Description: Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950), along with Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger, was instrumental in restoring metaphysics to the study of philosophy
Brief description:
Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950) was born in 1882 in Riga, Latvia, to German parents. He studied philosophy and classics, first in St. Petersburg and later in Marburg, where he was appointed to a chair of philosophy in 1920. In 1931, after a short time at the University of Cologne, Hartmann was offered the prestigious chair of philosophy by the University of Berlin, where he lectured until the end of the war, untainted by Nazism. From 1945 until his death in 1950, he held a chair of philosophy at the University of GOttingen.
Review Quotes:
On Nicolai Hartmann's Ethics
-This is a remarkable and perhaps an epoch-making book. . . . Certainly Professor Hartmann has brought into the philosophy of morality and into purely ethical theory a refreshing vitality and acuteness. . . . So valuable a contribution to ethics has not been made for many years, and it gives promise of more to come. . . . It is a genuine contribution of new knowledge.-
--C. Delisle Burns, International Journal of Ethics
-In this work Professor Hartmann has covered the ethical field from end to end in a luminous survey which never loses its unity, its proportion, or its philosophic depth. . . . I agree so profoundly with his method and his main ethical conceptions, and I am so grateful for the strength and clarity of his exposition, that I can only end by thanking him for what he has done.-
--J. L. Stocks, Philosophy