Jürgen von Kempski

Jürgen von Kempski Rakoszyn (born May 20, 1910 in Osnabrück , † October 11, 1998 in Berlin ) was a German lawyer, philosopher and social scientist.

Life

Kempski studied law, mathematics, philosophy and economics in Freiburg and Berlin from 1930 to 1935, with Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt , among others , without obtaining an academic degree. He lived as a freelance writer until 1939 and from 1939 to 1945 he was a consultant for international law at the German Institute for Foreign Policy Research, whose task it was to support Nazi foreign policy in journalistic terms. Kempski, who himself was not a staunch National Socialist, published the brochures Greece's Way into World War I and The Attack on Copenhagen 1807 (both 1940) in this context . After the Second World War he lived as a private scholar and translator. From 1947 he published the Archive for Philosophy , which appeared until 1964. In 1950 he was one of the co-founders of the “Archive for Mathematical Logic and Fundamentals of Mathematics” with Hans Hermes and Arnold Schmidt . In 1951 he received his doctorate from Theodor W. Adorno with a thesis on Charles Sanders Peirce - the earliest German-language treatise on the American philosopher. After various teaching assignments, in 1973 he received an honorary professorship for the theory of science and the history of science at the Ruhr University in Bochum , which he held until 1988.

plant

Kempski's scientific work, which is collected in the three volumes of his writings published by Suhrkamp in 1992 , is very diverse and includes, among other things, questions of philosophy and its history, the logic of relations , the theory of action , the theory of order and its application to economics and law. One of his endeavors was to formulate a concept of action that allows a mathematical formalization and thus allows the integration of social sciences with economics. Kempski's position cannot be assigned to any school. Noteworthy is both his early attention to mathematical logic, which connected him to the circle around Heinrich Scholz (Kempski published the short-lived Frege studies in 1940. Writings on basic research and the history of logic ), for American philosophers (Peirce, Wilfrid Sellars ), which only attracted greater attention in Germany years or decades after Kempski's first hints, as well as his interest in almost forgotten German philosophers of the 19th century beyond the philosophy of life and neo-Kantianism such as Friedrich Ueberweg , who is usually only perceived as a historian of philosophy.

Publications (selection)

• Foundation of a structural theory of law (= Academy of Sciences and Literature. Treatises of the humanities and social sciences class. 1961, No. 2).

Web links

• Obituary of the Ruhr University Bochum
• Bernd A. Laska : Jürgen von Kempski: "Stirner, who likes to be laughed at ..."

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Peter Longerich: Propagandists in War. The press department of the Foreign Office under Ribbentrop . Munich: Oldenbourg, 1987, p. 52.
2. ↑ On Kempski's attitude during National Socialism, cf. Eckart Menzler-Trott : Gentzen's Problem. Mathematical Logic in National Socialist Germany . Basel [et al.]: Birkhäuser, 2001, p. 164, note 98.