Hermann Schneider (philosopher)

Hermann Louis Heinrich Schneider (born April 29, 1874 in Pforzheim ; † October 26, 1953 in Delmenhorst ) was a German psychiatrist , philosopher and educator . He taught as a professor at the University of Leipzig .

Life

Schneider's father was a wholesale merchant, so Hermann Schneider was wealthy. He grew up in Alexandria in Egypt, where he attended the German School . From 1883 to 1892 he attended high school in Pforzheim. He studied medicine at the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich and obtained his license to practice medicine in the summer of 1897 . Early 1898 Schneider at Vincenz Czerny Dr. med. PhD. Until October 1898 he continued his education in London and Paris. Until November 1901 he was an assistant at the psychiatric clinic in Heidelberg , at the pharmacological institute in Marburg , at the psychiatric clinics of the Charité and with Emanuel Mendel in Berlin. In his assistantship he undertook "psychiatric, psychological and physiological studies" according to his own statements. In 1901 he settled in Freiburg im Breisgau as a specialist in nervous and mental diseases . At that time he also attended lectures in philosophy with Heinrich Rickert at the University of Freiburg . In March 1903 he gave up the medical practice and went to Leipzig , where he gave lectures and seminars a. a. visited with Max Heinze , Wilhelm Wundt , Karl Lamprecht and Albert Köster . In April 1904 Schneider was with the dissertation The position Gassendi to DeskArtes Dr. phil. PhD. The “external cause” was the “invitation to tender for the Krug scholarship for 1903 by the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Leipzig”.

In 1905 he received his habilitation in philosophy in Leipzig ; the title of the habilitation thesis was The causal thinking in German sources on the history and literature of the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries . Hans Volkelt had criticized this study as a "historical work undertaken with a philosophical spirit". The trial lecture as a private lecturer took place under the title of Goethe's guiding principles of natural philosophy . In 1911 Hermann Schneider became a non-official associate professor for philosophy in Leipzig (inaugural lecture: Jesus as a philosopher ). 1922 he was also the Saxon Ministry of the teaching license of philosophy of history granted. In 1923 he became an associate professor for philosophy and education. The appointment took place under the influence of social democratic protection on August 25, 1923, although the faculty had highlighted his incompetence in pedagogical questions. In 1939 he retired and his associate professor was no longer available.

For almost two decades, from 1912 to 1931, he worked on his main work, The Cultural Achievements of Mankind . As in other works, his thematic focus on the representation of the respective contributions of individual peoples to the culture of mankind is recognizable.

Political position

Schneider is to be assigned to the "liberal" philosophers; but he turns against capitalism and a "western-liberal [s] system of selfishness". Tilitzki speaks of an "anti-Christian, anti-bourgeois and a violent anti-monarchist basic attitude directed against Wilhelm II. " Schneider was initially close to the SPD, considered “capitalism the basic evil” and accused “the Anglo-Saxons” of “having in their uninhibited materialism 'over-Jews' the Jews” ”. The November revolution of 1918 overturned the bourgeois class state "long since ripe for breakage"; he hoped for "socialism without Marxism". Karl Marx was a pupil of Fichte and the “closed commercial state” was a product of Marxism.

Schneider postulated that the high cultural achievements are not based on "racial purity", but on "mixing". Shortly before the National Socialists came to power , he expressed a view that was in contradiction to racial theory. Tilitzki attributes to him to have resisted "anti-Semitism", but to have been "in no way philo-Semitic". Schneider adds an epilogue to modern Judaism to his cultural history of the Jews and Babylonians from 1910 , which gives ambivalent evaluations: Jews as “individual atomists” are “parasitic beneficiaries of the bourgeois-democratic social form, capitalism and cosmopolitanism” - but because of “modern Judaism” the "immunity against the Christian churches" also "ally of progress". With his sentence, Hermann Schneider denied that new cultural achievements would remain possible if there were new mixes of peoples, the formulations of Oswald Spengler . Even if Schneider was in contradiction to Nazi propaganda, there are anti-Semitic views in his writings (especially in Education for Being German ) and the call for the cultural identity of the Jews to be abandoned.

Schneider was a member of the NSDAP from the beginning of 1933 and also joined the NSLB . He signed the confession of the German professors about Adolf Hitler .

Fonts (selection)

• About stopping liver and kidney bleeding with steam and hot air. Laupp, Tübingen 1898, urn : nbn: de: bvb: 355-ubr10481-8 ( medical dissertation, University of Heidelberg, 1898; published in: Contributions to clinical surgery. Vol. 21, no . 3, pp. 805 ff.) .
• Gassendi's position on Deskartes. Orphanage, Halle a. S. 1904 (PhD thesis, University of Leipzig, 1904).
• Causal thinking in German sources on the history and literature of the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries. Gotha 1905.
• Culture and Thought of the Ancient Egyptians. Leipzig 1907.
• Culture and thought of the Babylonians and Jews. Leipzig 1910.
• Religion and philosophy. Your essence and your tasks in the present. Leipzig 1912; 2nd edition 1924.
• Metaphysics as an exact science. 3 booklets. Leipzig 1919–1920.
• Philosophy of history. Volume I: History of the Science of History. Wroclaw 1923.
• Philosophy of history. Volume II: Logic and Laws of History. Wroclaw 1923.
• On the reform of the private lecturer system. In: Academic News. Volume 5/7, 1923-24, pp. 40-42.
• Education to be German. Wroclaw 1925.
• The law of the transition of intellectual achievement to the masses. In: Japanese-German journal for science and technology. Volume 3, 1925, pp. 14-26.
• The cultural achievements of humanity. 2 volumes. Leipzig 1927/1931.
• Basic science. The non-psychological science of science. Kiel 1957.

literature

• The anti-Spengler. Hermann Schneider was born a hundred years ago. In: The world . April 29, 1974.
• Carsten Heinze : The pedagogy at the University of Leipzig in the time of National Socialism 1933-1945. Bad Heilbrunn / Obb. 2001.
• Christian Tilitzki : The German university philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. 2 parts. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-05-003647-8 , pp. 109 f., 381–383, 434–436, etc.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hermann Schneider in the catalog of the German National Library
• Hermann Schneider in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig
• Overview of Hermann Schneider's courses at the University of Leipzig (summer semester 1905 to summer semester 1914)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Tilitzki, p. 111
2. ↑ ^{a b} CV. In: Hermann Schneider: The position of Gassendis to Deskartes. Orphanage, Halle a. S. 1904 (dissertation, University of Leipzig, 1904).
3. ↑ Title page of the dissertation in Heidelberg with a text on the pacification of liver and kidney bleeding with steam and hot air
4. ↑ Catalog card for the dissertation , dissertation catalog of the University Library of Basel, accessed on April 12, 2016.
5. ↑ Rudolph F. Pfaff: The differences between Descartes' natural philosophy and that of Gassendi's and the contrast between the two philosophers in general. Ayer Publishing 1964, p. 2
6. ^ Hermann Schneider in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig
7. ↑ Publication: Goethe's guiding principles in natural philosophy. An introduction to scientific works. Gose & Tetzlaff, Berlin undated (1905), 25 pages.
8. ↑ Tilitzki, p. 111 f. and 382 f.
9. ^ Tilitzki, p. 850
10. ^ Tilitzki, p. 72
11. ^ N. Tilitzki, p. 382
12. ^ Tilitzki, p. 112
13. ^ So Tilitzki, p. 30, with reference to Schneider 1925, pp. 107-109
14. ↑ ^{a b} Tilitzki, p. 381
15. ^ Tilitzki, p. 434
16. ^ Tilitzki, p. 436
17. ↑ cf. Lit. 1974
18. ^ Norbert Kapferer : The Nazification of Philosophy at the University of Breslau, 1933–1945. Lit, Münster 2001, p. 54.