Ernst Tugendhat

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Ernst Tugendhat (born March 8, 1930 in Brno ) is a German philosopher and former professor at the Free University of Berlin . In his first work he was mainly influenced by Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl . Tugendhat later became one of the most important representatives of analytical philosophy in Germany.

life and work

Villa Tugendhat, where Ernst lived when he was young

Ernst Tugendhat was born in 1930 as the son of the textile manufacturers Fritz and Grete Tugendhat. In 1938 his family emigrated to Switzerland (for whom Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had built the Villa Tugendhat in Brno ), from where they moved to Venezuela in 1941.

At 15, he became interested in philosophy to care and self-study, among others, being and time by Heidegger to read what shaped him long term. At the age of 16 he moved to the USA to study classical philology at Stanford University , although at that time he had already set the goal of studying philosophy with Heidegger in Freiburg as soon as the political situation allowed it. At Stanford he also dealt with philosophy - also with the Far East. In the winter semester of 1949, Tugendhat started with Wilhelm Szilasi in Freiburg , but later switched to Eugen Fink and then to Karl Ulmer . He also took part in Heidegger's seminars, which he held in the years 1951–1952. He dealt with Pindar at an early age and tried to keep as free as possible from Heidegger jargon and to prove his skepticism towards the Greek notion of a special concept of truth that was widespread in Germany.

In 1956 he obtained his doctorate with a dissertation on the concept of the term ti kata tinos ("to say something of something") with Aristotle , and then three semesters at the University of Münster , where he came into contact with the circle of Joachim Ritter . Ulmer, who was teaching in Tübingen at the time , made him his assistant. In 1966 Tugendhat completed his habilitation in Tübingen with his work on the concept of truth in Husserl and Heidegger .

In early 1965 Tugendhat spent a guest semester at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor , where he was revolutionized in his "way of thinking" by analytical philosophy. From 1966 to 1975 he was a full professor of philosophy at Heidelberg University. During this time he became one of Germany's leading language analytical philosophers. A product of this time is his clarification of the self-consciousness problem in self-consciousness and self-determination (1979).

Due to the student movement , he decided to retire from teaching for a few years - originally to familiarize himself with social philosophy and political science. In 1975, however, he accepted an offer from Jürgen Habermas for a position at the Max Planck Institute for research into the living conditions of the scientific and technical world in Starnberg, where he spent five years. Here his focus shifted to the moral-philosophical justification problem. From 1980 to 1992 he taught as a professor of philosophy at the Free University of Berlin . One of the main focuses of his work there was in the field of ethics with the publications Problems of Ethics (1984) and Lectures on Ethics (1993). During this time, Tugendhat was also heavily involved in politics, especially in the peace movement and the asylum problem ( Reflecting on the danger of nuclear war , 1986; Ethics and Politics , 1992).

In the 1990s Tugendhat was a visiting professor at the Universidad Catolica in Santiago de Chile and gave lectures in Vienna and Prague. Since 2000, Tugendhat has turned to anthropology and mysticism . The works egocentricity and mysticism appeared. An Anthropological Study (2003), On Death (2006) and Anthropology Instead of Metaphysics (2007). Tugendhat has lived in Freiburg im Breisgau since 2013.

His sister is the art historian Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat , who grew up in Switzerland and taught in Vienna for a long time.

Social Commitment

In addition to his peace policy engagement, Tugendhat was also engaged as a human rights activist. He has been the patron of the Society for Threatened Peoples for many years and has been a member of the board of the Berlin “Atomic Weapons Free Europe Working Group” since 1982.

philosophy

Early writings

Tugendhat's early writings are strongly influenced by Heidegger's philosophy. In them he deals with the ontology of Aristotle and the question of truth in Husserl and Heidegger. In the habilitation thesis, the central definition of philosophy for Tugendhat can be found for the first time as “the idea of ​​aligning human life as a whole with truth, i.e. H. through the idea of ​​a life of critical responsibility ”.

Language analysis as "first philosophy"

An essential strand in Tugendhat's work is his program of developing a language-analytical first philosophy . He wants to overcome the traditional orientation towards being (ancient philosophy) or consciousness (modern philosophy) and transform it into the question of understanding linguistic expressions. In his 1976 lectures on the introduction to language analytical philosophy (1976) he developed his own language analytical approach on the basis of a destruction of traditional concepts and questions, whereby the previous language analytical philosophy was also subjected to criticism. The aim of the work is to develop a new formal universal science with the title "Formal Semantics", which should replace all other forms of a philosophical universal science, in particular ontology and epistemology.

Concepts on which traditional philosophizing was based, such as the concept of being, consciousness, experience and reason, can and must be clarified by language analysis according to this approach. However, Tugendhat excludes two areas of traditional philosophy from being successfully treated by analytic philosophy:

  1. the "question of the good" and "how we should live"
  2. the “non-objective modes of consciousness” such as the mood analyzed by Heidegger.

Philosophy of self-awareness

Tugendhat became further known for his philosophy of self-consciousness, which was largely influenced by Wittgenstein and which he explains in his work Self-consciousness and Self-Determination (1979). There he primarily deals critically with the concepts of Jürgen Habermas and Dieter Henrich . The aim of the work is to enable a non-circular description of self-confidence . According to Tugendhat, the contents of self-consciousness, like all consciousness of something, must be understood as propositional attitudes. He interprets practical self-confidence as behavior towards oneself and understands it - following Heidegger - as the question of what kind of person one wants to be and how one wants to live.

ethics

Tugendhat has repeatedly asked himself the central questions of ethics and revised his answers several times. In the Three Lectures on Problems of Ethics from 1981, he assumes, with the help of language-analytical considerations, that a moral norm is sufficiently justified if it serves the equal interests of the individuals concerned. He developed an alternative approach to this in his lectures on ethics from 1993, where he explicitly opposed contractualist argumentation patterns and instead tried to make the claim to justify moral judgments about the concept of the “good person” understandable. He rejected this justification concept a short time later and since then has come closer to contractualism again. This so far last phase of the development of his theory begins with the 1997 published dialogue in Leticia . His later treatises can also be assigned to this phase, some of which can be found in the volume Essays 1992–2000 published in 2001 .

With all revisions, some central elements in Tugendhat's work also persist over time. For him, when defining the concept of morality, the internal reference to the moral feelings of people has always remained essential, especially to the feelings of indignation and guilt in their function as sanctioning bodies. It is based on the individual's desire to be a member of a community. An absolute justification that goes beyond the factual morality of a community does not seem possible for Tugendhat in the modern age because religious and metaphysical traditions are no longer valid.

In meta-ethical issues, Tugendhat has always strictly set himself apart from any kind of a priori justification and advocated the thesis that the justification basis of a modern moral concept can only lie in the empirical interests of those concerned. Furthermore, he holds on to the fundamental importance of the autonomy of the individual as well as the principle of egalitarianism .

Anthropology and mysticism

More recently, Tugendhat applied the methods of analytical philosophy to basic anthropological questions. He sees anthropology as the “first philosophy” that relates to existential basic human phenomena. Tugendhat starts from the basic phenomenon of the predictive structure of human language, which he considers to be the decisive breakthrough to the human within biological evolution.

According to Tugendhat, the theme of mysticism is the mastering of human contingency. In contrast to religion, whose answers Tugendhat rejects as a mere wishful projection, mysticism does not require recourse to revelation or tradition. Rather, their possibility arises from the anthropological roots of being human itself: being gathered in oneself, which at the same time has one's own self and the world “as a whole” as its object. In this way, mysticism is able to relativize and transcend the egocentricity that is given to us by the structure of human language.

reception

Tugendhat is one of the most influential contemporary philosophers. He was one of the first to convey the continental European phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition with the Anglo-American analytical philosophy. His early works on Aristotle, Husserl and Heidegger already became standard philosophical works. His lectures on the introduction to philosophy of language analysis and the study of self-consciousness and self-determination quickly advanced to become classics, which, beyond the narrow circle of academic philosophy, also had an impact on other disciplines such as linguistics and literary studies. Tugendhat's moral-philosophical investigations have the greatest influence on the current philosophical discussion. Alongside and against the discourse ethics of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, they are recognized as the most important systematic German-language ethics draft of the present.

Awards

Ernst Tugendhat held many visiting professorships at home and abroad (Santiago de Chile, Konstanz, Prague, Goiânia (Brazil) and Porto Alegre). In 1999 he was appointed honorary professor by the University of Tübingen . In 2002 he was a fellow of the Friedrich Nietzsche College . On May 9, 2005, Ernst Tugendhat received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and in 2008 from the University of Zurich . In 2005 Tugendhat was awarded the 50,000 Euro Meister Eckhart Prize , which he donated to the “ Talitha Kumi ” school in Beit Jala (Palestine).

Works

Selection, in the order of appearance:

Secondary literature

Web links

Audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ See the problem of justification in Pindar's 7th Nemean poem. In: Hermes , Vol. 88 (1960), pp. 385-409. Also in: ET: Philosophical Essays , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1992, pp. 147-178.
  2. ↑ Hans-Martin Gauger : The Freiburg philosopher Ernst Tugendhat turns 90 , Badische Zeitung , March 5, 2020.
  3. ↑ ET: The controversy about human rights, in Stefan Gosepath, Georg Lohmann Hgg .: Philosophy of Human Rights. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1998 ISBN 3-518-28938-1 ; Excerpts in Martin Morgenstern , Robert Zimmer Ed .: State foundations and historical meanings . Series Meeting Point Philosophy, 4: "Political Philosophy". Bayerischer Schulbuch Verlag BSV, Munich 2001 ISBN 3-7627-0325-6 & Patmos, Düsseldorf 2001, ISBN 3-491-75641-3 , p. 40f
  4. ↑ For an overview of Tugendhat's philosophy cf. Stefan Gosepath: Ernst Tugendhat . In: Julian Nida-Rümelin, Elif Özmen (ed.): Philosophy of the Present in Individual Representations, Stuttgart 2007, pp. 671–677
  5. ↑ Ernst Tugendhat: The concept of truth in Husserl and Heidegger . Berlin 1967, p. 1
  6. ↑ On the following see: Bruno Puntel : Idea and Problem of a Formal Semantics. On E. Tugendhat's “Lectures for an Introduction to Linguistic Analysis Philosophy”. In: Journal for Philosophical Research, 1977, Vol. 31 (3), pp. 413-427; Ulrich Steinvorth : Tugendhat and the philosophy of language analysis. In: Journal for Philosophical Research, 1980, Vol. 34 (1), pp. 59-69
  7. ↑ See Ernst Tugendhat: Lectures for an Introduction to Linguistic Analysis Philosophy , Frankfurt 1976, p. 127
  8. ↑ Ernst Tugendhat: Lectures for an introduction to language analytical philosophy , Frankfurt 1976, p. 25
  9. ↑ Ernst Tugendhat: Lectures for an Introduction to Linguistic Analysis Philosophy , Frankfurt 1976, p. 128
  10. ↑ Ernst Tugendhat: Lectures for an introduction to language analytical philosophy , Frankfurt 1976, p. 103
  11. ↑ Ernst Tugendhat: Lectures for an Introduction to Linguistic Analysis Philosophy , Frankfurt 1976, p. 97
  12. ↑ On the following: Nico Scarano, Mauricio Suárez (ed.): Ernst Tugendhats Ethik. Objections and replies . Munich 2006, pp. 7-12
  13. ↑ first published in the essay volume Problems of Ethics from 1984
  14. ↑ See Susanne Köbele: E. Tugendhat, Egozentrizität und Mystik , Arbitrium, 2009, Vol. 27 (1), pp. 11-19 (here pp. 12f.)
  15. ↑ AGB - Klassik Stiftung Weimar .
  16. ↑ The primacy of equality or: the principle of symmetry in Ernst Tugendhat's Ethics , 134–152 and 319–321
personal data
SURNAME Tugendhat, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Brno