Isaac Benrubi

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Isaak Benrubi (born May 24, 1876 in Thessaloniki , Ottoman Empire , † October 19, 1943 in Geneva , Switzerland ) was a philosopher of Jewish descent from the then Ottoman city of Thessaloniki. In his work he defended himself against the conventional distinction between “subject” and “object” in epistemology and proclaimed that reality only exists through both, subject and object at the same time: “I cannot exist without the universe , nor can the universe exist without me ”.

biography

Benrubi was born in Thessaloniki , in the Ottoman Empire, in 1876 . He came from an old family of rabbis and the same Jewish community with Portuguese roots that included Spinoza in Amsterdam . Benrubi studied philosophy and received his training in Jena , Berlin and Paris from 1898 to 1914.

In 1904 he wrote his doctoral thesis in German, under the supervision of his mentor Rudolf Eucken , on " Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ethical ideal" . According to Benrubi, Rousseau is the source for all German philosophy, from Kant to Nietzsche , and the spiritual father of the great poets Goethe , Schiller and Holderlin . In 1904 he took part in the 2nd Congress of Philosophy in Geneva , where he finally settled down to teach the history of European philosophy at the university there until his death. Between 1927 and 1933 he was appointed by the Prussian government to Bonn to teach French philosophy. Benrubi saw this teaching assignment as a cultural mission to promote intellectual relations between France and Germany.

In his work, Benrubi tries to go beyond the agnosticism and fearfulness of modern, philosophical reflection by building a bridge between the self and the things of the outside world in order to bring speculative and practical thinking back together and to abolish dualism. He tries to understand the universe as a whole: terrestrial unity, solidarity among the living, which recognizes the existence of a universal human race and - united in its diversity - pursues a moral value: to follow the natural duty of cosmic and human solidarity .

In a second work, Benrubi studied in depth the great movements of moral philosophy in a manuscript over 600 pages long, which is archived in the Library of Geneva (BPU) and which compares the fundamental ideas of the great skeptics , utilitarians and relativists with one another and examines them in detail - starting out from the Greek sophists to Max Stirner and Herbert Spencer , via Montaigne , Blaise Pascal , La Rochefoucauld to Helvétius and others. a. still Yehouda Heinz Zeilberger.

Works

author

Essays
  • Tolstoy . Continuateur de Rousseau . In: Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Vol. 3 (1907), ISSN  0259-6563 .
  • L'idéal moral chez Rousseau, Mme de Staël et Amiel . In: Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Vol. 27 (1931).
Monographs
  • JJ Rousseau's ethical ideal (Pedagogical Magazine; Vol. 238). Beyer publishing house, Langensalza 1905 (including dissertation, University of Jena 1904)
  • Contemporary thought of France . Knopf, New York 1926.
  • Philosophical currents of the present in France Meiner, Leipzig 1928.
  • Les sources et les courants de la philosophie contemporaine en France ( Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine ). Alcan, Paris 1933 (2 vols.).
  • Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson . Delachaux & Nestlé, Neuchâtel 1942.

translator

  • Émile Boutroux : L'idée de la loi naturelle dans la science et la philosophie contemporaines . Société Française 1901.
    • About the concept of natural law in science and in contemporary philosophy . Dieterichs. Jena 1907.
  • Émile Boutroux: De la contingence des lois de la nature . PUF, Paris 1991, ISBN 2-13-043610-2 (also dissertation, University of Paris 1874)
    • The contingency of the laws of nature . Diederichs, Jena 1911.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Yehuda Zeilberger: Isaac Benrubi, juif fidele, patriote de Genève et cosmopolite fervent. Retrieved March 2, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Benrubi, Isaac
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jewish philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH May 24, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Thessaloniki (Ottoman Empire)
DATE OF DEATH October 19, 1943
Place of death Geneva