Siegfried Wollgast

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Siegfried Wollgast (2014), after receiving the Daniel Ernst Jablonski Medal from the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin ; in the background its president Gerhard Banse

Siegfried Wollgast (born September 27, 1933 in Schönlanke ; † June 26, 2017 in Dresden ) was a German historian of philosophy who mainly dealt with the history of philosophy and German intellectual history from the 16th to 18th centuries (early Enlightenment).

Life

Siegfried Wollgast spent his early childhood in the village of Stieglitz (today Siedlisko in the Greater Poland Voivodeship ), in the former Netzekreis . From 1940 to 1945 he attended elementary school there, and then the secondary school followed in Schönlanke , the district town of the Netzekreis.

After being expelled in 1945, he continued to attend school, first in Döbbersen ( Hagenow district ) and later in Jena . He was particularly interested in language training in the ancient language branch (C branch) of the secondary school in Jena, where - in addition to modern languages ​​- ancient Greek and Latin were taught. In 1952 he finished school with the Abitur . These language skills were an important prerequisite for his philosophy and history studies at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (FSU) and the Humboldt University of Berlin (HUB) from 1952 to 1957.

From 1957 to 1960 he worked as a research assistant at the Academy for Political Science and Law in Potsdam-Babelsberg and then from 1961 to 1964 as a lecturer and head of the philosophy department at the Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften in Berlin.

In 1964 he received his doctorate at the HUB on the subject of "A line of development in the European Early Enlightenment - Connections of heretical movements in Central and Western Europe to the Novgorod-Moscow heresy". He continued his preoccupation with early enlightenment throughout his life, and Wollgast developed into a nationally and internationally recognized specialist in this field. In 1968 he completed his habilitation with a thesis on Sebastian Franck and moved to the Technical University of Dresden (TUD), where he initially worked as a senior scientific assistant and since 1973 as a university lecturer . In 1976 he was appointed full professor for the history of philosophy at TUD.

To life's work

During his time in Dresden, Wollgast successfully advocated the history of philosophy as a specialist discipline and provided extensive scientific achievements, whereby the breadth of his work and the encyclopedic knowledge required for it should be emphasized. He published on pantheism of the 16th century and the work of Johannes Kepler. He edited works by Sebastian Franck, Paracelsus , Hermann von Helmholtz , Emil du Bois-Reymond , Valentin Weigel , Agrippa von Nettesheim , Erasmus von Rotterdam , Gabriel Wagner and others himself or together with colleagues . His preoccupation with the Hegelian Karl Christian Friedrich Krause and Krausism should be emphasized in recent years .

Philosophy and intellectual history of the early enlightenment

In more than 50 years, Wollgast has produced a hard-to-understand scientific work in his field. As a unique feature of Wollgast in the history of philosophy his focus is on the subjective side of the history of philosophy considered to have treated unlike the banished the subject from history and that as a result of networked works without regard of their authors and their names to different philosophy historians. This latter method is quite common in the natural and social sciences, where objects dominate the thinking and writing subjects. Since his early publications, Wollgast's work titles have included the actors of the history of philosophy in the sub-title in addition to the subject matter in the main title. He presents the work and the impact of people with detailed inclusion of their biographies, for example in his book Paralipomena on the history of philosophy in Germany , in which he treats, among others, Agrippa von Nettesheim, Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus , Christian Weise , Johann Christoph Adelung . His anthology Parerga contains biographies by Nicodemus Frischlin , Heinrich Schütz , Jakob Böhme , Martin Opitz , Gottfried Arnold , Sebastian Franck and Karl Goldammer.

Wollgast expands his biographies at the same time to include space as a lived living space, for example to house and birthplace, street, city, ancestors and their graves, landscape - as in the example of the Dresden-born Paracelsus biographer Karl Goldammer . In the works of Wollgast with his strategy of subjectification, a network of cultural carriers emerges as a “circle of life” or “spiritual environment”.

The culture of life as well as the philosophy of death were also considered by Wollgast in their historical development. He dealt with the current taboo on death. He studied the natural and human relationship to death, concentrating on antiquity and early modern times as well as European, especially German culture, not addressing other cultural areas and the course of time equally.

Wollgast was also interested in those who were wrongly forgotten or cast into insignificance, as was the case with the Protestants Martin Luther and Thomas Müntzer at the beginning . For Wollgast, this line extends from the lesser-known protest thinkers of the 16th and 17th centuries such as Sebastian Franck and Nicodemus Frischlin as well as Karl Christian Friedrich Krause ( Opposition Philosophy in Germany ) to more recently Ernst Bloch , the political left and individual works of GDR historiography. In an homage by Hans-Otto Dill , Wollgast was therefore described as a “nonconformist in the history of philosophy”.

Extent of the work

The diversity of Wollgast's scientific interest, which was not limited to a single historical epoch, is reflected in his extensive writings. It lists almost 50 books and brochures as well as over 300 articles in books and magazines, as well as countless reviews.

His main work , however, remains the “Philosophy in Germany between Reformation and Enlightenment 1550–1650”, which appeared in 1988 and in the 2nd edition in 1993 and comprises more than 1,000 printed pages. In the last five years of his life, Wollgast published 3 books and 40 articles. In addition to philosophy and its history, the balance sheet also includes areas in Wollgast's scientific work that are somewhat marginal, but of high relevance: the tradition in the past and the future , the philosophy of technology and tolerance research . He was a regular participant in the annual “Oranienburg Tolerance Conference” of the Leibniz Society.

Memberships and honors (selection)

Publications (selection)

  • On the idea of ​​peace during the Reformation. Texts by Erasmus, Paracelsus, Franck. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1968 (as publisher).
  • Siegfried Wollgast, Karl-Friedrich Teinz: Dialectics in modern natural science. Materials of the 2nd All Union Conference on Philosophical Questions in the Natural Sciences, Moscow 1970. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1973.
  • Johannes Kepler. Urania-Verlag, Leipzig; Jena; Berlin 1976, 2nd edition 1980.
  • Siegfried Wollgast, Siegfried Marx: Johannes Kepler. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1977, ISBN 978-3-7609-0278-4 .
  • Siegfried Wollgast, Gerhard Banse : Philosophy and Technology. On history and criticism, on the requirements and functions of bourgeois “technology philosophy”. German Science Publishing House, Berlin 1979.
  • On the position of the scholar in Germany in the 17th century. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1984.
  • Philosophy in Germany between the Reformation and the Enlightenment, 1550–1650. 2nd Edition. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1988, ISBN 978-3-05-000001-5 , 2nd edition 1993, ISBN 978-3-05-002099-0 .
  • Gabriel Wagner: Selected writings and documents. With an introduction ed. by Siegfried Wollgast. Frommann-Holzboog, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1997, ISBN 978-3-7728-1416-7 .
  • Contributions to the 500th birthday of Sebastian Franck (1499–1542). Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 978-3-89693-134-4 (as publisher).
  • On the history of doctoral studies in Germany. Grätz, Bergisch Gladbach 2001, ISBN 978-3-89074-012-6 .
  • Utopian socialism - eternal dream and unreality. Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Saxony, Leipzig 2001, ISBN 978-3-89819-101-2 .
  • Oppositional philosophy in Germany. Essays on the German intellectual history of the 16th and 17th centuries. Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-89693-424-6 .
  • To early modern times, to patriotism, tolerance and utopia. Collected Essays. Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-89693-477-2 .
  • Paralipomena on the history of philosophy in Germany. Additions to my essays on the history of philosophy from the 17th to the 20th century. Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-89693-272-3 .
  • Parerga. To my philosophical-historical essays from the 16th to the 20th century. Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-89693-578-6 .
  • Siegfried Wollgast (ed.), Gerhard Güpner (transl.): Agrippa von Nettesheim. About the dubiousness, even nullity, of the sciences, arts and trades. (From the Latin). De Gruyter, Berlin; Boston 1993, Reprint 2015, ISBN 978-3-05-006791-9 , 978-3-05-006792-6.
  • Sebastian Franck (author), Siegfried Wollgast (ed.): Sebastian Franck - Paradoxa. De Gruyter, Berlin; Boston 1995, reprint 2015, ISBN 978-3-05-007027-8 , 978-3-05-007028-5.
  • Karl Christian Friedrich Krause - Aspects of Life, Work, Effect. Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-89693-654-7 .
  • Siegfried Wollgast - bibliography of his work. In: Gerhard Banse , Herbert Hörz , Heinz Liebscher (Eds.): From Enlightenment to Doubt. Contributions to philosophy, history and the history of philosophy. Festschrift for Siegfried Wollgast on his 75th birthday. Treatises of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin, vol. 25. trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2008, p. 435 ff., ISBN 978-3-89626-655-2 .

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Siegfried Wollgast: German pantheism in the 16th century - Sebastian Franck and its effects on the development of pantheistic philosophy in Germany. German Science Publishing House, Berlin 1972.
  2. ^ Siegfried Wollgast: On death in the late Middle Ages and in the early modern period. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1992, ISBN 978-3-05-002180-5 .
  3. ^ Siegfried Wollgast: Forgotten and Misunderstood - On Philosophy and Spiritual Development in Germany between the Reformation and the Early Enlightenment. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 978-3-05-001968-0 .
  4. ^ Necrology
  5. ↑ Siegfried Wollgast: Tradition and Philosophy - about tradition in the past and future. German Science Publishers, Berlin 1975.
  6. ↑ Gerhard Banse , Siegfried Wollgast (ed.): Tolerance - yesterday, today, tomorrow. Contributions to the Oranienburg Tolerance Conferences 2002 to 2011. Treatises of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin, Vol. 33. trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86464-030-8 .
  7. ↑ https://www.zeit.de/1991/12/der-exorzist/komplettansicht
  8. ↑ www.saw-leipzig.de
personal data
SURNAME Wollgast, Siegfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian of philosophy (early enlightenment) and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Nice slim
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 2017
Place of death Dresden