Wilhelm Burkamp

Wilhelm Burkamp (born January 20, 1879 in Stöckte (today Winsen (Luhe) ), † August 26, 1939 in Rostock ) was a German philosopher .

Live and act

Burkamp, ​​the son of a farmer, attended a secondary school in Hamburg, which he graduated in 1893. His further training at an agricultural school in Hildesheim was accompanied by work on his parents' farm. From 1903 to 1906 he was a guest student in Berlin in the subjects of biology and philosophy. In 1909 he passed the Abitur at a secondary school in Hamburg. He then studied natural sciences and philosophy in Berlin and Kiel .

With the work The development of the concept of substance in Ostwald with Götz Martius , he received his doctorate in 1913. He then moved to the University of Göttingen , where he worked for three semesters at the Psychological Institute. During the First World War he did military service and was awarded both Iron Crosses as a lieutenant . He then continued his studies, first in Göttingen and then in Rostock . There he completed his habilitation in 1923 with the work The causality of psychological processes and their unconscious action regulations . When he moved to the University of Rostock , he took up lectures there on logic , philosophy and the history of philosophy. In 1929 he was made a non-civil servant. o. Professor appointed. At the age of 60 he applied to Königsberg without success .

Burkamp was one of the first to admit to the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce . In his book Reality and Meaning , Burkamp criticized Edmund Husserl's theoretical philosophy and neo-Kantianism . Instead of over-empirical values, which are “unreasonable” in view of the findings of the natural sciences (Tilitzki, 484), he called for a pragmatic philosophy. Burkamp discusses the "four humiliations of man":

• The I recognizes itself as part of the world.
• The earth - and with it man - is not the center of the world.
• Humanity is integrated into the development system of organisms.
• The human soul arose phylogenetically; Even consciousness does not have the independence from physical-biological nature ascribed to it.

As an alternative, Burkamp developed a theory of the cosmos of superordinate wholes, naming Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as an important thought leader. “And yet after serious research I am convinced that the answer of the apriorists is wrong, and that an appropriate understanding of the ego, including all the laws of meaning and categories, can only be achieved a priori on the way of recognizing its intricate but complete integration into the system of the world and his becoming can be won in her. "(WuS 49)

Works (selection)

• The causality of psychic processes and their unconscious action regulation , 1922
• Concept and relationship. Studies on the Foundation of Logic , 1927
• The structure of wholes , 1929
• Natural Philosophy of the Present , 1929
• Logic , 1932
• Reality and meaning. And sense: the objective becoming of meaning in meaningless reality , 2 volumes, 1938 (reprint: Severus, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-942382-24-3 )

literature

• Christian Tilitzki : The German University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and National Socialism, Vol. 2 . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2002, pp. 790–791, ISBN 3-05-003647-8 (2 volumes, plus dissertation, Universität Freie Universität Berlin 1999).

Web links

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Burkamp in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Wilhelm Burkamp in the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium