Julius Kraft (sociologist)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Julius Kraft (born October 23, 1898 in Wunstorf , Hanover Province ; † December 29, 1960 in Norwalk, Connecticut ) was a German sociologist and university professor. He died on a train ride from New Haven to New York on the way back from a meeting of the American Philosophical Society at Yale University .

Life

Kraft was born as the son of the timber merchant and respected Senator Emil Kraft and his wife Elfriede in Wunstorf. He obtained his university entrance qualification at a grammar school in Hanover and took part in the First World War as a soldier . From 1919 he studied law (doctorate 1922) and philosophy, sociology and political science in Göttingen with Leonard Nelson (doctorate 1924). Then Kraft was in Vienna with Hans Kelsen ; he befriended Karl Popper , who is a distant relative of Kraft. From 1925 to 1928 he was Franz Oppenheimer's assistant in Frankfurt and after his habilitation (1928) private lecturer at his chair for theoretical economics and sociology. After the " seizure of power " by the NSDAP and the revocation of his teaching license, he first emigrated to the Netherlands and worked until 1939 as a private lecturer at the University of Utrecht . His parents fled Germany to the Netherlands in March 1939. His father was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there in 1943, his mother committed suicide. After emigrating to the United States , he worked as a lecturer (Lecturer) at the University of Rochester until 1944 . In 1944/45 he was visiting professor at Colgate-Rochesters Divinity School , 1945/46 lecturer (Instructor, Lecturer) in New York City ( Hunter College , New York University , New School for Social Research ). In 1947 he received a position as professor of philosophy at Washington and Jefferson College in Washington , Pennsylvania. In 1954 he went to London and worked on the critical edition of Leonard Nelson's works. After returning from emigration in 1957, as a measure of reparation, he was given the chair of social science at the University of Frankfurt am Main at the newly founded "Seminar for Social Studies" of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences. The chair will not be filled again after Kraft's retirement.

Kraft worked mainly in the fields of social philosophy and legal sociology, was an opponent of phenomenology and existential philosophy and advocated a strict separation between ideal legal norms and legal reality. In particular , he doubted the phenomenological criterion of evidence in view of the different conceptions of law, which on the one hand is traced back to the laws of being, on the other hand is characterized as purely positive law. Phenomenological studies of law are therefore a “derivation of conclusions from abstractions, the matter of which in and of itself is arbitrarily determined. The conclusions presented as conceptions of essence can therefore be drawn from empirical, rational as well as empirical-rational concepts. "

Works (selection)

  • The legal and sociological significance of the distinction between private and public law . In: Journal of Public Law , Volume 3, 1923, pp. 563ff.
  • The method of legal theory in the school of Kant and Fries Dr. W. Rotschild, Berlin-Grunewald 1924. Dissertation.
  • The philosophical foundations of criminal policy . Rotschild, Berlin-Grunewald 1925. Göttingen dissertation.
  • Legal sociology. In: Concise Dictionary of Sociology , 1931. 2nd edition 1959
  • From Husserl to Heidegger. Critique of Phenomenological Philosophy. Buske, Leipzig and Rascher, Zurich / Leipzig 1932. 3rd edition 1977.
  • The 'rebirth' of natural law. Public Life Publishing House, Berlin 1932.
  • The impossibility of spiritual science. Buske, Leipzig and Rascher, Zurich / Leipzig 1934. 2nd edition: Public life , Frankfurt 1957. 3rd edition Meiner, Hamburg 1977.
  • Positive Law Paradoxes . In: International Journal for Theory of Law , Volume 9, 1935, pp. 270ff.
  • Knowledge and belief . Sijthoff, Leiden 1937.
  • Philosophy as science and worldview. Published by Albert Menne, Meiner, Hamburg 1977.

Julius Kraft was the founder and editor of the magazine Ratio 1–3 (1957 to 1960, German and English)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Julius Kraft: The scientific meaning of the phenomenological legal philosophy, in Kant studies 31 (1926), 286-296, 294.
personal data
SURNAME Kraft, Julius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH October 23, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Wunstorf
DATE OF DEATH December 29, 1960
Place of death Norwalk, Connecticut