Joseph Geyser

Gerhard Joseph Anton Maria Geyser (born March 16, 1869 in Erkelenz , † April 11, 1948 in Siegsdorf ) was a German philosopher .

Life

Geyser was the eldest of four children of high school teacher Carl Geyser (1838-1904) and his wife Franziska Winter (1836-1923). He was married to Elisabeth Becker (1874–1942), daughter of the painter and engraver Carl Leonhard Becker and Franziska Berke. His daughter was the federal judge Maria Elisabeth Geyser .

Geyser completed his habilitation in philosophy in Bonn in 1898 . In 1904 he became a. o. Professor in Münster , full professor in Münster in 1911, in Freiburg in 1917 and in Munich in 1924 .

Geyser was a representative of the Philosophia perennis . He had a special intellectual exchange with the philosopher Nicolai Hartmann . His international esteem is demonstrated by the commemoration of his sixtieth birthday, "Philosophia Perennis" (2 volumes, 1930), which contains 68 contributions from scholars at home and abroad. His works contain an astute examination of the neo-Kantian idealistic philosophy and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl . He discussed the metaphysical knowledge of God with Max Scheler . "Like few contemporary philosophers, it was possible for him to develop a logically well thought-out view of the world." (Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen, cf. literature)

Geyser was regarded as "the most important representative of the progressive direction of neo-scholasticism in Germany". Johannes Hessen wrote: “In the foreword to his psychology he describes as his program the amalgamation of the basic Aristotelian concepts with the results of modern empirical research. He was best able to do this in his foundations of logic and epistemology . One only needs to take this book in hand to realize that this is not a mere repetition of scholastic lines of thought, but one's own thorough research, which of course then coincides in its final results with the Aristotelian-Thomistic basic views. The fact that Geyser is also ready to disclose essential pieces of scholasticism or at least to redesign them is shown in his General Philosophy of Being and Nature , where he tries to replace the scholastic concept of substance with a new and better one. Geyser is well aware that his endeavors do not always appeal to the conservative direction. But he asks these neo-scholastics, 'to allow a place in addition to the cult of tradition for further scientific work on the problems, bearing in mind that even if the truth itself can only be one, its knowledge is always more or less historically conditioned remains and is therefore forever both extensively and intensively capable and in need of perfection '. "

student

• Nikolaus Ehlen (1886–1965), educator and pioneer of self-help settlement construction
• Franz Rüsche, professor at the Philosophical-Theological Academy Paderborn
• Johann Auer (1910–1989), theologian, who in 1936 caused a sensation with his philosophical dissertation from Geyser, "The human free will in the teaching system of Thomas Aquinas and Johannes Duns Scotus" because of the important topic and the excellent methodology. In 1975 Joseph Ratzinger was editor of the commemorative publication “Mysterium der Gnade” for Johann Auer.
• Paul Wilpert (1906–1967), historian of philosophy, translator of Nikolaus von Kues
• Albert Grote , physician and philosopher

Works (selection)

• Foundation of Empirical Psychology, 1902
• Knowledge of nature and causal knowledge, 1906
• Philosophy textbook, 1908
• The soul and its relationship to consciousness and to the body, 1914
• General philosophy of being and nature, 1915
• New and old ways of philosophy. A discussion of the foundations of knowledge with regard to Edmund Husserl's attempt to re-establish it., Münster i. Westf, published by Heinrich Schöningh, 1916
• Aristotle's theory of knowledge, 1917
• About truth and evidence., Freiburg i. Breisgau, Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 1918
• Foundation of Logic and Epistemology, 1919
• Epistemology, 1922
• Some major problems in metaphysics, 1923
• Augustine and the Phenomenological Philosophy of Religion of the Present, 1923
• Max Scheler's Phenomenology of Religion, Freiburg 1924
• On the battlefield of logic, 1926
• The Sufficient Reason Principle, 1930
• The Law of Cause, 1933
• Joseph Geyser's philosophical system. Own overall presentation. (= German systematic philosophy according to their forms). Special edition from Volume 2., Berlin, Junker and Dünnhaupt, 1934

estate

Geyser's scientific estate is now in the Freiburg University Library as a gift from his daughter Zita Dimpfl .

literature

• Fritz Joachim von Rintelen (ed.): Philosophia perennis: Treatises on their past and present. Festgabe Josef Geyser for his 60th birthday. Josef Habbel Verlag Regensburg 1930, Volume 1: Treatises on the history of philosophy (525 pages); Volume 2: Treatises on systematic philosophy (pp. 526–1244) (contributions in German, French, Spanish, Italian).
• Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen:  Geyser, Gerhard Joseph Anton Maria. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 363 f. ( Digitized version ).
• M. Ettlinger: Joseph Geyser as a psychologist , in: Philosophia Perennis , Volume 2, 1930, pp. 1131-1140
• K. Huber: Joseph Geyser's position in logic and epistemology , in: Philosophia Perennis , Volume 2, 1930, pp. 1141–1172
• L. Baur: Joseph Geyser as an epistemologist , in: Philosophia Perennis , Volume 2, 1930, pp. 1173-1196
• J. Rössli: The principle of cause and reason in Joseph Geyser , 1940

Individual evidence

1. ↑ J. Hessen: The philosophical currents of the present. Rottenburg 1940. 21.
2. ↑ Ibid. 21f.