Gerhard Frey (philosopher)

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Gerhard Frey (born October 19, 1915 in Vienna ; † June 19, 2002 in Innsbruck ) was an Austrian philosopher and science theorist .

Gerhard Frey. signature

Live and act

Gerhard Frey, son of the art historian Dagobert Frey , attended school in Breslau and graduated from high school there in 1935. After work and military service, he began studying philosophy , mathematics , physics , astronomy and chemistry in the winter semester of 1937/38 . 1940 teacher training for secondary schools in mathematics and physics. 1943 with Clemens Schäfer in Breslau doctorate in physics with a dissertation on the elasto-optical properties of Jena glasses. Research work followed at the Physics Institute of the University of Breslau and later at the Institute for Microscopy and Applied Optics at the University of Jena .

After the war, Frey was first a graduate student and later a teacher at high schools in Giengen an der Brenz , Ellwangen , Esslingen and Stuttgart . In 1951 he qualified as a professor at the faculty for natural and educational subjects of the Technical University of Stuttgart with an investigation of the law-forming linkage of the exact natural sciences , the basis of the book "Law and Development in Nature". In 1959 Frey took over a diet lecturer at the Technical University of Stuttgart and was appointed as an adjunct professor. In 1962 he became a Scientific Council. In 1968 Frey followed the call to the then newly established chair for philosophy and philosophy of science at the University of Innsbruck . He “made a significant contribution to the fact that a scientifically oriented philosophy was able to gain a foothold in Austria, which had almost disappeared from the universities with the end of the Vienna Circle, the National Socialist rule and the Catholic restoration that took place after the war."

The "problem of the structure of scientific languages" led Frey "to the fundamentals of logic and mathematics," as his assistant at the time, Bernulf Kanitscheider, noted in his obituary from 2004. And further: “Here the terrain of metamathematics was particularly important for the philosopher , such as the question of the logical structure of mathematics, the relationship between sense and meaning in Frege and of course the philosophical consequences of K. Gödel's theorems of incompleteness . ... Frey not only linked Gödel's metamathematic results with the failure of Hilbert's program of the finite axiomatizability of mathematics, but also saw significant consequences for the construction of consciousness-analogous machines. "

Gerhard Frey “was rather averse to radical fundamental solutions.” In the scientism controversy, that is, the question of the universality of the deductive-nomological method, he “did not want to simply decide against the hermeneutic-understanding method of the Gadamer school. ... He did not want to subscribe to the opinion of the then prevailing analytical direction that the natural sciences and humanities were characterized by a uniform method, but instead stuck to the idea of ​​a domain-dependent validity of nomothetic and idiographic procedures. "

In later years Frey turned back more to art. Shaped by his parents' house, he was an avid concert-goer and lover of the fine arts throughout his life . “It made sense for him to now apply his conceptual instruments to the interpretation of the fine arts. He distinguished between different levels of reflection and showed, using time-dependent interpretations, how different artistic reality can be constituted. Ambiguity and multilayeredness are inner characteristics of art, which clearly relativizes the question of authenticity in painting or faithfulness to the work in music. From this point of view, the viewer and the listener are always creatively involved and interwoven in the work of art, they play a key role in the same sense as natural languages ​​in establishing factual statements about the world. Frey's life's work is remarkably well-rounded and has a wealth of ideas for future research, even for today's reader. «With this reference, Bernulf Kanitscheider closes his obituary.

Frey's scientific estate is in the Brenner archive of the University of Innsbruck .

Publications (selection)

  • Thoughts on a Universal Philosophy. Frommanns Verlag Stuttgart 1948
  • Law and Development in Nature. R. Meiner Hamburg 1958.
  • Knowledge of reality. Philosophical Consequences of Modern Natural Sciences. W. Kohlhammer Stuttgart, 1965.
  • Language - expression of consciousness. W. Kohlhammer Stuttgart, 1965.
  • The mathematization of our world, W. Kohlhammer Stuttgart, 1967.
  • From science to art. Selected writings by Gerhard Frey, ed. by J.osef Zeiger. Inst. For Language Science Innsbruck, 1989.

Honors

  • Bernulf Kanitscheider : (Ed.): Language and knowledge. Festschrift for Gerhard Frey on his 60th birthday. Innsbruck 1976.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ University of Innsbruck, Institute for Philosophy, Institute History.
  2. ↑ Bernulf Kanitscheider: From the philosophy of science to art. A researcher's life. Obituary for Gerhard Frey. Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 35 (1), pp. 1-12, 2004.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Frey, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH October 19, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH June 19, 2002
Place of death innsbruck