Josef Simon (philosopher)

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Josef Simon (born August 1, 1930 in Hupperath , Eifel ; † March 28, 2016 in Bonn ) was a German philosopher .

Josef Simon. Signature December 21, 1994

Life

Josef Simon at a lecture in Rimbach (2003)

In 1950, Josef Simon began studying philosophy, German, geography and history at the University of Cologne. His academic teachers here included Bruno Liebrucks , Heinz Heimsoeth and (in German studies) Richard Alewyn ; In 1957 he received his doctorate with Bruno Liebrucks with the thesis "The problem of language in Hegel". After working as a consultant for the German National Academic Foundation in Bad Godesberg, Simon followed Liebrucks, who offered him an assistant position, to the University of Frankfurt (Main) in 1960, where he was in close contact with Theodor W. Adornokicked. Simon completed his habilitation in Frankfurt in 1967 with the thesis “Language and Space. Philosophical Investigations into the Relationship between Truth and Definiteness of Sentences ”; He taught here as a senior assistant and finally also a professor until he was appointed to a full professorship as the successor to Karl Ulmer at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, which took place in 1971. During his time in Tübingen, works such as the great monograph “Truth as Freedom. On the development of the question of truth in modern philosophy ”(1978) or Simon's“ Philosophy of Language ”(1981), which made him known far beyond the boundaries of the subject; important cooperation partners were now u. a. Eugenio Coseriu and Mihailo Đurić, with whom Simon initiated the Dubrovnik Nietzsche Courses, which were prominent during the 1980s.

In 1982, Simon moved to the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn as the successor to Hans Wagner , where he a. a. was acting head of the department for Kant research.

Simon's “Philosophy of the Sign” (1989) and the last monograph “Kant. The foreign reason and the language of philosophy ”(2003). New cooperation partners have now included the Bonn sinologist Rolf Trau among others and the Japanese philosopher Tomonóbu Imamíchi, in whose Eco-Ethica group Simon has been a regular participant since the 1990s. Simon was also editor of the “Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie” from 1985 to 1994, and from 1990 to 2010 he was also co-editor of the “Nietzsche Studies”.

In 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy for his life's work by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Simon was with the philosopher Gertrud Simon, geb. Prieß (1932–2013) married. Several books and numerous articles by Simons became known worldwide through translations into a total of ten languages.

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Simon's dissertation from 1957 already proves him to be an independent thinker who is able to open up "heterodox" perspectives in a constructive way: Inspired by Liebrucks, he is the first to systematically portray the central role of language in Hegel's thought. - The habilitation thesis "Language and Space" then already contains numerous theses in concentrated form that should remain constitutive for Simon's philosophical approach. The book varies the Kantian theme of “concept and perception”, but with “language” aims at the specific speech that already addresses the other, with “space” at the epitome of “non-institutionalized sensual experience” as the sphere of the appearance of something that certain speech refers to at all. If the tendency of rational forms of knowledge tends to arrive at the ultimate equation of sentence structure and spatial structure and, in this sense, to be able to regard certain sentences as true sentences, then, according to Simon, philosophical knowledge undermines precisely this tendency. And when science educates subjects whose value and self-esteem consists precisely in being mutually substitutable, philosophy draws attention to the fact that original material determinacy can not be induced in this way, but that it is the individuality, that in space , that is determinate Wise already affected subject. The philosophy sticks to the fact that real language in this sense is not a formal system of signs or even a technically controllable "communication process", but rather the speaking of the individual , which when speaking differs significantly in space from the addressee and which at the same time speaks in space That which appears relates that is supposed to be the common object of speaking for one and the other individual, but has its identity only in the linguistic "confrontation" with it.

Simon's Tübingen study "Truth as Freedom" is a critical examination of the widely prevalent conceptions of truth that aim to base them on abstract validity-theoretical assumptions and the associated suboptions of "intersubjectivity". Instead, Simon tries to go back to a concept of truth for which the key keywords are neither “correspondence” nor “coherence”, neither “consistency” nor “consensus”, but for which a real option of individual and free acceptance of sentences becomes decisive and constitutive : Truth refers to the free expression of the individual and also to the freedom to allow something to be said in such expression.

In his "Philosophy of Language" from 1981, Simon positions his linguistic thinking in relation to traditional authors such as Johann Georg Hamann , Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Nietzsche as well as in discussions with contemporaries ( Noam Chomsky , Jacques Derrida , Louis Hjelmslev , Willard Van Orman Quine , Alfred Tarski , Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). The question about the sign, which already arises here, soon becomes the main theme of Simon's “Philosophy of the Sign”, which at the same time contains the sketch of a new and independent fundamental philosophical approach. The book transformed the sign from a functional variable, ultimately understood technically, as they are known by both structuralism and semiotics, into an instance of lasting strangeness and thus a place where the “space” in the sense of the habilitation thesis is apparently unambiguous meaning continua. Simon's Kantbuch from 2003 also takes up this topic again in the mirror of the classic, the space in Simon's understanding is the principle of alienation, which I also encounter in “alien reason”, but the language of philosophy is the only one that really does justice to this principle are able - philosophical language always processes the experience of difference and alienation and accordingly defends against all appearances of identity and consonance. Simon's work deviates very far from the “conventional” image of Kant, insofar as it specializes Kant's “ pure reason ... directly to the standpoint of world orientation” (Max Gottschlich). Linked to this, however, it gives numerous impulses to understand Kant in a more colorful and “dialectical” way than otherwise happens from a purely transcendental-philosophical perspective.

Fonts

  • The problem of language in Hegel . Kohlhammer-Verlag, Stuttgart 1966.
    • Spanish translation: El problema del lenguaje en Hegel , transl. by Ana Agud and Rafael de Agapito, Madrid 1982.
  • Language and space. Philosophical investigations into the relationship between truth and definiteness of sentences . Publisher Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1969.
  • Philosophical aspects of category theory . Heiderhoff Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1971.
  • Philosophy and Linguistic Theory . Walter de Gruyter publishing house, Berlin / New York 1971.
  • Aspects and problems of the philosophy of language . Karl Alber Verlag, Freiburg / Munich 1974.
  • Truth as freedom. On the development of the question of truth in modern philosophy . Walter de Gruyter publishing house, Berlin / New York 1978.
    • Spanish translation: La verdad como libertad , transl. by Ana Agud and Rafael de Agapito, Salamanca 1983.
  • Philosophy of language. Manual Philosophy , ed. by Elisabet Ströker, Wolfgang Wieland, Karl Alber Verlag, Freiburg / Munich 1981.
    • Portuguese translation: Filosofia da linguagem , transl. by Artur Morao, Lisboa 1990.
  • Philosophy of the sign , Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1989.
    • English translation: Philosophy of the Sign , trans. by George Heffernan, Albany 1995.
    • Spanish translation: Filosofia del signo , transl. by Ana Agud, Madrid 1998.
    • Polish translation: Filozofia znaku , transl . by Jarosław Merecki, Warszawa 2004.
  • Comments on the contributions to the philosophy of the sign . In: Borsche / Stegmaier (ed.): To the philosophy of the sign . Berlin 1992, page 195 ff.
  • What is reality Lecture . Reprint of the Evangelical Academy of the Palatinate, 1993.
  • Character versions. About analytical and synthetic hypotheses . Jena Philosophical Lectures and Studies, Vol. 18, ed. by Wolfgang Hogrebe, Erlangen / Jena 1996.
  • Kant. The foreign reason and the language of philosophy , Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003.
  • Écriture sainte et philosophie critique , ed. and translated by Marc de Launay, Paris 2005.
  • Signe et interprétation , ed. by Denis Thouard, translated by Christian Berner, Marc de Launay, and Denis Thouard, Villeneuve d´Ascq Cedex 2004.
  • Philosophy as an illustration. Treatises on Knowledge, Language and Action . Published by Thomas Sören Hoffmann , Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2010.

literature

  • In memoriam Josef Simon (August 1, 1930 - March 28, 2016). Speeches held at the academic commemoration on March 28, 2017 in the ballroom of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn . Bouvier, Bonn 2018. ISBN 978-3-416-04041-9 .
  • Thinking of individuality. Festschrift for Josef Simon on his 65th birthday in August 1995, edited by Thomas Sören Hoffmann, Stefan Majetschak, Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1995, reprint 2011.
  • Tilman Borsche, Werner Stegmaier (ed.), On the Philosophy of the Sign , Berlin / New York 1990
  • Kurt Flasch: “The world is everything that is mine. On the seventieth by Josef Simon ”, in: FAZ, August 1, 2000.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary notice Josef Simon , FAZ , March 30, 2016
  2. ↑ Max Gottschlich: "Josef Simons Kant-Interpretation", in: In memoriam Josef Simon (08/01/1930-28/03/2016). Speeches held at the academic commemoration on March 28, 2017 in the ballroom of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. Bouvier, Bonn 2018, p. 103.
personal data
SURNAME Simon, Joseph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH August 1, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Hupperath , Eifel
DATE OF DEATH March 28, 2016
Place of death Bonn