Günter Ralfs

Günter Ralfs (born December 17, 1899 in Braunschweig , † April 19, 1960 in Rhodes ) was a German philosopher and student of Heinrich Rickert .

life and work

Ralfs spent his childhood and youth in Braunschweig until 1917 . His participation in the First World War ended his school days prematurely. After the end of the war he studied philosophy at the universities of Berlin and Munich, then in Heidelberg with Heinrich Rickert, whose pupil he became. His dissertation, The Irrational in Concept , which he completed in 1925, is a metalogical attempt to defend against a purely logical-epistemological neo-Kantianism .

Ralfs withdrew to the Darß peninsula on the Baltic Sea for several years in order to heal the consequences of a yellow cross poisoning acquired through the use of mustard gas during the war . During this time, in 1931, his book Meaning and Being in the Object of Knowledge was published : a transcendental-ontological discussion which, continuing the line of thought of the dissertation, bridges the gap between phenomenological perception and neo-Kantian concept formation.

After completing his habilitation in 1935 at the University of Hamburg , he turned to the thoughts of the forgotten idealistic philosopher Heinrich von Stein . Mediated early on by his teacher at the Martino-Katharineum Braunschweig , the classical philologist Richard Elster (1861–1931;), he had been studying it for a long time. In three publications () Ralfs intended to visualize his Platonic and Spinozist thinking, which seemed to be removed from the Nazi era. He also wrote the essay Arthur Schopenhauer . System and design from 1938.

In 1937 Günter Ralfs became a member of the NSDAP .

Ralf's platonic idealistic reconsideration, by which he himself let a pessimistic, anti-idealistic Schopenhauer be determined, collapsed suddenly and deeply when the war broke out in 1939, when he was a soldier. After his return from captivity, Ralfs resumed teaching in Hamburg in autumn 1945 "to give direction and support to young people" ( Hermann Glockner ). Ralf's late teaching activity in Hamburg was characterized on the one hand by the resumption of educational teaching of moral values ​​to a disaffected post-war youth, on the other hand by the need to further develop one's own teaching content.

His student Hanspeter Sommerhäuser (* 1930), who began studying philosophy, German literature and history in Hamburg in 1951, completed it with an Emil Lask dissertation in the dispute with Heinrich Rickert , which was supervised by Ralfs but was not completed in an advisory capacity due to his early death (Hamburg 1965).

Main fonts

• The irrational in the concept. A metalogical attempt (= Heidelberg treatises on philosophy and its history , volume 4), Mohr, Tübingen 1925, (dissertation University of Heidelberg 1924, IV, 91 pages, 8 °).
• Meaning and being in the object of knowledge. A transcendental-ontological discussion ; Heidelberg Treatises on Philosophy and its History Vol. 23, Tübingen 1931, VI, 146 pp.
• Heinrich von Stein as a teacher and educator . Diary entries by Richard Elster. Edited by Günter Ralfs. In: Journal for German Cultural Philosophy. Vol. 2., 1936, pp. 160-193
• Heinrich von Stein . Attempt at an interpretation. 1938
• Idea and world . The work of the philosopher and poet Heinrich von Stein. Selected u. with d. Documents of his life ed. v. Günter Ralfs. 1940
• Life forms of the spirit; Lectures and treatises , Kant studies, supplementary books, Ed. Ingeborg Heidemann, vol. 86. Cologne 1964, 344 pp.
• Levels of consciousness; Lectures on epistemology . Edited by Hermann Glockner, Kant studies, supplementary books, ed. v. Ingeborg Heidemann. Vol. 91. Cologne 1965, 284 pp.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ s. Markus Bernauer: Heinrich von Stein . Supplementa Nietzscheana. Vol. 4. Berlin 1998. XII, p. 208