Gerd Buchdahl

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Gerd Buchdahl (born August 12, 1914 in Mainz ; † May 17, 2001 in Cambridge ) was a German-English science theorist and science historian .

Life

Buchdahl's parents were liberal German Jews . His father Moritz Buchdahl (* 1878) came from Brilon and worked in retail, his mother Emmy was born in Hameln in 1881. Because of his Jewish descent , Gerd Buchdahl emigrated from National Socialist Germany to London in 1933, after having attended the Mainz secondary school until March 1933.

There Buchdahl attended 1934-1936 the Brixton School of Building and Engineering , which he graduated with a diploma. In 1936 he was licensed to the Institute of Builders , from 1938 he was an assistant civil engineer in London. During the Second World War he was interned in June 1940 as an " enemy alien " and deported to Australia on the HMT Dunera .

“On board ship, he was one of the authors of the 'constitution', inscribed on a toilet roll, for self-government of the internees. Kept under appalling conditions and surviving a torpedo attack, they reached Australia after fifty-seven days, there to be placed in an internment camp […]. ”

“On board the ship he was one of the employees working on the“ constitution ”for the self-administration of internees, written on a toilet roll. Held under appalling conditions and surviving a torpedo attack, they reached Australia after 57 days to be put in an internment camp [...]. "

- Nick Jardine

In the internment camp in Tatura in the state of Victoria , Buchdahl taught philosophy for the first time at the "camp university" that he founded with his help. In November 1941 he was released from internment because he was able to take up a position as a civil engineer in Melbourne , which he held until 1947.

In addition, Buchdahl attended the University of Melbourne from 1941 , where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy with special honors in 1945 . He renounced his Jewish religion in 1944 by joining the Church of England and became an Australian citizen the next year. From 1947 to 1957 Buchdahl was a member of the faculty at Melbourne University and soon headed the Department of General Science , where he was supposed to bring students of the humanities closer to the (natural) sciences. In 1947 he married the Australian Nancy Wann (* 1925); The marriage resulted in two sons born in 1950 and 1951. Also in 1950, Buchdahl's parents, who were imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp after the November pogroms of 1938 and who were able to escape to the United Kingdom in August 1939, migrated to their son in Melbourne.

Buchdahl's grave

In Melbourne, Buchdahl also obtained his Master of Arts in 1953 , while he succeeded in expanding his department to five lecturers with its own building and library and renaming it initially to History and Methods of Science , but finally to History and Philosophy of Science . 1954–1955 he attended as a lecturer at the University of Oxford and in 1958 returned permanently to Great Britain to teach at the University of Cambridge . There, under Norwood Russell Hanson , whose successor was Buchdahl, History and Philosophy of Science was included in the curriculum. Initially a lecturer, he was one of the founding members of Darwin College in Cambridge in 1964 , having taken citizenship of the United Kingdom the previous year. In 1966 he was appointed professor for the history of science and the philosophy of science ( reader in history and philosophy of science ) and was chairman of the department of the same name from 1972 to 1974. In addition, he was visiting professor in Stanford, Canada and Texas and visited Regensburg and Hanover several times to give lectures as part of the Kant studies .

From 1979–1981 Buchdahl was President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science , as well as a member of the British Society for the History of Science , the Aristotelian Society , the Centro Superiore di Logica e Scienze Comparate and the Académie International de Philosophie des Sciences .

Buchdahl's grave is in the village of Horningsea near Cambridge.

plant

Buchdahl developed, influenced by Ernst Mach's Die Mechanik in seine Entwicklung (1883), a historical approach to conveying science. This resulted in his endeavor to unite the history of science with the theory of science, to which he made important contributions, not least in 1970 the founding of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science , one of the leading journals in its field, carried out together with Larry Laudan . As in Melbourne, Buchdahl also succeeded in firmly establishing the History and Philosophy of Science department in Cambridge and expanding it into a center of international renown in its subject.

In his main works Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (1969) and Kant and the Dynamics of Reason (1992) Buchdahl succeeded in dealing with philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, both the strangeness of their views due to our temporal distance to them, as well as to work out their significance for present-day epistemological problems.

Fonts

  • History and Methods of Science . In: University of Melbourne Gazette 6, 1950, pp. 71f.
  • The Image of Newton and Locke in the Age of Reason . Sheed and Ward, London [1961].
  • History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge . In: History of Science 1, 1962, pp. 62-66.
  • Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science. The Classical Origins. Descartes to Kant . Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1969.
  • Philosophy of Science. Its historical roots . In: Epistemologia 10, 1987, pp. 39-56.
  • Twenty-five Years of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge . In: The Cambridge Review 10, 1989, pp. 167-171.
  • History and Philosophy of Science. Some anecdotal memories . In: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20, 1989, pp. 5-8.
  • Kant and the Dynamics of Reason. Essays on the Structure of Kant's Philosophy . Blackwell, Oxford / Cambridge 1992, ISBN 0-631-14815-9 .
  • Modelli di spiegazione. Per una lettura neotrascendental delle teorie scientifiche . Universita degli studi di Pavia, [Pavia] 1995, ISBN 8878302007 (collection of articles translated from English).

literature

  • Buchdahl, Gerd . Article in: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographisches Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration nach 1933 (= International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945 ). Volume 2, Saur, Munich et al. 1983.
  • Nick Jardine: Obituary. Gerd Buchdahl (1914–2001): Founding Editor . In: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32, 2001, No. 3, pp. 401-405.
  • Roger S. Woolhouse: Gerd Buchdahl: Biographical and Bibliographical . In: Roger S. Woolhouse (Ed.): Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Essays in Honor of Gerd Buchdahl . Kluwer, Dordrecht [et al.] 1988, ISBN 90-277-2743-0 , pp. 1-7.
  • Ulrich Charpa: The Cambridge 'Realgymnasium' and the 'Freie Schule' London. Historical and Philosophical Remarks on Gerd Buchdahl and Karl Popper . In: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 56, 2011, pp. 269–287.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, biographical information comes from the article Buchdahl, Gerd in Volume 2 by Werner Röder / Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): Biographisches Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration nach 1933 (= International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933– 1945 ). 3 volumes, Saur, Munich et al. 1980–1983.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Nick Jardine: Obituary. Gerd Buchdahl (1914–2001): Founding Editor . In: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32, 2001, No. 3, pp. 401-405. Online at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. Retrieved December 11, 2009.
  3. ↑ See Benzion Patkin: The Dunera Internees . Cassell, Melbourne 1979, ISBN 0-7269-6803-X .
  4. ↑ Photo of the tombstone on geograph.org.uk . Retrieved December 11, 2009.
  5. ↑ Online at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. Retrieved December 11, 2009.
personal data
SURNAME Buchdahl, Gerd
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-English science historian, science philosopher, university lecturer
DATE OF BIRTH August 12, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Mainz
DATE OF DEATH May 17, 2001
Place of death Cambridge