Theodor Ebert (philosopher)

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Theodor Ebert (born January 28, 1939 in Telgte ) is a German philosopher .

Life

Theodor Ebert was born in 1939 as the first of four children to the married couple Anna and August Ebert. He attended the old-language grammar school and boarding school Collegium Augustinianum Gaesdonck near Goch / Niederrhein and studied at the universities of Münster and Heidelberg as well as one semester at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1967 he received his doctorate under Hans-Georg Gadamer and Ernst Tugendhat in Heidelberg. He then studied for a year at Oxford University with a focus on ancient philosophy and analytical philosophy . After working as an editor at the Hegel Archives in Bonn and Bochum, he took up an assistant position at the University of Erlangen in 1972 , where he completed his habilitation in 1976 and was given a C2 professorship in 1980 and a C3 professorship in philosophy in 1999. In the academic year 1977/78 Ebert was a visiting fellow at University College London . He has been retired since April 2004.

From 1981 to 1984 Ebert was a representative of the Green List on the city council of Erlangen. While he was still on the city council, Ebert and like-minded friends founded the Citizens 'Decision campaign, which aimed to introduce citizens' petitions and referendums in Bavaria by way of a referendum / referendum. In the first few years of its existence, the Citizens' Decision campaign primarily sought support from other Bavarian associations: trade unions, church youth organizations, nature conservation associations and political parties. After their merger with the "Initiative Demokratie Entwicklungs (IDEE)" for the campaign "More Democracy in Bavaria", the introduction of the referendum in 1995 by means of a referendum / referendum was successful.

At the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Ebert campaigned in the 1990s, among other things, that the former SS man Hans Schneider, who changed his name to Hans Schwerte after the Second World War and with this false identity, received his doctorate in Erlangen and then a was able to make an academic career, the doctoral degree awarded by Erlangen University was revoked.

Since 2007, Ebert has been campaigning against the occupation of concordat chairs .

Ebert is a member of several scientific societies: The General Society for Philosophy in Germany , the Society for Analytical Philosophy (GAP) and the Society for Ancient Philosophy (Ganph) . He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation and its Ethics Committee. Ebert has also been active in the civil rights organization Humanist Union since 2003 and has been a member of the Federation for Freedom of the Spirit in Erlangen since 1980 .

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Ebert works scientifically mainly in the fields of the philosophy of antiquity and the European Enlightenment, analytical philosophy, action and epistemology and argumentation theory. In his work on Plato he took the view, among other things, that Plato, contrary to the general opinion, did not represent the doctrine of recalling prenatal knowledge that was ascribed to him, but only quotes material from the Pythagorean tradition, depending on the respective situation of a dialogue.

In addition, Ebert worked in particular on the history of logic in antiquity. His work Dialecticians and Early Stoics with Sextus Empiricus. Investigations into the emergence of propositional logic (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1991) prove that a significant part of the evidence that was ascribed to Stoic logicians in the work of Sextus Empiricus does not belong to the Stoics, but to a school that goes under the name of " Dialectician "was known. Its main representatives include Diodoros Kronos and Philon von Megara. Ebert can draw on an important essay by David Sedley. Sedley had proven that Diodoros Kronos did not belong to the school of the Megarics, but to the dialecticians who were seen as a school of their own. Ebert now adds the evidence from Sextus Empiricus, which deal with the dialecticians, to Sedley's evidence. Ebert responded to critics who questioned the existence of a dialectical school in an article In Defense of the Dialectical School .

In his studies on the logic of Aristotle, Ebert was able to show, among other things, that the lack of a fourth syllogistic figure in Aristotle can be plausibly explained in the way that Aristotle's treatment of the syllogisms of the traditional fourth figure as modes of the first figure with changed terms In the conclusion, the finding of refuting final examples for the invalid modes is greatly facilitated: The method chosen by Aristotle to refute invalid modes of the first figure also always provides refuting examples for the invalid modes of the traditional fourth figure, insofar as this is an a-, e- or i -Conclusion.

Together with Ulrich Nortmann, Ebert wrote the volume on the Analytica Priora Book I in the series of annotated translations of the works of Aristotle published by the Mainz Academy of Sciences .

Ebert's monograph The Enigmatic Death of René Descartes (2009) is a biographical and philosophical historical study of the death of the French philosopher René Descartes . In this book, Ebert reconstructed the circumstances under which René Descartes lived and died in February 1650 at the court of the Swedish Queen Christine on the basis of newly opened or reinterpreted documents and an overall view of all available sources . Ebert presents François Viogué, a member of the order of the Augustinian hermits who, like Descartes, lived in the house of the French ambassador Chanut as the perpetrator of a poisoning . Viogué - according to Ebert - had a motive: he feared that Descartes might endanger the Queen's imminent conversion to Catholicism (which actually took place in 1654, albeit after the resignation of the throne); Viogué had already reported to the Roman congregation De propaganda fide in June 1648 that the Swedish queen, "if any other religion comes into question, will only choose the Catholic one"; Viogué also had the means and the means: arsenic, which he could administer when giving communion with the host . As a result, Ebert describes it as "highly likely that Descartes was killed by the poisoning of a Catholic priest." A French translation of this book was published in 2011 in Paris. Ebert dealt with two French critics of his study (René Verdon, Victor Carraud) on the website of the magazine Revue du dix-septième siècle.

Ebert's last monographic publications were on the Platonic dialogue Menon . His commentary plus translation from 2018 ( Plato, Menon ) was published by de Gruyter, Berlin, in the series Sources and Studies on Philosophy; a smaller edition with a Greek text was published in the following year, also by de Gruyter, in the Tusculum series.

Fonts (selection)

  • Opinion and knowledge in the philosophy of Plato: Studies on “Charmides”, “Menon” and others "Country". de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1974, ISBN 3-11-004787-X
  • Dialecticians and early Stoics in Sextus Empiricus. Investigations into the emergence of propositional logic. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1991. ISBN 3-525-25194-7
  • Erlangen literary guide philosophy. Bibliographical references for studying philosophy at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. 2nd edition, Erlangen 2002
  • Socrates as Pythagoreans and the anamnesis in Plato's Phaedo. Steiner, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-515-06652-7
  • Collected essays , 2 volumes, mentis, Paderborn 2004, Volume I: On the philosophy of Aristotle. ISBN 3-89785-387-6 , Volume II: On philosophy and its history. ISBN 3-89785-388-4
  • Plato, Phaedo. Translated and commented by Theodor Ebert, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-525-30403-X
  • Aristotle: Analytica Priora. Book I. translated and explained by Theodor Ebert and Ulrich Nortmann, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-05-004427-9
  • Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde - A man and his dictum. From someone who set out to pursue a career in justice policy. In: Enlightenment and Criticism 2, 2010, 81–99
  • The mysterious death of René Descartes. Alibri, Aschaffenburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-86569-048-7
  • L'énigme de la mort de Descartes. Hermann, Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-7056-8166-1
  • Plato: Meno. Translation and commentary. de Gruyter, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-057752-5
  • Plato: Meno. Greek-German, edited and translated. de Gruyter, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-11-062011-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Ebert's contributions in: Ungeahntes Erbe. The Schneider / Schwerte case: clean bill of health for a lie. Alibri, Aschaffenburg 1998.
  2. ^ Theodor Ebert: Filling of a concordat chair in Erlangen temporarily stopped . Press release on a court judgment dated January 14, 2011
  3. ^ "The Theory of Recollection in Plato's Meno": Against a Myth of Platonic Scholarship. In: M. Erler / L. Brisson (ed.): Gorgias - Menon. Selected Papers from the Seventh Symposium Platonicum. Academia Verlag, Sankt Augustin 2007, pp. 184-198. Meanwhile Plato: Menon, translation and commentary. De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.
  4. ^ Diodorus Cronus and Hellenistic Philosophy In: Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society. 1977, pp. 74-120.
  5. ↑ In: Francesca Alesse et al. (Ed.): Anthropine Sophia. Studi di filologia e storiografia filosofica in memoria di Gabriele Giannantoni. Bibliopolis, Naples 2008, pp. 275-293
  6. ↑ Why is the fourth figure missing from Aristotle? In: Archive for the history of philosophy 62 (1980) pp. 13–31
  7. ^ Georg Denzler: The Propaganda Congregation in Rome , Paderborn 1969, p. 118
  8. ^ Theodor Ebert: The enigmatic death of René Descartes. Alibri, Aschaffenburg 2009, p. 163.
  9. ^ Theodor Ebert: L'énigme de la mort de Descartes. Hermann, Paris 2011.
  10. ^ Theodor Ebert: La Maladie mortelle de Descartes - pneumonie ou empoisonnement? ( French ) 17esiecle.fr. Retrieved November 11, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Ebert, Theodor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH January 28, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Telgte