Hans Barth (philosopher)

Hans Barth (born February 25, 1904 in Winterthur ; † February 12, 1965 in Zurich ) was a Swiss journalist and philosopher .

Life

Hans Barth was a son of the historian and classical philologist Hans Barth. After studying law, which he completed with a doctorate in 1928 , he worked from 1929 to 1949 as the features editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , where he had been an employee since 1924. Without prior philosophical doctorate and habilitation , Barth was appointed professor of philosophy, political science and ethics at the University of Zurich in 1946.

Act

At the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , Barth was responsible for scientific, in particular philosophical, topics and in his articles he mainly followed the intellectual development in Germany, whose nationalism and irrationalism he subjected to criticism at an early stage. In 1945 he published his book Truth and Ideology , which traces the history of ideas and the problems of the concept of ideology from Francis Bacon to Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche , at the same time explicates the positions of his journalistic statements and was regarded as a standard work on this topic at the time. According to Barth's view, his presentation shows that the modern total concept of ideology, as it occurs in Marx and Nietzsche and which dispenses with a non-ideological concept of truth, refutes itself. Barth's defense of a genuine understanding of truth must also be understood in the context of the year of publication as a comment on contemporary history and as a reaction to National Socialism and Communism .

Fonts

• Thinking in time . Philosophical-political articles in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung 1932–1964. With an introduction by Hermann Lübbe . Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich 1988.
• Crowd and myth. The ideological crisis at the turn of the 20th century and the theory of violence: Georges Sorel . Rowohlt, Hamburg 1959.
• The idea of ​​order. Contributions to a political philosophy . Rentsch, Erlenbach-Zurich 1958.
• Pestalozzi's philosophy of politics . Rentsch, Erlenbach-Zurich 1954.
• with Walter Rüegg (Ed.): Nature and Spirit. Fritz Medicus on his 70th birthday. April 23, 1946. Rentsch, Erlenbach-Zurich 1946.
• Truth and ideology . Manesse-Verlag, Zurich 1945; 2., ext. Edition, Rentsch, Erlenbach-Zurich 1961; Paperback edition: Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1974; English translation: University of California Press, 1976.
• Floods and dams. The philosophical thought in politics . Fretz & Wasmuth Verlag, Zurich 1943.

literature

• Richard Reich (ed.): Humanity and political responsibility . For Hans Barth's 60th birthday. Rentsch, Erlenbach-Zurich 1964.
• Reinhard Bendix : Foreword. In: Hans Barth: Truth and Ideology. University of California Press, Berkeley [et al.] 1976, pp. Vii-xiii.
• Against the self-abolition of reason - Hans Barth, editor and philosopher , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , February 21, 2004
• «. . . because the mind itself is activity »- Hans Barth as a philosophical-political journalist , Neue Zürcher Zeitung, February 21, 2004

Web links

• Publications by and about Hans Barth (1904-1965) in the Helveticat catalog of the Swiss National Library
• Literature by and about Hans Barth in the catalog of the German National Library
• Alfred Cattani : Barth, Hans. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .