, Weiss Heffer became Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC When they no longer wanted to renew the contract, which had to be renewed annually, because Weiss had now reached the age of 90, he again threatened to sue. As a result, his activity was extended for two more years before he finally retired. Until shortly before his death, Weiss worked on other publications.

Teaching

Weiss is considered to be a philosopher who was rooted in tradition and who rejected the modern forms of analytical philosophy . His focus was on questions of metaphysics and cosmology . His work “Being and Other Realities” (1995) is often mentioned for this purpose. Although a student of Whitehead, he took a clear defense of substance metaphysics . For white, there is a dialectical relationship between natural objects, our knowledge of them and our reference to them. This is because the nature of our cognitive abilities does not allow an immediate description of the objects. Rather, consideration must be given to how they appear in human experience. For Weiss, science, art and philosophy do not have the task of designing new worldviews. Rather, they should stick to daily experience as much as possible and only make corrections where the knowledge leads to contradictions between the ideas of the everyday world and the research results of the sciences.

For white that constitutes being a multiplicity of individuals whose cohesion is ensured by four universal levels of structure (domains). These four spheres are those of the person, the human world, nature and the cosmos. Elsewhere Weiss describes the four modes of being as actuality, ideality, existence and God. Weiss thus constructed a similar ontological structure to that of Nicolai Hartmann . Weiss made further, in part highly regarded, contributions to the philosophy of sport, art, religion, logic and political philosophy.

Fonts

  • Reality , Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1938
  • Modes of Being , Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1958
  • Our Public Life , Bloomington, Indiana University Press 1959
  • Nine Basic Arts , Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1961
  • The World of Art , Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1961
  • History: Written and Lived , Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1962
  • The God We Seek , Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1964
  • The Making of Men , Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1967
  • Right & Wrong: A Philosophical Dialogue between Father and Son , Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1967
  • Beyond All Appearances , Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1974
  • Cinematics , Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1975 ( Review ; PDF; 34 kB)
  • Creativity and Common Sense. Essays in Honor of Paul Weiss , State University of New York Press, Albany (NY) 1987
  • Philosophy in Process , Vol. 1-11, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1966-1989
  • Being and Other Realities , Open Court, Chicago 1995
  • Emphatics , Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville 2000
  • Surrogates , Indiana University Press, Bloomington (IN) 2002 (posthumous)

literature

  • John E. Smith: Professor Weiss, Existence and Hegel (PDF; 400 kB), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, (Dec, 1948), 322-325
  • Irwin C. Lieb (Ed.): Experience, existence and the good; essays in honor of Paul Weiss, Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale 1961
  • Jacobo L. Datko: Evolution in the philosophy of Paul Weiss, New Orleans 1962 (Excerpta ex dissertatione ad Lauream in Facultate Philosophica Pontificiae Universitatis Gregorianae)
  • Robert Cummings Neville : Paul Weiss's Philosophy in Process, Review of Metaphysics, 24 (December 1970), 276-301
  • Richard J. Bernstein: The philosophy of Paul Weiss, Philosophy Education Society, Washington 1972 (Review of metaphysics, a philosophical quarterly, v. 25, suppl.)
  • Thomas Krettek (Ed.): Creativity and common sense. Essays in honor of Paul Weiss, State University of New York Press Albany 1987 (contains a bibliography by Paul Weiss)
  • Lewis Edwin Hahn (Ed.): The Philosophy of Paul Weiss, Open Court, LaSalle 1995 (Library of Living Philosophers, Volume 23) ( list of articles )
  • Kevin Kennedy: Paul Weiss's Method (s) and System (s), The Review of Metaphysics 50 (September 1996), 5 - 33, ( online )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Weiss: Separate and Equal, but Integrated . Preview at JSTOR.
  2. ^ Robert C. Neville: Reconstruction of Thinking: Self Development in Zen, Swordsmanship, and Psychotherapy, SUNY Press, New York 1981, 239ff
  3. ^ Paul Weiss: Being and Other Realities, Open Court, La Salle, IL 1995, 32-34
  4. ^ Answer by Paul Weiss to the contribution by Andrew Reck (The five Ontologies of Paul Weiss), in: Lewis Edwin Hahn (Ed.): The Philosophy of Paul Weiss, Open Court, LaSalle 1995, 153-158
personal data
SURNAME Weiss, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weiss, Peretz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH May 19, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH July 5, 2002
Place of death Washington, DC