Bernulf Kanitscheider

Bernulf Kanitscheider (born September 5, 1939 in Hamburg ; † June 21, 2017 ) was a philosopher and scientific theorist . He wrote on natural philosophy , mainly on questions of cosmology , the philosophy of life and an "enlightened hedonism ".

Career

Kanitscheider studied philosophy, mathematics and physics at the University of Innsbruck and received his doctorate there in 1964 on the subject of the problem of consciousness . At the same university he completed his habilitation in 1970 on the subject of "Geometry and Reality". In 1974 he was appointed to the chair for philosophy of natural science at the University of Giessen . Kanitscheider retired in October 2007.

He was co-editor of the journals Enlightenment and Criticism and Philosophia naturalis as well as a member of the advisory board of the journals Folia Humanistica , Argumentos de Razón Técnica , knowledge and journal for general philosophy of science. He was also a member of the scientific advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation and was a member of the Science Council of the Society for the Scientific Investigation of Parasciences and the Society for Critical Philosophy Nuremberg .

In his natural philosophy he represented a consistent naturalism , according to which even the cultural achievements of human beings - the subject of the humanities - merely represent "organizational forms of spontaneous order formation on an ontologically early layer of matter".

Since the mid-1990s, the thematic focus of Kanitscheider's publications on practical philosophy has shifted . His book Das Hedonistische Manifest (2011) can be regarded as the conclusion of this creative period . A key message was z. For example : " Julien Offray de La Mettrie was undoubtedly the most uncompromising and frank defender of the lust for life among the philosophers." Besides La Mettrie, it is above all the Marquis de Sade , whose position on hedonism Kanitscheider time and again, also in The Matter and Its Shadows (2007), ventilated. The La Mettrie connoisseur Bernd A. Laska criticized Kanitscheider's efforts to use Sade alongside La Mettrie as the ancestor of a hedonistic ethic as inconsistent.

In many of his monographs, but especially in “Small Philosophy of Mathematics”, Kanitscheider argues that the formal rigor of mathematics can serve as a model and orientation point for science in general. In addition, he shows that the aporias of mathematics that are sometimes emphasized by the humanities (such as certain problems in set theory or the work of Kurt Gödel) neither fundamentally disavow the validity of mathematical-logical thinking nor that they cannot be formally precisely described as problems. At the same time, he tries to show that scientific methods that are decidedly different from formal logic, such as phenomenology, do not come close to the precision of mathematical-logical methods, despite the phenomenologists' claims to the contrary.

Books

• Geometry and reality. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1971, ISBN 978-3-428-02495-7 .
• From absolute space to dynamic geometry. Bibliographisches Institut, Zurich 1976, ISBN 978-3-411-01506-1 .
• Matter - Life - Spirit. To the problem of the reduction of the sciences. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1979, ISBN 3-428-04336-7 .
• Philosophy and modern physics. Systems, structures, syntheses. WBG, Darmstadt 1979, ISBN 978-3-534-00808-7 .
• Theory of Science of Natural Science. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1981, ISBN 978-3-11-006811-5 .
• Modern natural philosophy. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 1984, ISBN 978-3-88479-076-2 .
• Einstein's worldview. CH Beck, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-406-33002-9 .
• Cosmology: history and systematics from a philosophical perspective . Reclam, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 978-3-15-008025-2 (new edition 2013).
• From the mechanistic world to the creative universe. Towards a new philosophical understanding of natural science . WBG, Darmstadt 1993, ISBN 978-3-534-11296-8
• In search of meaning. Insel, Frankfurt / M. 1995, ISBN 3-458-33448-3 .
• Inside nature. WBG, Darmstadt 1996, ISBN 978-3-534-23381-6 (special edition 2010).
• Bernulf Kanitscheider, Karl Grammer (ed.): Love, lust and passion. Sexuality in the mirror of science . with the assistance of Berthold Suchan. Hirzel , Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-7776-0795-9 (Edition Universitas).
• Drug consumption. Fight or Release? Hirzel, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-7776-0999-4 .
• with Bettina Dessau: Of lust and joy. Insel, Frankfurt / M. 2000, ISBN 3-458-34258-3 .
• Matter and its shadows. Naturalistic philosophy of science . Alibri Verlag, Aschaffenburg 2007, ISBN 3-86569-015-7 .
• Disenchanted world. About the meaning of life in ourselves - a polemic . Hirzel, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-7776-1603-2 .
• The hedonistic manifesto . Hirzel, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-7776-2107-4 .
• Nature and number. The mathematisability of the world. Springer Spectrum, Berlin / Heidelberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-642-37707-5 .
• Small philosophy of mathematics . Hirzel, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-7776-2637-6 .

Appreciation

• Martin Mahner in: Bernulf Kanitscheider (1939–2017) , skeptiker, 3/2017, p. 142.

Web links

• Literature by and about Bernulf Kanitscheider in the catalog of the German National Library
• Interview with Bernulf Kanitscheider: Plea for "enlightened hedonism"
• Interview humanistic press service
• Interview Sueddeutsche Zeitung Wissen (from October 17, 2008)
• Bernulf Kanitscheider: Hedonism - a naturalistic ethic. In: Enlightenment and Criticism, special issue 14/2008, pp. 32–43.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ https://www.giordano-bruno-stiftung.de/meldung/nachruf-bernulf-kanitscheider
2. ↑ conflict or cooperation? About the relationship between the natural sciences and the humanities
3. ↑ Bernulf Kanitscheider: The hedonistic manifesto . Hirzel, Stuttgart 2011, p. 111.
4. ↑ Bernulf Kanitscheider: Matter and its shadows. Alibri, Aschaffenburg 2007, pp. 256-261.
5. ↑ Bernd A. Laska: La Mettrie - a deliberately unknown acquaintance. On the subject of Enlightened Hedonism and the Second Enlightenment . In: Enlightenment and Criticism. Journal for free thinking and humanistic philosophy. Special issue 14/2008, pp. 64–84.