Hans-Dieter Bahr

Hans-Dieter Bahr (born July 5, 1939 in Berlin ) is a German philosopher and university professor . He has been living in Tübingen since 2000 .

Life and education

Hans-Dieter Bahr studied philosophy and literature at the University of Tübingen , the Free University of Berlin and at the Sorbonne in Paris . During his studies (especially with Walter Schulz ) the focus was on German Idealism and the Left Hegelian School. In 1968 he did his doctorate with Ernst Bloch in Tübingen on Arthur Schopenhauer's aesthetics, which he largely tried to interpret in terms of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School .

In 1971 he received a position as assistant professor at the Free University of Berlin, and since 1973 he has held the chair for epistemological and social theory at the University of Bremen. The focus of these years was initially on developing a critical philosophy of technology . In this context, he also dealt with the representatives of contemporary French philosophy ( Foucault , Deleuze , Derrida and others), who at the same time brought him closer to a completely different reading of the German tradition between Nietzsche and Heidegger .

Between 1981 and 1983 he was visiting professor at the Facoltà di Architettura in Milan on problems of architecture - aesthetics . There, the question of structured spaces that could not be adequately determined either by location, residency or immanence, or by the path, the being on the move, the transcendence, resulted in a preoccupation with the topic of hospitality. More intensive studies of phenomenology and hermeneutics enabled him to introduce the new area of ​​"xenosophy" into philosophy with the topic of hospitality. The aim was to uncover being a guest as an existential structure of existence that could no longer be grasped with the monisms and dualisms of modern subject theories.

In 1984 he accepted an appointment at the University of Vienna, where he held the chair in "History and Systems of Philosophy" until 2000. This time was accompanied by further studies on the history of philosophy, especially with regard to aesthetics, the phenomenology of time and ontology . With the intention of overcoming nihilistic thinking, he tried to gain a different understanding of “nothing”, which is not determined by absolute lack and the negation of beings, but rather exposes an openness that “is not” and in the Parmenidic sense hence the finiteness of being as it differs from the limitation of beings.

He has lived in Tübingen since his retirement in order to pursue these focal points. They were expanded by an occupation with a possible philosophy of the landscape, which, compared to the traditional natural philosophy , will require a changed concept of space .

Fonts (selection)

Monographs

• Time of leisure - time of the muses . Tübingen: Attempto Verlag 2008. 235 pp. ISBN 978-3-89308-408-1
• The strangeness of the guest . Vienna: Passagen Verlag 2005. 168 pp. ISBN 978-3-85165-677-0
• The Babylonian Logos. Media, times, utopias. Vienna: Passagen Verlag 2005. 192 pp. ISBN 978-3-85165-626-8
• Think death . Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2002. 164 pp. ISBN 3-7705-3651-7
• The language of the guest . A metaethics. Leipzig: Reclam Verlag 1994. 493 pp. ISBN 3-379-01500-8
• About handling machines . Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag 1983. 512 pp. ISBN 3-88769-011-7
• The presence of the guest - draft of a xenosophy , Verlag Traugott Bautz, Norhausen 2012, ISBN 978-3-88309-761-9 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans-Dieter Bahr in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage of Prof. Dr. Hans-Dieter Bahr
• Two lectures by Hans-Dieter Bahr - audio documentation