Joachim Kopper

Grave of Joachim Kopper in the main cemetery in Mainz

Joachim Kopper (born July 31, 1925 in Saarbrücken ; † April 17, 2013 in Mainz ) was a German philosopher and university professor in Mainz.

Life

Joachim Kopper, b. 1925 in Saarbrücken, after graduating from high school and military service 1945–1950 studied philosophy, German and classical philology in Göttingen and Cologne. In 1949 he received his doctorate on "The Metaphysics of Maurice Blondels". 1950–1952 he was a foreign language assistant at the Saint Louis and Carnot grammar schools in Paris and from 1951–1954 assistant at the Philosophical Department of Saarbrücken University . In 1954 he completed his habilitation there on "The Metaphysics of Meister Eckart " and was professor there from 1960–1965. After a visiting professorship at the University of Dakar / Senegal (1965–67), he was a full professor of philosophy at the German Sport University Cologne until 1969 and from 1969 a full professor of philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz . For his commitment to German-French university cooperation (visiting professorships in Rennes and Dijon) he was awarded the Doctor honoris causa of the Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, in 1984. From 1987 and beyond his retirement (1993) he worked as a partnership officer of the University of Mainz for the University of Dijon. His services to Franco-German cooperation in higher education were awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st Class (1993) and the appointment of Officier de l ' Ordre des Palmes Académiques (1996). He died in 2013.

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The focus of his research was the examination of Kant's transcendental philosophy and its classification in a process of self-assurance of thought that was both historical and systematic. His analyzes cover the course of occidental thought from Zeno's aporetic theory to the metaphysical thinking of Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas von Aquin , Meister Eckart, Leibniz, to Descartes ', Berkeley's and Humes' skepticism to Kant's transcendental philosophy, the further development of the transcendental concern in German Idealism, Kierkegaard and Heidegger and numerous analyzes of French philosophy in the 20th century (Sartre, Jankelevitch, ...)

Kopper develops a philosophy of self-confidence in which he traces metaphysical and ontological questions back to the basic problem of the self-assurance of thought. The basic problem of thinking does not consist in the fact that comprehension has to take place on a completely different, intuitively given material, but the material that is presupposed for comprehension is itself of the type of knowledge, although as such knowledge it cannot be directly concept . Kopper's thinking now aims to understand the historical development of thinking as a process that results from the necessity of determination that is inherent in understanding itself.

From the reflection on the ability to grasp it emerges that knowledge structured in space and time is “objectively” valid, but in principle cannot come to an end in the objective determination. Self-consciousness comes through experience to the knowledge of an order in succession and apart, which it perceives as a structured perception. In the experience, the individual contents cannot express the totality of the knowledge through which they are made possible. That the whole of knowledge enters into, or has entered into, certain perception is shown by the fact that things are extensively present to us. In the present object, however, we cannot see the reason for its determination. Our perception, experienced as structured, is preceded by something that cannot be determined, although it enables determination.

The work of Joachim Kopper deals systematically and historically with presenting this “happening” that is required to be understood. The method arises in the reflection on the ability to comprehend as the principle of the generation of knowledge in the expanded. He applies this method historically, in the penetration of philosophical thought from Zeno to Kant and beyond, and presents the historical development as the process of the coming together of thinking self-consciousness. Basic moments of the historical process are:

- the openness of the knowledge of reflection as such, which cannot be reached in the definite intuition, in the Zenonic Aporias.

- the obscuration of this openness in a thinking that posits the first act of reflection in the Zenonian Aporias, namely definite intuition, through the dogmatic assertion of the continuum, as that to which thought must adhere, without the second act of reflection, namely the ability to pursue thinking in its comprehension, to pursue further. - The dogmatic fixation of perception leads to the development of metaphysical thinking from Aristotle to skepticism. In the skepticism of Descartes and the English empiricists, the validity of the vividly given object dissolves in that the structures of space and time under which it is determined are included in the reflection.

- The transcendental thinking of the Critique of Pure Reason is the attempt to represent the understanding of the world from the principle of the ability to comprehend. In Kant, perception again seems to be dogmatically presupposed, as it actually is according to time. In his analyzes, Joachim Kopper endeavored to show that Kant's transcendental doctrine is the representation of a knowledge that cannot be explicated by the doctrine: the doctrinal representation can only be based on the conceptuality that arises from the knowledge of the particular, but the occurrence of the determination, that precedes all time and space, cannot be grasped in principle by the conceptuality bound in multiplicity. According to J. Kopper, the actual result of the Critique of Pure Reason is therefore the fundamental lack of meaningfulness of being as such, which conditions both empirical knowledge as assured knowledge and the fundamental need for human knowledge, which cannot be completed as experience. In spite of the lack of meaningfulness, the return of thought to the principle of the ability to comprehend gives rise to a new self-understanding of man, which is completely different from the self-understanding, which is based on the presupposed existence of things in space and time.

In his later work, Joachim Kopper endeavors, in the modesty that must be imposed on knowledge based on the ability to understand itself, to portray this fundamental necessity for modesty, and to come to the communication in the interior in the modesty.

Book publications

1. The structure of Maurice Blondel's metaphysics. Diss. [Mach.] Cologne 1949. Reprint: s. Point 12.
2. The metaphysics of Meister Eckhart. Saarbrücken: West-Ost-Verlag, 1955.
3. The dialectic of the community. Frankfurt a. M .: Klostermann, 1960.
4. Transcendental and dialectical thinking. Cologne: Kölner Universitäts-Verlag, 1961. [Kantstudien-Zusatzhefte No. 80]
5. Reflection and reasoning in the ontological proof of God. Cologne: Cologne University Publishing House, 1962.
6. Reflection and determination. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1976. [Kantstudien-Zusatzhefte No. 108]
7. Introduction to the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Theoretical foundations. Darmstadt: Scientific Book Society, 1979.
8. Ethics of the Enlightenment. Darmstadt: Scientific Book Society, 1983.
9. The Position of the Critique of Pure Reason in Modern Philosophy. Darmstadt: Scientific Book Society, 1984.
10. The transcendental thinking of German idealism. Darmstadt: Scientific Book Society, 1989.
11. Brief consideration of the development of European thought from Descartes to Kant. Frankfurt a. M. et al .: Peter Lang, 1997.
12. The structure of Maurice Blondel's metaphysics. Edited by Stephan Grätzel and Joachim Heil, with a foreword by Peter Reifenberg. London: Turnshare, 2006. [Reprint of 1949 dissertation]
13. The unrelated as being revealed. Reflection on philosophical thinking. Frankfurt a. M. u. a .: Peter Lang, 2004. 2nd edition 2009.
14. Imagination, faith and ontological proof of God. The question of God in philosophical reflection. (Contains the two works: "Imagination and Faith - The Unity of Jewish and Christian Thought" [first publication] as well as "Reflection and reasoning in the ontological proof of God" [revised reprint of the 1962 edition]) Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1. 2012 edition.

Web links

• Literature by and about Joachim Kopper in the catalog of the German National Library
• Obituary (PDF; 14 kB)