German-speaking Philosophers – Portraits

The work of the great sociologist is in sum a critical enlightenment about the limits of the political sphere.More ...

First he was a physicist, then a philosopher, and finally a political intellectual: Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker’s path was a long and convoluted one.More ...

As the standard bearer of the Federal German peace movement psychoanalyst, Horst-Eberhard Richter, was not only highly regarded all over the world, but also way beyond the boundaries of his field.More ...

Günther Anders was many things: cultural and media theorist, critic of technology, essayist and story-teller, pessimist, moralist, pacifist and a committed and fighting writer.More ...

The career of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was born on May 19, 1762, began with a publisher’s trick.More ...

Ingeborg Maus opposes tendencies of government, administration and judiciary to make themselves autonomous with her demand to “democratize democracy”.More ...

In the biography and the martyrdom of Edith Stein the moral abysses of German history and the untold suffering of so many people become nightmarishly tangible.
More ...

In his philosophy of symbolic forms, Ernst Cassirer created the epistemological foundation for cultural studies.More ...

Max Weber, economist and sociologist (1865-1920), is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.More ...

We live in a supremely ambivalent age. Hardly any modern classical philosopher has analysed this now commonplace view more incisively than Georg Simmel.More ...

Karl Löwith was one of the most prolific German philosophers of the twentieth century – and is one of the least known.More ...

What is man? Is there even any sense in posing so simple and big a question today?More ...

Georg Wilhelm Hegel was one of the main representatives of German Idealism and, continuing Immanuel Kant’s critique of reason, the thinker who consummated Enlightenment rationalism.More ...

“You must change your life” is the title of a book that Peter Sloterdijk published in March 2009. In it, he develops his doctrine of man. A key text for Sloterdijk’s other work as well.More ...

In his major work, “The Civilising Process” (1939), Norbert Elias describes the cultural development of certain forms of behaviour, especially the self-control of civilised man.More ...

According to his famous dictum, there is “no right life in falsehood”. This already shows Adorno’s pessimistic view of the world, which assigned to philosophy the task of giving expression to the suffering of man brought about by society.More ...

From philosophy Max Horkheimer demanded not edification but commitment: philosophy should subject to criticism all conditions in which man is oppressed.More ...

Do utopias still have anything to say to us today? Many doubt that they do. The neo-Marxist Ernst Bloch has been forgotten. Rightly?More ...

Hannah Arendt is widely recognized as a political philosopher – but is she really appreciated?More ...

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does the world exist? Ernst Tugendhat has never ceased wondering about such astonishing questions.More ...

Not only the thought of Walter Benjamin was criss-crossed by fractures and changes. His life too was anything but straightforward.More ...

The truth of philosophy is philosophizing as a radical way of existence and the illumination of existence. Hardly anyone has lived this conviction more sincerely than the German philosopher Karl Jaspers.More ...

Hans-Georg Gadamer had been a more or less unassuming professor of philosophy, then with the publication of his book Truth and Method in 1960, he entered the annals of the history of philosophy.More ...

Lord Ralf Dahrendorf, the sociologist, was one of the most influential voices of liberalism. An obituary by Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann.More ...

Human beings expand their possibilities of action through cooperation with others: this is one of the insights that we owe to Axel Honneth. This summer he turned sixty years old.More ...

In the 1960s Jürgen Habermas, then head of Max Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, appeared to be a main proponent of the allegedly neo-Marxist Frankfurt School. For the student rebels of 1968, however, he was by no means leftist enough. Today he might be called a philosopher of the second German democracy, and its foremost representative from the perspective of a constitutional patriotism.More ...

Max Scheler, one of the most influential of philosophers of the first third of the last century, is today one of the great forgotten figures. And yet he laid the foundation stones for an ethics of values, a philosophy of feeling, a phenomenology of religion, the sociology of knowledge and philosophical anthropology.More ...

Does philosophy concern the objects of everyday life? One might hardly think so. But precisely that was the secret of the immense effect of the philosopher Edmund Husserl, born on April 8, 1859 in the Moravian town of Proßnitz and the founder of modern phenomenology.More ...