Günther Patzig

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Günther Patzig (born September 28, 1926 in Kiel ; † February 2, 2018 in Göttingen ) was a German philosopher . He was considered an expert on Greek philosophy (especially Plato and Aristotle), logic and the history of logic (especially Gottlob Frege), the philosophy of science in the humanities and ethics with a focus on bio and medical ethics.

Life

G. Patzig (l.) And J. König (r.) 1956
Günther Patzig. Signature 1994

Patzig came from a West Prussian family of pastors, pharmacists, merchants and civil servants. His father was the naval officer and admiral in World War II Conrad Patzig , his mother Gertrud Patzig, geb. Thomsen. He grew up alternately in Kiel and Berlin. From 1937 he attended the Humanist Gymnasium in Berlin-Steglitz until he was called up for military service in 1943 as a so-called flak helper and in April 1944 as a marine . Released from British captivity, he studied classical philology and philosophy at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen from the winter semester 1945/46 . In 1951 he received his doctorate there with the work The Concept of ›Usia‹ in the ›Metaphysics‹ of Aristotle , supervised by the phenomenologist Kurt Stavenhagen . In addition to Stavenhagen and Nicolai Hartmann , Josef König , whose last college he attended in Göttingen in the winter semester 1945/46, before he went to Hamburg for the summer semester of 1946, left a great impression on him. He owed his training in classical philology to Kurt Latte and Wolf-Hartmut Friedrich ; the latter was also a mentor to him in the following years. In 1950 he went to Hamburg to continue his philosophical training with Josef König and to prepare for the state examination for higher education. During this time, 1951/52, a six-month study trip (Unesco Fellowship) to India took place. In 1952 he passed the state examination in classical philology (with Bruno Snell among others ) and philosophy in Hamburg . He initially taught as a student trainee at the Johanneum in Hamburg, until he returned to Göttingen in 1953 with Josef König, who had accepted a position at the University of Göttingen, as the latter's research assistant. 1958 habilitation he there with work Aristotelian syllogism and then taught as a lecturer for his subject at the university until 1960. With the assistance of the recently exchanged to Hamburg Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker he received in 1960 a call to a professorship at the University of Hamburg In 1962 he was appointed full professor. In 1963 he succeeded Josef König in his Göttingen chair, which he held until his retirement in 1991. Patzig's students include Michael Frede , Gisela Striker , Dorothea Frede , Ulrich Steinvorth , Robert Alexy , Ulrich Nortmann and Jens Timmermann .

Visiting professorships took him to Harvard (1964), Yale (spring 1971) and Berkeley (autumn 1971), and several times (1961, 1963 and 1973) he was a guest at Oxford University. In 1984/85 he stayed at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where he and Michael Frede wrote the commentary on Aristotle ›Metaphysik Z‹ .

plant

Patzig's philosophical legacy lies, also according to his self-image, in the re-establishment of Gottlob Frege's philosophy in the German-speaking area and in his advocacy of an appropriate methodical approach to dealing with philosophical texts of the past. Both can be traced back directly or indirectly to suggestions from Josef König . It is an attitude that is characterized by the fact that, when interpreting such texts, it both relates historical-philological and systematic-philosophical questions to one another and at the same time differentiates them from one another. The efficiency of this methodical approach, the main characteristic of which is to interpret such texts sub ratione veritatis , that is, to take them seriously in terms of their truthfulness and their claim to truth, was first tested by Patzig while researching Aristotelian logic. In the First Analytics Aristotle presents logical insights, and the nature of these insights requires that the manner in which they are presented, developed and substantiated meet the logical requirements of formal logic. By virtue of a yardstick (e.g. the logic of connectives or the calculus of natural inference), the interpreter is able to look for an interpretation that is not only compatible with the Aristotelian text, but also logically correct in the matter . This procedure, which can be applied in the field of formal logic to an incomparable degree of methodological clarity and transparency, Patzig then tried to transfer to classical works of tradition that are not texts on logic. His syllogistics book, a standard work on Aristotelian logic, is therefore of paradigmatic importance for the philosophical interpretation of traditional texts in general, without prejudice to recent research results. At the same time, Patzig was one of the very few in Germany who campaigned for an understanding of the history of philosophy in which it appears as a real sub-discipline of philosophy itself.

His second merit lies in the revival of the examination of Frege's work in Germany through the edition of his most important essays on logic and philosophy of language in two widely used study editions and their introductions to them, as well as, since the late 1950s, through the treatment of Frege's writings in the academic field Lessons, but also in radio lectures for a wider public. So it happened that he was once introduced in Oxford by Gilbert Ryle as "› Refregerator ‹of Germany".

While Patzig is known in the Anglophone world for his contributions to ancient philosophy and Frege research, he is also known in German-speaking countries - and this is a third focus of his work - through his contributions to current moral problems, e.g. B. on bioethics and medical ethics (problems of euthanasia, animal and human experiments, genetic engineering, etc.), but especially on questions of moral justification, i.e. the question of the possibility of generally valid justification of moral principles. To put it briefly, they are attempts to conceive a rational “ethics without metaphysics” (the title of a book) that combines the intentions of Kant's ethics of reason with those of utilitarianism . Patzig also tried to arouse interest and understanding for utilitarianism in the German-speaking area, which was considered disreputable there for a long time.

Initially trained in phenomenology, he made the main tool of analytical philosophy, logical analysis, his own at an early age (around 1952). In addition to Frege, whose analysis of logical relationships in the area of ​​elementary predication in the course of his investigation of the concept of number in the basics of arithmetic (pp. 58–67) was a prime example of such a logical and language-critical analysis for him, the relevant work played for him Bertrand Russell, but also Gilbert Ryles and the metaphysical-critical studies of Rudolf Carnap play an important role. Already in his syllogistics book, Patzig pointed out the importance of the analytical method for philosophy and its history when it comes to tracking down errors of thought caused by “systematically misleading idioms” and rendering them harmless. Nonetheless, it should be a reasonable judgment to say that Patzig was equally close to phenomenology and analytical philosophy, but that he cannot be reduced to either of these two main currents of the 20th century. (It is therefore not surprising that he was able to tell of conversations with Martin Heidegger , whom he once visited in his Freiburg house, and, so to speak, in the same breath, of discussions with Willard van Orman Quine at Harvard University.) Rather, he carried, equipped with a striking and incorruptible power of judgment, his spiritual compass, as it were, in himself - a compass that can also be found wherever one is looking for "rationally founded answers to deep-seated questions" (to a formula he has occasionally quoted use) tried to prove, in the form of a factual discussion that starts - quite Aristotelian - from a critical examination of widely accepted theories of recognized authors.

Patzig was considered an outstanding university professor who shaped generations of students and scholars with an unmistakable weapon - clarity. His senior seminars were an institution, and it was not uncommon for one or the other student or doctoral candidate to travel to Göttingen from far away every week to take part. - "Conspicious among the beliefs Günther Patzig managed to instil in his students was the belief, perhaps even faith, in reason - the belief that rationality was a matter of painstaking, detailed, minute reflection and hard intellectual work; that it might not lead as far as one would wish, but that there was no acceptable alternative to it, in scholarship, in philosophy, or in life. "

Awards

He was a member of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen since 1971 (as its president from 1986 to 1990), the Joachim-Jungius-Gesellschaft Hamburg since 1989 and the Royal Academy of Science in Oslo since 1997. In 2009 he became a full member of the Academia Europaea accepted.

He was also an honorary member of the Society for Analytical Philosophy since 1997. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Saarbrücken . In 2000 he received the Ernst Hellmut Vits Prize from the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster ( Westphalia ). Furthermore, he received the Lower Saxony Prize for Science in 1983.

Fonts (selection)

(Patzig's list of publications [as of 2014] includes 312 titles)

  • The Aristotelian syllogistics. Logical-philological research on Book A of the “First Analytics”. 3rd, modified edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1969 (1st edition 1959).
  • Language and logic. 2., through u. exp. Edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1981 (1st edition 1970).
  • Ethics without metaphysics. 2., through u. exp. Edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1983, ISBN 3-525-33493-1 (1st edition 1971).
  • Facts, norms, sentences. Articles and lectures. 2nd Edition. Reclam, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-15-009986-2 (1st edition 1980).
  • Collected writings , Vol. I-IV, Wallstein, Göttingen 1993–1996
  • with Michael Frede : Aristoteles 'Metaphysik Z'. Text, translation, etc. Commentary , 1st volume. Introduction, text and Übers., 2nd volume commentary, Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN 978-3-406-31918-1

Festschriften

  • Michael Frede, Gisela Striker (Ed.): Rationality in Greek Thought. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996
  • Achim Stephan, Klaus Peter Rippe (ed.): Ethics without dogmas. Articles for Günther Patzig. Mentis, Paderborn 2001

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Günther Patzig: Obituary notice. In: Göttinger Tageblatt. February 10, 2018, accessed February 10, 2018 .
  2. ↑ See G. Patzig: On dealing with texts from the philosophical tradition (2002), pp. 22-25; Ders .: facts, norms, sentences (1980), p. 4 f .; Ders .: Foreword to Josef König: Introduction to the Study of Aristotle, ed. by Nicolas Braun, Freiburg 2002, pp. 7–9)
  3. ^ G. Patzig: The Aristotelian Syllogistics (1959).
  4. ↑ Volume III of his Gesammelte Schriften (1996) contains the essays on ancient philosophy based on the methodological principle outlined here.
  5. ↑ Gottlob Frege: Function, Concept, Meaning (1962, 6th edition 1986, new edition 2008); G. Frege: Logical investigations (1966, 5th edition 2003); see. also: G. Patzig: Gottlob Frege and the logical analysis of language. In: G. Patzig: Language and Logic , pp. 77–100; G. Patzig: Thank God Frege. In: Otfried Höffe (Ed.), Klassiker der Philosophie II, Munich 1981, pp. 252–273.
  6. ↑ G. Patzig, in: Marcus Bierich. In the mirror of his family, friends and companions , Frankfurt a. M. 2010, p. 41.
  7. ↑ Summarized in Volume II of his collected writings (1993).
  8. ↑ United in Volume I of his Collected Writings (1994). All the contributions previously published in the book Ethics Without Metaphysics (1971) are contained in this Volume I.
  9. ↑ G. Patzig: The Aristotelian Syllogistics , p. 156, note 1
  10. ↑ Cf. G. Patzig: Tatsachen, Norms, Satz (1980), p. 7. His work on theoretical philosophy is combined in Volume IV of his collected writings (1996).
  11. ^ Michael Frede / Gisela Striker: Preface. In this. (Ed.): Rationality in Greek Thought (1996), pp. Viii f.
  12. ^ G. Patzig: Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker as a philosopher. In: Yearbook of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences 2008, Berlin / New York 2009, pp. 146–156, here 25, available online .
  13. ↑ http://idw-online.de/pages/de/news23083

literature

  • Günther Patzig: Autobiographical Introduction . In: Ders .: facts, norms, sentences , pp. 3–7
  • Jens Timmermann: Günther Patzig. In: Julian Nida-Rümelin (ed.): Philosophy of the Present in Individual Representations. From Adorno to v. Wright (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 423). 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-520-42302-2 , pp. 557-561.
  • Jonathan Barnes: Book review: G. Patzig, Gesammelte Schriften [1993–1996]. In: Dialectica , Vol. 54, No. 2 (2000), pp. 139-142
  • Julian Nida-Rümelin: Laudation [on GP]. In: Günther Patzig: About dealing with texts of the philosophical tradition. Aschendorff, Münster 2002, pp. 11-20.
  • Dieter Birnbacher: Laudation [on GP]. In: [Saarland University:] Universitätsreden 52, 2003, pp. 13–27.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Patzig, Günther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH September 28, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Kiel
DATE OF DEATH February 2, 2018
Place of death Goettingen