Kuno Fischer

Kuno Fischer
Born (1824-07-23)23 July 1824
Sandewalde (near Guhrau), German Confederation (in present-day Poland)
Died 5 July 1907(1907-07-05) (aged 82)
Heidelberg, German Empire
Alma mater University of Leipzig
University of Halle (PhD, 1847)
Era 19th-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Hegelian Neo-Kantianism
Institutions Heidelberg University
University of Jena
Main interests
 Metaphysics
Notable ideas
 The empiricism–rationalism distinction
Kuno Fischer
Thesis De Parmenide Platonico (On Plato's Parmenides) (1847)
Academic advisors Christian Hermann Weisse (Leipzig), Johann Eduard Erdmann (Halle), Julius Schaller (Halle)
Notable students Richard Falckenberg

Kuno Fischer, born Ernst Kuno Berthold Fischer (23 July 1824 – 5 July 1907), was a German philosopher, a historian of philosophy and a critic.

Biography

After studying philosophy at Leipzig and Halle, became a privatdocent at Heidelberg in 1850. The Baden government in 1853 laid an embargo on his teaching owing to his liberal ideas, but the effect of this was to rouse considerable sympathy for his views, and in 1856 he obtained a professorship at Jena, where he soon acquired great influence by the dignity of his personal character. In 1872, on Eduard Zeller's move to Berlin, Fischer succeeded him as professor of philosophy and the history of modern German literature at Heidelberg.

He was a brilliant lecturer and possessed a remarkable gift for clear exposition. His fame rests primarily on his work as a historian and commentator of philosophy. As far as his philosophical views were concerned, he was, generally speaking, a follower of the Hegelian school. His writings in this direction, especially his interpretation of Kant, involved him in a quarrel with F. A. Trendelenburg, professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, and his followers. In 1860, Fischer's Kants Leben und die Grundlagen seiner Lehre (Kant's life and the foundations of his doctrine) lent the first real impulse to the so-called “return to Kant.”

His grave in Heidelberg

In honor of his 80th birthday, celebrated in 1904, O. Liebmann, W. Wundt, T. Lipps and others published Die Philosophie im Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Festschrift für Kuno Fischer (Heidelberg, 1907).

Contributions

One of Fischer's most significant and lasting contributions to philosophy was the use of the empiricism/rationalism distinction in categorising philosophers, particularly those of the 17th and 18th centuries. These include John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume in the empiricist category and René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza and G.W. Leibniz in the rationalist category. Empiricism, it is said, claims that human knowledge is derived from sensation, i.e. experience, while rationalism claims that certain knowledge can be acquired before experience through pure principles. Although influential, in more recent times this distinction has been questioned as anachronistic in its failure to represent precisely the exact claims and methodologies of the philosophers it categorises.

Reception

Kuno Fischer's History of Modern Philosophy had a strong impact on Friedrich Nietzsche and his view on modern philosophy, particularly on Spinoza.[2] Frege and W. Somerset Maugham were amongst his students.

Works

Other translations of his works are:

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, Oxford UP, 2011, p. 370.
  2. ↑ Andreas Urs Sommer: Nietzsche’s Readings on Spinoza. A Contextualist Study, Particularly on the Reception of Kuno Fischer, in: Journal of Nietzsche Studies 43/2 (2012), pp. 156-184.
  3. ↑ remark: before, Daniel Schenkel had published Abfertigung für Herrn Kuno Fischer in Heidelberg
  4. ↑ 1. Teil (4. Aufl. 1897) hier online

References

Wikisource has the text of the The Nuttall Encyclopædia article Fischer, Ernst Kuno Berthold.
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