Harry Austryn Wolfson

Harry Austryn Wolfson (born November 2, 1887 in Astryna / Yiddish Ostrin in the Vilnius Governorate , Russian Empire ; died September 20, 1974 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ) was an American historian of philosophy.

Live and act

Wolfson was born as Zvi Hershel (Hirsch) ben Mendel Wolfson and then changed his name to an Anglicized form (Harry) in 1912 with the place of origin (Austryn) as the middle name. He studied at the Slabodka Yeshiva under Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Epstein . In September 1908 he came to Cambridge , Massachusetts . From Harvard University , he received his bachelor's and Ph.D. -Degrees. With the exception of the years 1912-14, he spent his entire academic career at Harvard; a biography therefore bears the appropriate title Wolfson of Harvard (Leo W. Schwarz). Wolfson was a student and friend of George Santayana and George Foot Moore . Ten different universities have awarded Wolfson honorary doctorates . Wolfson was a founding member and president of the American Academy for Jewish Research . In 1933 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1956 to the American Philosophical Society .

He taught at Harvard University , where he founded the Faculty of Judaic Studies - the first of its kind in the United States to represent the success of the 19th Century Science of Judaism program . Wolfson emerged above all with much-discussed studies on Philo of Alexandria , Chasdai Crescas , Spinoza , the Arab Kalam , the philosophy of the Church Fathers and numerous Jewish philosophers , which always carried out a strong systematization of very extensive material .

Works

Wolfson's overall project was a history of philosophy from Philo to Spinoza - an epoch that he reconstructed as a basically uniform system of religious philosophy, the possibilities of which were realized in different ways in the religious philosophies of Jewish, Muslim and Christian thinkers and which was only given up decisively with Spinoza. The implementation of this project was based on numerous volumes, about half of which were published, some only posthumously; further components of the overall plan exist in the form of individual publications in the form of articles or in unpublished manuscript form.

Wolfson's most important publications include:

• Crescas' Critique of Aristotle: Problems of Aristotle's Physics in Jewish and Arabic philosophy (1929)
• The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning , Harvard University Press (1934/1962)
• Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam , Harvard University Press (1947)
• The Philosophy of the Church Fathers: Volume I Faith Trinity, Incarnation , Harvard University Press (1956)
• The Philosophy of the Kalam , Harvard University Press (1976)
• Repercussions of the Kalam in Jewish philosophy , Harvard University Press (1979)
• The meaning of "Ex Nihilo" in the Church Fathers, Arabic and Hebrew philosophy, and St. Thomas (1948)
• The internal senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew philosophical texts (1935)
• The amphibolous terms in Aristotle, Arabic philosophy, and Maimonides (1938)
• Solomon Pappenheim on time and space and his relation to Locke and Kant , pp. 426–440 in Jewish studies in memory of Israel Abrahams , Press of the Jewish Institute of Religion (1927)

A more complete list of publications can be found at Schwarz.

literature

• Lewis S. Feuer: Recollections of Harry Austryn Wolfson (PDF file; 987 kB), in: American Jewish Archives 28 (1976), pp. 25-50.
• Paul Mendes-Flohr : Jewish scholarship as a vocation . In: Alfred L. Ivry, Elliot R. Wolfson, and Allan Arkush: Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism. Proceedings of the International Conference held by The Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London, 1994, in Celebration of its Fortieth Anniversary . Harwood Academic Publishers 1998.
• Leo W. Schwarz: A bibliographical essay . In: Saul Lieberman: Harry Austryn Wolfson Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of His Seventy-Fifth Birthday . American Academy for Jewish Research 1965.
• Leo W. Schwarz: Wolfson of Harvard. Portrait of a scholar . Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia 1978, ISBN 0-8276-0098-4
• Isadore Twersky: Harry Austryn Wolfson, 1887–1974 . In: Journal of the American Oriental Society . Volume 95, No. 2, 1975, pp. 181-183.

Web links

• Bibliography of some of Wolfson's works in the RI-Opac .
• Arthur Hyman : Article on HA Wolfson

Individual evidence

1. ^ Harry Austryn Wolfson Jewish Virtual Library on jewishvirtuallibrary.org