Günther Jacoby

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Friedrich Günther Jacoby (born April 21, 1881 in Königsberg i. Pr. , † January 4, 1969 in Greifswald ) was a German theologian and philosopher .

Life

From 1900 to 1903 Jacoby studied Protestant theology in Königsberg . He obtained the licentiate degree with a text interpretation of the biblical book Jeremiah . After the state examination for higher education in religion, Hebrew and German, which he took in 1904, he studied philosophy while teaching in East Prussia and Berlin and received his doctorate in 1906 under Friedrich Paulsen with Herder's work “Kalligone” and her relationship to Kant's “Critique of Judgment " . This was followed by two years as an exchange teacher in Paris and Glasgow and in 1908 a failed habilitation attempt in Münster. Finally, Jacoby completed his habilitation in Greifswald in 1909 with his book Herders and Kant's Aesthetics , which was published two years earlier and based on his dissertation, and the manuscript The Herders Philosophy .

After completing his habilitation, Jacoby became a private lecturer in philosophy in Greifswald. Jacoby's inaugural lecture in Greifswald on the subject of pragmatism resulted in an exchange of letters with William James , which led to an invitation as a Research Fellow to Harvard University . In 1911 he presented the work Herder als Faust , in which he tried to demonstrate by means of text comparisons that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had Johann Gottfried Herder in mind as a model for his Faust drama . After a visiting professorship at the University of Illinois and extensive lecture tours in Asia and North Africa, Jacoby served as a volunteer officer on the Western Front for a few months before he was badly wounded and dismissed with the Iron Cross, 2nd class. In 1915 the Prussian Ministry of Culture recruited lecturers for the newly founded university in Istanbul, and so Jacoby taught there until November 1918, “the ample free time for a never published opus about Herder and the re-establishment of German philosophy in the second half of the 18th century ' using. "

After returning, Jacoby joined the Plehwe Freikorps , but returned to Greifswald at the beginning of the 1919 summer semester. In March 1920 he took part in the Kapp Putsch against the Weimar Republic at the head of a volunteer company . After the rapid failure of this uprising "Jacoby only clung to old sympathies as a DNVP voter and devoted himself to his life's work, the 'ontology of reality'"

The Greifswald faculty rejected an appointment by Jacoby because "Jacoby, who oscillates between philosophy and literary history, and whom one has hardly seen because of his many trips abroad, is probably not a suitable candidate for such an increase in rank." An institution suggested by Jacoby was one The associate professor for international philosophy in Kiel was rejected because of his lack of professional qualifications, and so "the Greifswalders gave up their resistance to the appointment as associate professor simply because of the 'predicament' of the Constantinople returnees."

Forced retirement in the Third Reich in 1937 because of his grandfather's ancestry, Jacoby was only able to resume teaching in 1945.

There is an estate in the Tübingen University Library .

Appreciation

In addition to Nicolai Hartmann , Jacoby is considered to be the founder of the "critical ontology ", a form of critical rationalism, directed against Neo-Kantianism .

From an ideological point of view, Jacoby is noticeable for his rejection of democracy (“the temporary stay in 'democratic states' had 'lowered' his already weak belief in popular rule”), and in 1921 he denounced with formulations in a brochure on “English and German Manner” like “paradise of average humanity” an “English conformism” as “a Christian disguised Judaism”, which he contrasts with the freedom of “German humanity”.

The logic considers Jacoby as a purely philosophical discipline (called with him yet "Logistics") strictly by modern formal mathematical logic should be separated - a position he in his 1962 monograph The claims of logisticians on logic and its Summarizing historiography and which his student Bruno von Freytag-Löringhoff developed further in his successor.

Jacoby sees it as the task of logic to examine the term “logical” - in the sense of “consequential” - for its objective background independent of the inferring subject. These backgrounds do not form the inference itself, which he regards as subjective - tied to a psychological subject; rather, everything that is logical is based on a “subject-free objective foundation”, which is about “identities between facts”. Everything logical relates to the existence or non-existence of such identities, that is, all “concepts, judgments, assumptions, deductive and inductive inferences”. In particular, for Jacoby species-generic relationships, that is, relationships between more general issues, the genera, and more specific issues, the species, are identified by a certain type of identity and non-identity. Only this is relevant for the logic.

He sees Jacoby's understanding of logic and its subject area as well as his definition of identity in stark contrast to modern formal logic, of which he also takes the opinion that it is connected to a certain epistemological position and necessarily subject-related.

Since judgments and conclusions for Jacoby are subject-related, concepts are subject-free and objective, and since the object of logic has to be the investigation of objective conditions, logic must start at the level of concepts and not - as he sees it in modern formal logic - at the Level of statements or conclusions. A consequence of this point of view is that the analysis of statements in terms of subject and predicate (type and genus) and in the expression of their “identity”, as performed by traditional logic in the form of syllogistics , must be regarded as the only logically correct one and that only syllogisms are valid conclusions.

The recognition of modern logic that many intuitively valid arguments - for example the argument often quoted in tradition “All horses are animals. So all horse heads are animal heads ”- cannot be proven valid after such an analysis, agrees Jacoby; in order to still be able to maintain the validity of such arguments, he assumes that the respective argument must include additional premises that are simply not expressly stated - that the argument is therefore incompletely formulated, an enthymeme .

From Jacoby's conception of logic - he speaks of the “One Logic” - the modern logic working with formal and mathematical methods stands out, for example in propositional logic , predicate logic or modal logic . Jacoby regards the former as mathematical disciplines, as individual sciences, which cannot lay claim to the knowledge of “true logic” and which should be subordinated to philosophy.

In his work, The Claims of Logisticians on Logic and its Historiography, he attributes the fact that modern formal logic was already accorded such a high priority by philosophy during Jacoby's lifetime and that the recognition of his interpretation of traditional logic was declining Representatives of modern logic, partly from motives of positivistic enmity with philosophy, partly from “denominational motives”, but also driven by “need for recognition”, “immaturity” and “association consciousness”, would have built a global propaganda machine to collectively “as exponents of the ideology of an invisible international Corporations "first" character assassination, then substance assassination "on the philosophical logic and finally to be able to inherit it.

Remarks

  1. ^ Christian Tilitzki : The German University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. Part 1. , Berlin Akademie 2002, ISBN 3-05-003647-8 , page 272.
  2. ^ Christian Tilitzki: The German University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. Part 1. , Berlin Akademie 2002, ISBN 3-05-003647-8 , page 272f.
  3. ↑ a b c Christian Tilitzki: The German university philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. Part 1. , Berlin Akademie 2002, ISBN 3-05-003647-8 , page 273f.
  4. ↑ Signature: Md 1077 and Md 1078, Federal Archives, Central Database of Legacies . Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  5. ↑ quoted from Christian Tilitzki: The German University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. Part 1. , Berlin Akademie 2002, ISBN 3-05-003647-8 , page 274
  6. ^ Günther Jacoby: English and German man style. Moninger Greifswald 1921 (= German Collection Volume 1), quoted from Christian Tilitzki: The German university philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. Part 1. , Berlin Akademie 2002, ISBN 3-05-003647-8 , page 275
  7. ↑ “Behind what is rescale there is a subject-bound deductive reasoning that is open or hidden. And behind it, as its subject-free, objective foundation, stand the identities between facts. "( The claims of logisticians on logic and its historiography , page 10)
  8. ↑ The claims of the logisticians on logic and its historiography , page 10
  9. ↑ "[Logic] works in conceptual pyramids, i. H. in identity and non-identity relationships in the sequence of stages between more general facts as genera and more specific as types "( The claims of logisticians on logic and its historiography , page 12)
  10. ↑ "[T] he logic of the second half of the 19th century [began], according to its epistemological attitude, subject-bound and accordingly, as in its wake still logistics today, proceeded from the judgments that existed only for us." ( The claims the logistician on logic and its historiography , page 19)
  11. ↑ “Conceptual logic applies to identities between relations as well as to those between subjects and predicates. Here it subsumes subjects as species or individuals under their inherent predicates as genera, there relations as species under their inherent relational genera. Subsumption is the same both times. ”( The claims of logisticians on logic and its historiography , page 53)
  12. ↑ "Nichtsyllogistische conclusions contradict itself." ( Claims, the logistics of the logic and its history , page 133)
  13. ↑ a b "The demands of logisticians on logic and its historiography" , page 151
  14. ↑ "The claims of logisticians on logic and its historiography" , page 152, there also: "In the historiography of logistics, its propagandists are often Catholic clergy."
  15. ↑ a b c d "The demands of logisticians on logic and its historiography" , page 152

Works

  • Glosses on the latest critical lists of the composition of the book Jeremja (Capp. 1–20) , Königsberg 1902
  • The pragmatism. New paths in science teaching abroad. An appreciation , Leipzig 1909
  • Herder as a fist. An investigation , Felix Meiner Leipzig 1911
  • English and German man , Moninger Greifswald 1921 (= German collection, volume 1)
  • General ontology of reality , 2 volumes, Halle 1925 and 1955, new edition: Niemeyer Tübingen 1993, ISBN 3-484-70151-X (volume 1), ISBN 3-484-70152-8 (volume 2)
  • Memorandum on current university philosophy in the German Democratic Republic , 1955
  • The demands of logisticians on logic and its historiography , Kohlhammer Stuttgart 1962

literature

  • E. Albrecht: “On the role of ontology in late bourgeois philosophy. Thoughts on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Günther Jacoby (1881–1969) ”, German Journal for Philosophy , 29 (1981), pages 854–858
  • Bruno von Freytag Löringhoff:  Jacoby, Günther. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , p. 253 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Bruno von Freytag-Löringhoff: "Günther Jacoby 80 years old", Journal for Philosophical Research , 15 (1961), pages 237–250
  • Christian Tilitzki: The German university philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. Part 1. , Berlin Akademie 2002, ISBN 3-05-003647-8 , pages 272-276
  • Hans-Christoph Rauh:  Jacoby, Günther . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 . review

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Jacoby, Günther
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jacoby, Friedrich Günther (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH April 21, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Koenigsberg i. Pr.
DATE OF DEATH 4th January 1969
Place of death Greifswald