Max Semper

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Max Semper (born August 29, 1870 in Altona , † February 24, 1952 in Valley ) was a German geologist and paleontologist .

Career

Semper studied from 1891 at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , where he received his doctorate on the climate of the Eocene under Karl Alfred von Zittel in 1896 and was then an assistant. In 1899 he qualified as a professor at the TH Aachen (via brachiopods ), where he became an associate professor in 1922 and a full professor in 1924. In 1935 he retired.

Among other things, he dealt with paleoclimatology, geological methodology and wrote a book about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as a geologist, which arose from an order from the Goethe National Museum in Weimar to organize its geological estate and collection. Semper came to a pessimistic attitude to the idea of ​​a scientific progress in geology, whereupon among other things the contradictions occurring in his palaeoclimatic investigations led him (which found their resolution only much later in the plate tectonics) and for which he also an example in the Neptunism-Plutonismus Eighteenth-century debate in which Goethe was involved. He also advocated modifications of Darwin's selection theory from paleontological studies and was a fierce critic of Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift.

In 1930, after a trip to the Orient, he published a cultural anthropological book Races and Religions in the Ancient Near East . Later in the 1930s, he advocated National Socialist ideas.

He had been an honorary member of the Paleontological Society since 1950 .

Fonts

  • The Geological Studies of Goethe: Contributions to the biography of Goethe and to the history and methodology of geology, Leipzig, Veit and Comp., 1914
  • Races and Religions in the Ancient Near East, Heidelberg 1930, Online
  • Scientific and moral goals of future Germanness, Munich, Lehmanns 1920
  • The climate problem of the past. Geolog. Rundschau, Volume 1, 1910, pp. 57-80
  • Comments on the history of geology and the teachings resulting from it, Geologische Rundschau, Volume 2, 1911, pp. 263–277
  • On species formation through pseudospontaneous evolution, Centralblatt für Mineralogie, Geologie und Paläontologie, 1912, pp. 140–151, correction in the year 1913, p. 27
  • Basics of paleogeographical investigations, Centralblatt für Mineralogie, Geologie und Paläontologie, 1908, pp. 434–445
  • The palaeothermal problem, especially the climatic conditions of the Eocene in Europe and in the polar region, Journal of the German Geological Society, Volume 48, 1896, pp. 261-349, corrections and additions, Volume 51, 1899, p. 185
  • History of the Paap family and the Joh. W. Paap woolen yarn factory in Altona , manuscript 1950

literature

  • Gottfried Hofbauer: Max Semper's failed attempt to establish geological historiography as historical epistemology . 2006 ( online, pdf ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Directory of professors at the TH Aachen
  2. ↑ What is a working hypothesis? , Centralblatt für Mineralogie, Geologie und Paläontologie, 1917, pp. 146-163
  3. ↑ Ulrich Kalkmann: The Technical University of Aachen in the Third Reich (1933-1945) , Verlag Mainz, Aachen 2003, p. 483. In 1936, Semper published an essay Geistige Rassenhygiene , Z. für die Gesamt Naturwiss., Volume 2, 1936/7, Pp. 388, 467
personal data
SURNAME Semper, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German geologist and paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 29, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Altona
DATE OF DEATH February 24, 1952
Place of death Valley