Ruedi Imbach

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ruedi Imbach (born May 10, 1946 in Sursee ) is a Swiss historian of philosophy . He is one of the most famous mediaeval philosophers in Europe.

Life

Ruedi Imbach attended the Sursee Cantonal School . He passed his Matura in 1966. From 1966 to 1971 he studied philosophy and history at the University of Friborg in Switzerland . There he was Louis-Bertrand Geiger's assistant from 1971 to 1975 . Imbach received his doctorate in 1975 with a work supervised by Geiger on the relationship between being and thinking in its importance for the understanding of God with Thomas von Aquin and in the Paris quaestions of Meister Eckhart . In 1979 he completed his habilitation in Freiburg. His habilitation thesis consisted of the critical edition of two treatises from the late medieval periodPhilosopher Dietrich von Freiberg ( De ente et essentia and De natura contrariorum ), which appeared in the second volume of Dietrich's collected works, as well as preparatory work published separately as an essay for an interpretation of De ente et essentia .

From 1976 Imbach taught as an associate professor, from 1979 as an associate professor for ontology and medieval philosophy history in Friborg, Switzerland. From 1981 to 1983 he was visiting professor at the University of Geneva . In 1985 he was appointed full professor in Freiburg. He held this chair until August 2000. From September 2000 until his retirement in 2013 he was Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the Sorbonne ( University of Paris IV ). He is a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen and co-editor of the Freiburg journal for philosophy and theology . In 2001 he was awarded the Marcel Benoist Prize , which is awarded annually for the most important scientific achievement in Switzerland.

Researches

Imbach's main research interests are the history of philosophy in the 13th and 14th centuries, Thomism, and the history of metaphysics and political theory . He was instrumental in the rediscovery and constitution of the works in the Corpus Philosophorum Teutonicorum Medii Aevi and directed the comprehensive German-language cataloging of Dante Alighieri's philosophical and political writings .

Imbach already expressed his conviction in his dissertation that even a purely historical task "always intended more than the pure reconstruction of past approaches", because in an interpretation, consciously or unconsciously, "elements of current problems" are effective. Medieval texts would be read with the expectation "that they have something to tell us, that they are able to ask us questions". According to Imbach's understanding, Thomas von Aquin, Meister Eckhart and other medieval thinkers are “in that great tradition of spiritual metaphysics, which extends from Parmenides to German idealism .” Here Imbach ties in with a statement by Hans Krämer . In this sense, he regards his research on Dietrich von Freiberg not only as significant in terms of the history of philosophy, but also as philosophically topical, because Dietrich's intellect theory anticipates theses "which are generally vindicated for the modern age". The exploration of Dietrich's thinking is "an important contribution to an appropriate interpretation of the origin and the meaning of the self-understanding of philosophy that determines the modern age: philosophy of autonomous subjectivity".

An important concern of Imbach is to overcome the traditional narrowing of the field of view of philosophical research to a few particularly well-known scholastic authors. He emphasizes the need to “also take into account lesser-known writers and their works”. This is material that - as he stated in 1979 - is "barely manageable and, for the most part, not yet edited". In the foreword of the lexical reference work Mots médiévaux offerts à Ruedi Imbach , which is dedicated to Imbach , the editors state that Imbach shows a particular interest in marginal objects and objects neglected by historical research; to this end, he is moved by his methodological awareness, with which he questions common categories. According to the information provided there, his main demands include "space-time permeability", that is, the inclusion of the entire history of the reception of ideas, and methodological pluralism.

A special topic that Imbach has dealt intensively with is the relationship of the layman to the philosophy of the later Middle Ages. He concluded that the laypeople had played an important role; a considerable number of texts were written for them or even written by them. The number of Latin texts whose addressees can be clearly identified as laypeople is surprisingly large. The passing on of knowledge to laypeople is by no means always associated with trivializing the knowledge content; rather, in some cases the communication of philosophy to a lay audience turns out to be “a transformation that creatively renews and changes philosophy as such”. In this context, Imbach wrote that anyone wishing to seek out philosophy at the “place of its origin” should not neglect its social function. For this it is necessary that “the social position of the author or the addressee is also explicitly discussed”.

On Imbach's 50th birthday in 1996, his employees published a collection of 23 of his essays and praised his teaching and research work in the foreword. There they wrote that he had tried "to break up the monolithic medieval history of philosophy and to reconstruct it in its historical and social context".

Fonts

Monographs

  • with Peter Schulthess : Philosophy in the Latin Middle Ages. A handbook with a bio-bibliographical repertory. Artemis & Winkler, Zurich et al. 1996, ISBN 3-7608-1127-2 .
  • Dante, la philosophie et les laïcs. Universitätsverlag, Freiburg / Switzerland 1996, ISBN 2-8271-0747-3
  • Deus est intelligere. The relationship between being and thinking in its meaning for the understanding of God in Thomas Aquinas and in the Paris quaestions of Meister Eckhart (= Studia Friburgensia. New series 53). Universitätsverlag, Freiburg / Switzerland 1976, ISBN 3-7278-0144-1 (also: Freiburg / Switzerland, university, dissertation, 1975).
  • Laypeople in the philosophy of the Middle Ages. Notes and suggestions on a neglected topic. Grüner, Amsterdam 1989, ISBN 90-6032-059-X
  • with Catherine König-Pralong: Le défi laïque. Existe-t-il une philosophie des laïcs au Moyen Âge? Vrin, Paris 2013, ISBN 978-2-7116-2494-2

Collection of articles

  • Quodlibeta. Selected Articles / Articles choisis. Universitätsverlag, Freiburg / Switzerland 1996, ISBN 3-7278-1059-9 (collection of 23 of his articles with a list of publications p. 497-512 edited by Imbach's employees)

Editorships

  • On the spiritual world of the Franciscans in the 14th and 15th centuries. The library of the Franciscan monastery in Freiburg / Switzerland. Files from the conference of the Medieval Institute of the University of Freiburg on October 15, 1993 (= Scrinium Friburgense. Vol. 6). Universitätsverlag, Freiburg / Switzerland 1995, ISBN 3-7278-0996-5 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Edition: Dietrich von Freiberg: Opera omnia , Vol. 2: Writings on Metaphysics and Theology , ed. by Ruedi Imbach et al., Hamburg 1980, pp. 17-42, 69-135; Article: Ruedi Imbach: Gravis iactura verae doctrinae. In: Freiburg Journal for Philosophy and Theology 26, 1979, pp. 369-425.
  2. ^ Ruedi Imbach: Quodlibeta , Freiburg / Schweiz 1996, p. VII (foreword by the editors).
  3. ^ Ruedi Imbach: Deus est intelligere , Freiburg (Switzerland) 1976, p. VIII.
  4. ^ Ruedi Imbach: Deus est intelligere , Freiburg (Switzerland) 1976, p. 6 f. and note 13.
  5. ↑ Ruedi Imbach: Gravis iactura verae doctrinae. In: Freiburg Journal for Philosophy and Theology 26, 1979, pp. 369–425, here: 370.
  6. ↑ Ruedi Imbach: Gravis iactura verae doctrinae. In: Freiburg Journal for Philosophy and Theology 26, 1979, pp. 369-425, here: 377-386.
  7. ↑ Iñigo Atucha et al. (Ed.): Mots médiévaux offerts à Ruedi Imbach , Porto 2011, p. 9. Cf. Ruedi Imbach: Quodlibeta , Freiburg / Switzerland 1996, p. VII (foreword by the editors): “Overcoming the current philosophical historical schemes ".
  8. ↑ Ruedi Imbach: Laien in der Philosophie des Mittelalters , Amsterdam 1989, pp. 9-12.
  9. ^ Ruedi Imbach: Laien in der Philosophie des Mittelalters , Amsterdam 1989, p. 14 f.
  10. ^ Ruedi Imbach: Quodlibeta , Freiburg / Schweiz 1996, p. VIII (foreword by the editor).
personal data
SURNAME Imbach, Ruedi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss historian of philosophy
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Sursee