BY TORSTEN SCHWANKE
Bettina Brentano von Arnim
Bettine (1785-1859) was an iconoclast, a political reformer, and a salonnière whose publications in the 1830s and 1840s rekindled philosophical Romanticism. Brentano von Arnim questioned philosophy's tendency toward abstraction and attempted to make philosophy more expansive in its concerns. This is evident in their claim that a proper understanding of human beings requires that we take into account our intellectual abilities as well as our sensory and emotional lives. In her opinion, humans are fundamentally creative - just as nature itself is creative. In order to become fully human, realize one's abilities and experience human life to the maximum, it is necessary to live poetically.
It is also evident in their conception of philosophy as a dialogic enterprise that can only be carried out through the activity of “sym-philosophy”. In the case of Brentano von Arnim, the “Sym philosophy” was a realized achievement, as evidenced by her publication Günderode (1840). Günderode is a semi-fictional correspondence based on letters to her friend Karoline von Günderrode, illustrating the romantic ideal of sociability – staging a dialogue in which participants develop their viewpoints and reach a higher level of understanding. Brentano von Arnim also dealt with important social issues such as poverty and education.
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Karoline von Günderrode
Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806) was a playwright, philosopher and poet who made crucial contributions to German Romanticism and German idealism. Günderrode's writings come in various forms, such as philosophical fragments and notes, essays, dramas and poems. In addition, her writings draw on content from philosophy, world religions and mythologies, ancient languages and the natural sciences.
The diversity of form and content is typical of Günderrode's criticism of bourgeois society, which offered no space for intellectual women and their aspirations. It is also indicative of Günderrode's syncretism, which wanted to make philosophy more poetic and poetry more philosophical.
Günderrode's novel approach dealt with fundamental philosophical questions in her writings, including the question of the "vocation of man" and the associated questions of (female) self-determination, autonomy and intercultural understanding. She argued that the human vocation should not be understood in purely human terms, but must also take into account the larger community to which humans belong: the earth and all its inhabitants. For Günderrode, human morality serves not only to achieve human goals, but also to realize the earth's goals.
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Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) was a writer, literary critic, feminist and psychoanalyst whose contributions included the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of life, the philosophy of art and literature, and psychology. Salomé's diverse interests led to famous friendships with Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke and Sigmund Freud. This, in part, brought widespread attention to her autobiography, Looking Back: Memoirs (1951), and her letters. Salomé's works in literature, criticism, and philosophy include Ibsen's Heroines (1892), Friedrich Nietzsche (1894), Rainer Maria Rilke (1928), The Freud Journal (1958), and many essays on Russian art and culture.
Salomé's contributions to psychoanalytic literature include essays on bisexuality and narcissism (which she sees as potentially productive and not just regressive or destructive), as well as groundbreaking observations on women's sexuality. Salomé's 1910 work The Erotic argues that eroticism represents a central point of connection between mind and body, self and other, the individual human being and the totality of nature. In this sense, eroticism is the key to our understanding of humanity. With her interdisciplinary orientation, Salomé represents a clear philosophical movement of the long 19th century.
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Simone Weil (1909–1943)
The French philosopher Simone Weil is a confronting and disturbing figure in modern philosophy. This is not only because she was so many things at once – ascetic and mystic, teacher and factory worker, labor activist and political activist, social thinker and penetrating moral psychologist, critical Marxist and heterodox Christian theologian – but also because of the striking “untimeliness” of her thought . For unlike philosophers in the analytic tradition, she insisted that life and philosophical reflection were interconnected at the deepest ethical level; and, unlike those in the postmodern tradition, she felt free to resort to terms such as “truth,” “reality,” “the sacred,” “justice,” “soul,” and “God.”
Weil was, of course, neither an analytical philosopher nor a proto-postmodernist. She came to philosophy in the interwar years in a philosophical milieu of political radicalism, phenomenology and emerging existentialism. Like most of her contemporaries, she viewed philosophy as the essence and challenges of human existence, although she differed from the existentialists in what this meant.
While Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir saw things in terms of the radical freedom of the individual to choose their values in a godless world, Weil took a different path. For her, it was not about perfecting herself as a substitute for God and creating values out of a supposed absolute freedom, but rather about facing the real existence of other people and taking care of them. While Sartre's existentialism saw him faced with the challenge of showing how morality was even possible, Weil took the possibility of morality as a given - as an essential and fundamental modality of human life and experience, however incomplete and flawed its manifestations like - and looked for it to show what it means to take morality seriously.
Seen in this way, the moral life rested on our ability to care for others, which meant caring for them as they were, rather than as a means or hindrance to our own end, including that of our moral perfection or virtue. To reject this attention would be to read the world in such a way that nothing and no one is sacred, not even oneself. This reading gave us the world of power and with it the sovereignty of violence, and it was the ultimate logic of violence, “that it “turned everyone who was subjected to it into a thing.”
Such a reading of the world denied the ethical, but it was precisely this denial that the ethical wanted to overcome. For Weil, here lay a fundamental contradiction at the heart of ethical life. It was not a contradiction that meant the impossibility of this life, but rather it showed us that the ethical was ultimately and fundamentally something supernatural.
This article considers Weil as a moral philosopher in a tradition stretching from Plato to Kant: someone who took morality with a seriousness and a total commitment that was alien to those philosophers driven by skepticism or, in response, by the desire to have been seduced into finding something rational on which an otherwise threatened building can rest safely.
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Edith Stein
Stein (1891–1942) was a phenomenologist who studied with Edmund Husserl. Her early work is consistent with phenomenological studies of the affective and emotional dimensions of consciousness. This is illustrated in On the Problem of Empathy (1917), in which Stein attempted to trace the basis of intersubjectivity to the lived body and the empathy we have with other people. Most of Stein's works remained unpublished during her lifetime.
She was not allowed to progress from the dissertation to the habilitation, which is required for academic positions in Germany. Her Jewish background also made it increasingly difficult for her to publish. Stein's collected works include Essays on Women: a series of shorter texts from the 1920s and early 1930s that examine questions of gender, education, and related topics from a phenomenological perspective.
Another significant contribution is her work on the philosophy of psychology and the humanities (originally intended as a habilitation). In addition, her philosophy includes discussions of psychologism, willpower, the relationship between the sentient and mental aspects of man, political philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Stein was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. Her work deserves further attention because of its original systematic position and undoubted influence within phenomenology.
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Hannah Arendt 1906-1975
Political theorist
Arendt grew up in Königsberg, received her doctorate in Heidelberg in 1928 and continued her scientific work in Berlin. Endangered as a critic of National Socialism and a Jew, she fled to Paris in 1933, where she joined the World Zionist Organization. Interned in France after the start of the war, she managed to emigrate to New York in 1941. She writes for the German-Jewish exile newspaper "Aufbau", works for the Conference on Jewish Relations and writes her major work "Elements and Origins of Total Domination". In 1951 she became a US citizen and taught at various universities. In 1961 she took part as a reporter in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and in 1963 published the controversial book "Eichmann in Jerusalem. A report on the banality of evil".
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Alice von Hildebrand
Alice von Hildebrand, née Alice Jourdain (born March 11, 1923 in Brussels, Belgium; † January 14, 2022 in New Rochelle, New York) was a Catholic philosopher and theologian.
Alice Jourdain came to New York City in 1940 as a war refugee. She met the philosopher and theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand at the Jesuit college Fordham University in New York and studied philosophy at Fordham University. She later became Dietrich von Hildebrand's assistant, and wife from 1959, and worked with him in writing some of his books.[1]
From 1947 she taught at Hunter College in New York City and was a professor of philosophy for 37 years until 1984. She then went on to speak in South America, Canada, thirty-five U.S. states, and many European countries. In addition to her many years at Hunter College, she also taught at several other institutions, including the Catechetical Institute in Dunwoody, NY, the Franciscan University of Steubenville (where she was a member of the Board of Trustees for many years), and Thomas More College in Rome , at Ave Maria College in Michigan and at the Notre Dame Institute in Arlington, VA (now Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College).[1]
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Ruth Lapide
The religious scholar and her husband Pinchas Lapide were among the most important mediators in the Jewish-Christian dialogue in Germany
According to a report in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, the Jewish religious scholar and historian Ruth Lapide died on Tuesday at the age of 93 in her adopted home of Frankfurt am Main. She and her husband Pinchas Lapide, who died in 1997, were among the most important mediators in Jewish-Christian dialogue in Germany.
Ruth Lapide, née Rosenblatt, was born in 1929 in Burghaslach near Bamberg, Franconia. Her Jewish family had lived in Germany since the 12th century. She and her family fled Nazism to Palestine, where she studied linguistics, history and Jewish studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In the 1970s she returned to Germany with her husband Pinchas Lapide. There the couple was particularly committed to the exchange between Christians and Jews and wrote several books. When her husband died in 1997, Ruth Lapide continued this work with her son Yuval. He repeatedly advocated for the most accurate possible interpretation of the Bible and emphasized the Jewish roots of Christianity.
Ruth Lapide was received in private audiences by several popes and also regularly advised the Catholic Bishops' Conference.
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Christa Meves (née Mittelstaedt; born March 4, 1925 in Neumünster) is a German child and adolescent psychotherapist and writer.
After studying geography, German and philosophy at the universities of Breslau and Kiel, she completed her state examination in Hamburg, where she also studied psychology. In 1962 she completed her additional training as a child and adolescent psychotherapist (psychagogue) at the psychotherapeutic institute in Göttingen. In 1992 she received state recognition. She is a member of the Lower Saxony Chamber of Psychotherapists.
Christa Meves works in Uelzen. She has authored more than 100 books that have been translated into up to 13 languages. From 1978 to 2006 she was co-editor of the weekly newspaper Rheinischer Merkur. Meves is also an author for the Catholic newspaper Die Tagespost.
She had been married to the ophthalmologist Harald Meves († 2003) since 1946. From 1973 she was an appointed member of the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany, from which she left at her own request in 1984. In 1987 she converted to the Roman Catholic Church.
Christa Meves developed her own concept based on the neoanalytic drive theory and the instinct theory of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, developmental psychology and findings from her practical experience in child psychotherapy. This was later supported by results from brain and hormone research, which she then wrote down in the book Secret Brain. Meves developed a theory of personality types, which she differentiated into display, orderly, hermit, and devotional types.
On the question of psychotherapeutic treatment in prison, Meves warned against “carelessly overestimating the reversibility of criminal behavioral disorders.” Repeat offenders are often not in a position to assess their actions according to the situation at the time of committing the crime, so that the crime is often not intentional Therefore, a criminal accusation cannot be made.
In her book Manipulated Excessiveness, the books The Enlightened Eros (1964) by Alex Comfort and Sex Education (1970) by Helmut Kentler were subjected to sharp criticism. With Kentler's book one gets the “very clear impression” that “real demagoguery is being practiced here. The aim here is to incite political incitement and at the same time promote anarchy. Mr. Kentler's instructions on gender education are comparable to diabolical "strategies for corrupting people." In her essay The Verkopfite Mensch, she blamed the philosophy of the Enlightenment and especially Kant for an overvaluation of thinking and a devaluation of feelings. Here religion assigns it one-sidedly to the realm of feeling.
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Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz
Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz (born November 23, 1945 in Oberwappenöst, Upper Palatinate) is a German religious philosopher.
Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz studied philosophy, German and political science in Munich and Heidelberg and received her doctorate in 1970 from Ernesto Grassi. phil. doctorate. In 1979 she completed her habilitation on Italian Renaissance philosophy. In 1995 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Vallendar University of Philosophy and Theology. She was married to Hans-Bernhard Wuermeling until his death in 2019.
She was head of studies at Rothenfels Castle and taught as a private lecturer at the universities in Munich, Bayreuth, Tübingen and Eichstätt. She received a professorship in philosophy at the Weingarten University of Education. Since 1993 she has held the chair for philosophy of religion and comparative religious studies at the Technical University of Dresden. In 2007 she took on a visiting professorship at the University of Trento/Italy, Cattedra Antonio Rosmini.
When she retired on April 1, 2011, her chair was also closed. Since 2011 she has headed the newly founded EUPHRAT Institute (“European Institute for Philosophy and Religion”) at the Benedict XVI University of Philosophy and Theology. in Heiligenkreuz near Vienna.
Her research focuses on the philosophy of religion in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly Edith Stein and Romano Guardini. The focus of the research is the anthropology of gender, the theological foundations of modern times, Cusanus, and phenomenology. She is co-editor of the 28-volume complete edition of the works of Edith Stein and the 29-volume complete Italian edition of the works of Romano Guardini (Opera omnia, Morcelliana, Brescia). An important topic in research and teaching is the phenomenology of grace, to which she also dedicated her own monograph (“Forgive the Unforgivable?”).