Johannes Daubert

Johannes Wilhelm Erich Philipp Daubert (born June 8, 1877 in Braunschweig , † December 11, 1947 in Attenhofen , Kelheim district ) was a German philosopher .

Life

Johannes Daubert was born as the son of the master furrier and later canning manufacturer Johann Heinrich Daubert and his wife Alwine Wilhelmine Marie. Wehage was born. After graduating from high school in Braunschweig in 1896, he began studying philosophy and modern languages in Göttingen in the autumn of the same year . In the summer of 1898 he continued his philosophy studies in Leipzig (among others with Wilhelm Wundt ) before he went to Munich in the winter of 1898/99 and there v. a. heard from Theodor Lipps and Alexander Pfänder , with whom he led philosophical discussions and made closer acquaintances. Through his visit to Edmund Husserl in 1902, Daubert established the contact between the Göttingen philosopher and the Munich students of Lipps, which ultimately led to the emergence of the phenomenological movement. Daubert, who never published a line in his life and also did not complete his doctorate (with Lipps), lived as a private scholar in Munich before the First World War , where he became a key figure in the local phenomenologists group . After the war he worked as a self-employed farmer (Gut Kuchenried, Freidlhof in Attenhofen near Mainburg) and, even though some studies have survived from this period (including on the phenomenology of evidence), he no longer appeared as a philosopher.

In his estate, which is kept under the signature "Daubertiana" in the Bavarian State Library, are v. a. Lecture transcripts (Th. Lipps, A. Pfänder, R. Vischer), notes as well as studies and treatises that never met his requirements and therefore remained unpublished. This also applies to his essay on the "Phenomenology of Question" written in 1911/12, which was originally planned as a contribution to Volume 1 of Husserl's Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Daubert also influenced the development of Adolf Reinach's "Theory of Social Acts" less in writing than through personal discussions and, together with it, gained insights into the action character of language at the beginning of the century, which the English philosopher John L. Austin were only repeated in the 1950s and developed into the so-called speech act theory . The first traces of a conception of language as a form of social action can already be found in Daubert's texts from 1904. Daubert's proximity to Reinach did not prevent Daubert from critically examining his theory of (negative) judgment, especially the concept of facts : For him, facts are not reality and judgment-independent existing sentences that express possible facts and therefore can be true or false. For him, the negative judgment is not due to the conviction of the existence of a negative fact, as was the case with Reinach, but to the act of negating a positive one (motivated by knowledge and interest in knowledge).

literature

• Karl Schuhmann : Johannes Daubert's criticism of the 'theory of negative judgment' by Adolf Reinach. In: Kevin Mulligan (Ed.): Speech Act and Facts. Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology. Dordrecht-Boston-Lancaster 1987, 227-238 ( doi: 10.1007 / 978-94-009-3521-1_10 ).
• Barry Smith : Materials towards a history of speech act theory. In: Achim Eschbach (Ed.): Karl Bühler's Theory of Language. Amsterdam 1988, 125-52.