Paul Oskar Kristeller

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Paul Oskar Kristeller (born May 22, 1905 in Berlin ; died June 7, 1999 in New York ) was a German-American researcher on humanism , philosophy historian and codicologist .

Life

Kristeller grew up in an assimilated Jewish family in Berlin. He was born Paul Oskar Graefenberg; his father Oskar Graefenberg died before he was born. Kristeller took the name of his stepfather Heinrich Benjamin Kristeller (1871-1942) in 1919. This was the nephew of the gynecologist Samuel Kristeller . Kristeller attended the Mommsen-Gymnasium in Berlin from 1911 to 1923 . There he had nine years of Latin and six years of Greek, one of his teachers was the historian of philosophy Ernst Hoffmann , with whom Kristeller studied Plato and where he attended his first Heidelberg philosophy seminar in 1923 (on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics ). Kristeller also studied philosophy with Karl Jaspers (also in Heidelberg), Richard Kroner (1924 in Freiburg) and Martin Heidegger (1926 in Marburg). Other subjects were medieval history (with Karl Ludwig Hampe and Friedrich Baethgen ), but also mathematics. Kristeller also attended lectures in German, linguistics, musicology, physics and art history.

Kristeller finished his dissertation on plotin with Ernst Hoffmann at the University of Heidelberg , and from 1929 he studied classical philology in Berlin with Werner Jaeger and Eduard Norden . In the winter of 1930/31 Kristeller obtained his state examination for the higher teaching post with a treatise in Latin on Pericles' First Speech with Thucydides, which took up Jaeger's concepts.

From 1931 to 1933 Kristeller went to Freiburg to Heidegger, who advised him against a school career and accepted Kristeller's proposal for a habilitation thesis on Marsilio Ficino . Kristeller began his work in Berlin and continued because of the Nazi boycott against Jews in Italy, where he lived from 1934. He taught temporarily (presumably until 1936) at the rural school in Florence and, with Giovanni Gentile's support, was able to teach German at the Scuola Normale Superiore and at the University of Pisa . Gentile supported the publication of Kristeller's Supplementum Ficinianum and his book on Ficino. He helped him personally when anti-Semitic legislation saw Kristeller's release in 1938, and also in emigrating to the United States in 1939.

There Kristeller taught briefly at Yale University ; but he soon moved to Columbia University in New York , where he retired in 1973 , but taught until 1976. In 1955 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , 1973 to the British Academy and 1974 to the American Philosophical Society . 1957/58 he was President of the New York Renaissance Society of America . 1974 Columbia University awarded him an honorary doctorate; In 1988 he was elected a corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .

In 1984 he was a MacArthur Fellow .

reception

The focus of his research was on the philosophy of the Renaissance and humanism. Important works include Marsilio Ficino , Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Pietro Pomponazzi .

He earned particular merit through the Iter Italicum (the title recalls the Iter Alemannicum and other works by Martin Gerbert ), a mammoth work in which he described countless previously unrecorded manuscripts.

Fonts (selection)

  • The concept of the soul in the ethics of Plotinus (= Heidelberg treatises on philosophy and its history , Volume 19), Mohr , Tübingen 1929, DNB 580465020 (dissertation University of Heidelberg , Philosophical Faculty, 1928, VII, 110 pages, 8 °).
  • The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino. New York 1943.
  • The School of Salerno. Its development and its contribution to the history of learning. In: Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Volume 17, No. 2, 1945, pp. 138-194.
  • The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1948.
  • The Modern System of the Arts , in Journal of the History of Ideas, 12, 1951, pp. 496-527 and 13, pp. 17-46; Reprints 1965, 1980 and 1990 (German translation in: Humanismus und Renaissance II. Fink, Munich 1980).
  • The Italian universities of the Renaissance. Scherpe, Krefeld 1953.
  • The Classics and Renaissance Thought. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1955.
  • Italian humanism and its meaning. Helbing and Lichtenhahn, Basel 1969
  • The philosophy of Marsilio Ficino. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1972.
  • Humanism and renaissance. 2 Vols. Fink, Munich 1980: Vol. I: The ancient and medieval sources. ISBN 3-7705-1815-2 ; Vol. II: Philosophy, Education and Art. ISBN 3-7705-1816-0 .
  • New sources on Salernitan medicine of the 12th century. In: Gerhard Baader , Gundolf Keil (Hrsg.): Medicine in the medieval occident. Darmstadt 1982 (= ways of research. Volume 363), pp. 191-208.
  • Studies on the history of rhetoric and the concept of man in the Renaissance. Gratia, Göttingen 1981.
  • La Scuola di Salerno. Il suo sviluppo e il suo contributo alla storia della scienza. In: Paul Oskar Kristeller (Ed.): Studi sulla Scuola medica salernitana. Naples 1986, pp. 11-96.
  • as publisher: Studi sulla Scuola medica salernitana. Naples 1986.
  • The ideas as thoughts of human and divine reason. Winter, Heidelberg 1989, ISBN 3-598-25030-4 .
  • Latin Manuscript Books Before 1600 . Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Cosmopolitan Science and Art Service, New York 1948. 4th edition: Munich 1993.
  • A life of learning. The 1990 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture. 1990
  • Iter italicum. A finding list of uncatalogued or incompletely cataloged humanistic manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and other libraries. Brill, Leiden 1995, ISBN 90-04-10122-5 (1 CD-ROM, identical to the London edition 1963-1997).
  • (Ed.) The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. Petrarca, Valla, Ficino, Pico, Pomponazzi, Vives. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill. 1996.
  • Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters. 4 volumes. Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 1956–1996.

literature

  • John Monfasani: Paul Oskar Kristeller. In: Gnomon. Volume 73, 2001, p. 378 ff.
  • Clemens Zintzen : Paul Oskar Kristeller. In: Middle Latin Yearbook. Volume 35, 2000, pp. 199 ff.
  • Thomas Gilbhard: Bibliographia Kristelleriana. A bibliography of the publications of Paul Oskar Kristeller. Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 2006 (= Sussudi eruditi. Volume 72), ISBN 88-8498-310-X .
  • Christopher S. Celenza: The Lost Italian Renaissance - Humanists, Historians, and Latin′s Legacy. Baltimore and London 2004, on Kristeller especially pp. 16 - 57.
  • John Monfasani (Ed.): Kristeller Reconsidered. Essays on His Life and Scholarship. Italica Press, New York 2006, ISBN 0-934977-57-7 .
  • Hans Peter Obermayer: Kristellers Fluchten: His ITER between Germany, Italy and the USA. In: same: German classical scholars in American exile. A reconstruction. De Gruyter, Berlin 2014, pp. 405-520.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Paurl Kristeller (with the assistance of David Hollander): Recollections of My Life . In: The European Legacy . tape 1 , no. 6 , 1996, pp. 1863-1878 .
  2. ↑ Berlin birth register, registry office III, No. 535 of May 29, 1905 with an addendum of May 27, 1919
  3. ↑ Fritz C. Neumann came to the Landschulheim as a teacher in June 1936 and reports in his Memoirs of a contemporary on page 207 that he visited Kristeller, whom he met there, in Pisa in November 1936. (Fritz C. Neumann: Memoirs of a contemporary, unpublished manuscript in English, edited by Lisel Mueller, Libertiville, 1965, 248 S. A copy of the manuscript was kindly made available by the library of the German Historical Institute in Washington.)
  4. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed June 21, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Member History: Paul Oskar Kristeller. Ammerican Philosophical Society, accessed January 3, 2019 .
  6. ^ Members of the HAdW since it was founded in 1909. Paul Oskar Kristeller. Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, accessed June 29, 2016 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kristeller, Paul Oskar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American researcher in humanism
DATE OF BIRTH May 22, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 1999
Place of death New York , USA