Paul Natorp

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Paul Natorp

Paul Gerhard Natorp (born January 24, 1854 in Düsseldorf ; † August 17, 1924 in Marburg ) was a German philosopher and educator who is known as a co-founder of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism .

Life

Paul Natorp was the son of the Protestant pastor Adelbert Natorp and his wife Emilie Keller. From 1871 he studied music, history, classical philology and philosophy in Berlin , Bonn and Strasbourg . During his studies in 1872 he became a member of the Alemannia Bonn fraternity . He completed his historical dissertation in Latin in 1876 in Strasbourg with the positivist Ernst Laas . After four years as a private tutor, he became an assistant librarian in Marburg , where he completed his habilitation under Hermann Cohen in 1881 .

In 1885 he became an associate professor and in 1893 he was appointed professor for philosophy and education in Marburg, which he held until his retirement in 1922.

In the winter semester of 1923/24 Natorp had an intensive exchange of ideas with Martin Heidegger, who was called to Marburg , whose work on Duns Scotus (and Thomas von Erfurt ) he had read and excerpted very early on. Politically, Natorp campaigned for left-wing liberal goals, from the emancipation of women to the abolition of the death penalty and the Prussian three-class suffrage .

Paul Natorp - in addition to the English scholar Wilhelm Viëtor - also made a name for himself as the organizer and director of the “Marburg Summer Courses” founded in 1896 by the Romanist Eduard Koschwitz . On January 24, 1924, he received an honorary doctorate from the theological faculty of the University of Marburg. He had been married to his cousin Helene Natorp since 1887 and had five children. Natorp was an ambitious composer who mainly composed chamber music (cello sonata, violin sonata, piano trio). He also wrote about 100 songs and 2 choral works. He is well known for his correspondence with Brahms, who advised him against earning his living as a composer.

In December 1945 it was decided to name a school in Berlin after Paul Natorp. On May 28, 1946, the "Celebration of the renaming of the school to Paul Natorp School" took place.

In 2012 the Paul-Natorp-Oberschule was renamed the Paul-Natorp-Gymnasium .

philosophy

In epistemology , like Cohen, Natorp represented a methodical idealism . The two tribes of knowledge of Kant, intuition and understanding, became matter and form of knowledge for him. Space and time are thought determinations of relation and size. The given becomes the given up, which is pointless to ask about. Findings are not subjective, but must be objectified in the legal determination of the phenomena. The synthetic unity is the fundamental law of knowledge, which is determined by the basic functions of the categories (quality, quantity, relation and modality).

With reference to Kant's regulative ideas, Natorp determined “the law of the ought” in the striving for knowledge of the infinite, which is to be understood as a task. From this he derived the stages of striving as drive, will and will of reason, which he combined with a doctrine of virtues. For him, what was truly concrete was not the individual, but the community. In practical terms, Natorp campaigned for a socialist educational policy that was quite controversial at the time, especially for a free elementary school and equal educational opportunities for everyone.

For Natorp, the source of religion was feeling, immediate self-knowledge. The truth ground of religion is thus subjectivity . The infinity of feeling leads to transcendence .

If one wanted to summarize the basic idea of ​​Natorp's work in one sentence, one could formulate:

  • Thinking does not just mean “relating” (Lotze), but thinking means standing in relationships (relationships).

With this, Natorp Gottlob Freges takes over - influenced by Lotze - a “conceptual foundation” program that initiated analytical philosophy through Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein and is topical again with Robert Brandom's Expressive Reason. However, while in the traditions of analytical and linguistic-structuralistic provenance that refer to Wittgenstein, the relations are viewed as “objects” among others or, with reference to common sense, are devalued as “mere” relations at all, so that with a maximum of content-related application of relations - from “structure” to “syntax”, “semantics”, “pragmatics” to “competence” and “performance” - a minimum of reflection goes along with these, Natorp “clearly and openly puts the relation at the top of all logical considerations "And thus makes it the" concept of the concept ". This transition from the concept of substance to the concept of relation was made known by Natorp's pupil Cassirer as the transition from the “concept of substance to the concept of function” - and, as physics attests to him, of undiminished relevance. He anticipates what Richard Rorty brought into his memorable and popular image of the “mirror of nature” 70 years later: namely, that “representation”, that is, the presentation of the world, does not “depict” it, but originally creates it .

From the beginning, Natorp used this basic idea of ​​his “monistic correlativism”, that knowledge as the relation of thinking to the object, also means its inclusion in the medium of thinking, at the service of encompassing the most diverse areas such as nature and culture, logic and politics above all pedagogy. All disciplines, from mathematics to linguistics and history, should have an impact on the education of the entire people and thus find their way back to life and practice. This means that the claim and scope of Natorp's work are of a significance for contemporary philosophy and pedagogy (educational science) that should not be underestimated.

Works

  • Hermann Cohen as a person, teacher and researcher  : commemorative speech given in the auditorium of the University of Marburg, July 4, 1918 by Paul Natorp; Digitized Potsdam: University Library, 2013
  • Descartes' epistemology. A Study of the Prehistory of Criticism. 1882. E-Book Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-944253-04-6
  • Religion within the Limits of Humanity: A Chapter on the Foundation of Social Pedagogy. 1894; again: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, Saarbrücken 2007 ISBN 3-8364-1341-8
  • Social pedagogy . 1899; 7th edition 1974
  • Plato's theory of ideas. 1903; again: Meiner, Hamburg 2001 ISBN 3-7873-1681-7
  • Logic in guiding principles. 1904
  • General pedagogy in guiding principles for academic lectures. 1905
  • Collected treatises on social pedagogy. 3 volumes 1907
  • Pestalozzi. Life and teaching. 1909
  • Philosophy and pedagogy. Investigations on their border area. Marburg 1909; again: Marburg 1923
  • The logical foundations of the exact sciences. 1910
  • Philosophy; their problem and their problems. 1911; New edition: Ed. And with an introduction by Karl-Heinz Lembeck . Edition Ruprecht, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-7675-3055-3
  • General psychology according to the critical method. 1912
  • The day of the German. 1915
  • German world profession. 1918
  • Social idealism. 1920
  • Beethoven and us. 1920
  • The German and his state. 1924
posthumously
  • General logic. In: Werner Flach, Helmut Holzhey: Epistemology and Logic in Neo-Kantianism. Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 1979 DNB 202772578 .
  • Lectures on practical philosophy. Erlangen 1925
  • Philosophical systematics. Reprint of the 1st ed. 1958. Meiner, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-7873-1687-6

literature

  • Franz Gundlach: Catalogus Professorum Academiae Marburgensis. The academic teachers at the Philipps University of Marburg from 1527 to 1910 . Marburg 1927, p. 300.
  • Eberhard Winterhager : The problem of the individual. A contribution to the development history of Paul Natorp , Hain 1975, ISBN 978-3-445-01244-9
  • Christoph von Wolzüge : The autonomous relation. On the problem of the relationship in Paul Natorp's late work. A contribution to the history of the theories of relation. Wurzburg 1984.
  • Christoph von Wolzüge: Creative Reason. The philosopher Paul Natorp and the end of neo-Kantianism. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , FAZ March 17, 1984, pictures and times.
  • Helmut Holzhey : Cohen and Natorp , 2 vols., Basel, Stuttgart 1986.
  • Christoph von Wolzüge: "There is". Heidegger and Natorp's “Practical Philosophy”. In: A. Gethmann-Siefert, O. Pöggeler (Ed.): Heidegger and the practical philosophy. Frankfurt 1988.
  • Norbert Jegelka: Paul Natorp. Wuerzburg 1992.
  • Christoph von Wolzüge: "Make your opponent strong". Heidegger and the outcome of Neo-Kantianism using the example of Paul Natorp. In: Ernst Wolfgang Orth, Helmut Holzhey (ed.): Neo-Kantianism. Perspectives and Problems. Würzburg 1994, pp. 397-417.
  • Ulrich Sieg : The rise and fall of Marburg Neo-Kantianism. The story of a philosophical school community. Würzburg 1994, pp. 274-302.
  • Peter Hoeres : The war of the philosophers. German and British philosophy in the First World War. 2004, ISBN 3-506-71731-6 .
  • Nina Dmitrieva: The Russian Neo-Kantianism: Marburg in Russia. Historical-philosophical sketches. Moscow 2007, ISBN 978-5-8243-0835-8 .

Web links

Wikisource: Paul Natorp  - Sources and full texts
Wikiquote: Paul Natorp  - Quotes

Remarks

  1. ↑ see Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg (HStAMR), Best. 915 No. 5723, p. 108 ( digitized version ).
  2. ^ Directory of the old men of the German fraternity. Überlingen am Bodensee 1920, p. 270.
  3. ^ Paul-Natorp-Gymnasium . In: Wikipedia . March 15, 2018 ( Special: Permanent Link / 175036169 [accessed February 19, 2019]).
  4. ↑ http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-vlib-1738
  5. ^ Excerpt, pp. 68–80, in: Hermann Röhrs (Ed.): Social pedagogy and their theory. Selection of representative texts, pedagogy. Frankfurt 1968, pp. 1-11.
personal data
SURNAME Natorp, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Natorp, Paul Gerhard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher and educator
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1854
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH 17th August 1924
Place of death Marburg