Fritz Kaufmann (philosopher)

Fritz Leopold Kaufmann (born July 3, 1891 in Leipzig ; died August 9, 1958 in Zurich ) was a German philosopher.

Life and activity

Kaufmann was a son of the businessman Gustav Joseph Kaufmann and his wife Mathilde, née. Frankenstein.

After attending school, which he completed with the Abitur in Leipzig in 1910, he studied philosophy in Berlin, Leipzig and Göttingen from 1910 to 1914. From 1914 to 1918 he took part in the First World War. He then continued his studies at the University of Freiburg. Edith Stein , Adolf Reinach and Hans Lipps were among his friends there . In 1924 he received his doctorate with a thesis supervised by Edmund Husserl at the University of Freiburg. He then became Husserl's assistant.

In 1926 Kaufmann's habilitation followed, also in Freiburg, where he then taught as a private lecturer from 1926 to 1933, according to other information until 1936. In 1936, Kaufmann was visiting professor at the University for the Science of Judaism in Berlin.

In 1938 Kaufmann emigrated to the United States with his family. As one of the most important representatives of phenomenology , the philosophical system of his teacher Husserl, he contributed significantly to the spread of the same in his new home.

After his emigration, the National Socialist police authorities classified Kaufmann as an enemy of the state: in the spring of 1940 the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin - which mistakenly suspected him to be in Great Britain - put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who would be killed in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Islands should be located and arrested by the Wehrmacht with special priority from the occupation troops following special commandos of the SS.

Since 1946, Kaufmann taught as an associate and visiting professor at Northwestern University in Evanston , Illinois. He later moved to the State University of New York in Buffalo. In 1958 he retired. In between he spent a year as a visiting professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1954 .

In 1958, Kaufmann settled in Switzerland. There he worked on his last work, a phenomenology of art.

Kaufmann was co-editor of the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and the Library of Living Philosophers .

family

Kaufmann was married to Dorothea (Alice) Lieberg in 1927 († 1953). In 1954 he married Luise Frankenstein for the second time. He had two children from his first marriage: the daughter Renate and the son Gustav.

Fonts

• The image as an aesthetic phenomenon , 1925. (Dissertation)
• The philosophy of Count Paul Yorck von Wartenburg , 1928.
• "The meaning of artistic mood", in: Festschrift dedicated to Edmund Husserl on his 70th birthday , Halle 1929, pp. 191–223.
• "The human being in philosophy and poetry of our days", in: Morgen , Jg. 6 (1930), pp. 157-170.
• Philosophy of History of the Present , 1931.
• "Art and Religion", in: Bruno Schindler (Ed.): Occident and Orient. Being Studies in Semetic Philology and Literature, Jewish History and Philosophy and Folklore in the Widest Sense. In: Honor of Haham Dr. M. Gaster's 80th Birthday - Gaster Anniversary Volume , London 1936, pp. 295-305.
• "In Memoriam Edmund Husserl", in: Soc Research , Vol. 7, No. 1 (February 1940), pp. 61-91.
• "Art and Phenomenology", in. Marvin Farber (Ed.): Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl , Cambridge 1940, pp. 187-202.
• "The Phenomenological Approach to History", in: Phil PhenR , Vol. 2, No. 2 (December 1941), pp. 159-172.
• "Thomas Mann and Nietzsche", in: MhdtUSL , 1944
• "On Imagination", in: PhilPhenR , Vol. 7, No. 3 (March 1947), pp. 369-375.
• "Goethe on the profession of man and art", in: MhdtUSL , 1949. (Reprint in Manfred Schlösser [Ed.]: On a split path. On the 90th birthday of Margarete Susman , Darmstadt 1964, pp. 239-253)
• "Phenomenology of the Historical Presenr", in: Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of Philosophy Amsterdam 199, pp. 967-970.
• "Edith Stein, Endliches und Ewiges Sein" (Review, in: PhilPhenR , Vol. 12, No. 4, June 1952, pp. 6572-577)
• "Ethics and Metaphysics. Considerations on Helmut Kuhns 'Encounter with Nothing' 1960 and 'Encounter with Being' (1954), in: ZfphilF (1956) Heft 2, pp. 279–286.
• "Karl Jaspers and the philosophy of communication", in: "Karl Jaspers and the philosophy of communication", in: Karls Jaspers, Stuttgart 1957, pp. 193–284.
• Thomas Mann. The World as Will and Representation , 1957.
• "Baeck and Buber", in: ConJd Vol. XII, Winter 1958, No. 2, pp. 9-22.
• The realm of beauty. Building blocks of a philosophy of art , 1960 (posthumous)
• "Martin Buber's Philosophy of Religion", in: Paul Arthur Schilpp / Marice Friedman (eds.): Martin Buber , Stuttgart 1963, pp. 180–207.
• "The relationship of Cassirer's philosophy to neo-Kantianism and phenomenology", in: Ernst Cassirer , 1966, pp. 566–612.

literature

• German Biography Encyclopedia , Vol. 5 (Hitz-Kozub), p. 538.
• Ludwig Landgrebe: "Fritz Kaufmann in Memoriam", in: Journal for philosophical research , vol. 12 (1958), pp. 612–615.
• Bertram Moriss: "Fritz Kaufmann", in: PhilPhenR , Jg. 19, No. 3 (March 1959), p. 423ff.
• Karl Rahner: "Protocol from a Husserl seminar with Fritz Kaufmann", in: Ders .: Complete Works Vol. 2, Freiburg im Breisgau 1996, pp. 427-430.
• Kaufmann, Fritz. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 13: Jaco-Kerr. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-598-22693-4 , pp. 314-318.
• Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 606

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Fritz Kaufmann (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .