Ernst Tugendhat (8 March 1930 – 13 March 2023) was a Czechoslovak-born German philosopher. He was a scion of the wealthy and influential Jewish Tugendhat family. They lived in Venezuela during the Nazi regime, and he studied first in Stanford University, then in Freiburg. He taught internationally in Europe and South America, with a focus on language analysis.
Life and career
Tugendhat was born in
Brno, Czechoslovakia, to Fritz and Grete (Löw-Beer) Tugendhat,
a wealthy Jewish family who had commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design the
Villa Tugendhat in Brno.
In 1938 the family escaped the Nazi regime,
first to St. Gallen, Switzerland, and later to settle in
Caracas, Venezuela.
Ernst had an older half-sister, Hanna Weiss, and three younger siblings – Herbert, Ruth, and Daniela.
The last two children were born after the family migrated to Venezuela.
Tugendhat studied classics at Stanford University from 1944 to 1949, and went on to do graduate work in philosophy and classics at the University of Freiburg.
Tugendhat was professor at the University of Heidelberg from 1966 to 1975. During the 1960s and 1970s, Heidelberg developed into one of the main scenes of the left-wing student protests in Germany.[ from Ruprecht, issue 37, 12.07.95] Because of the student movement and as a protest against the situation at German universities in the 1970s, Tugendhat gave up his position and relocated to Starnberg, where Jürgen Habermas worked at the time.
Tugendhat retired in 1992, but was a visiting professor in philosophy at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago (1992–1996),
Tugendhat died in Freiburg on 12 March 2023 at age 93.
Awards
Tugendhat became an honorary professor of the Tübingen University in 1999,
and in 2002 a
fellow of the .
He received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2005, and from the University of Zürich in 2009. In 2005 he was awarded the Meister Eckhart Prize;
he donated the prize money to a school, "
Talitha Kumi", in
Beit Jala, Palestine.
Bibliography
Publications by Tugendhat, many of them published by
Suhrkamp Verlag,
are held by the German National Library, including:
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1958: Ti kata tinos. Karl Alber, Freiburg.
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1967: Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger. de Gruyter, Berlin.
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1970: "The Meaning of 'Bedeutung' in Frege" ( Analysis 30, pp 177–189)
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1975: Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. , In English: Traditional and analytical philosophy. Lectures on the philosophy of language. Transl. by P.A. Gorner. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1982.
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1979: Selbstbewußtsein und Selbstbestimmung. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. , In English: Self-consciousness and self-determination. Transl. by Paul Stern. Cambridge, Mass./ London: MIT Press, 1986. (= Studies in contemporary German social thought.)
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1984: Probleme der Ethik. Reclam, Stuttgart.
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1992: Philosophische Aufsätze. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.
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1992: Ethics and Politics
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1993: Vorlesungen über Ethik. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.
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1995: "The Moral Dilemma in the Rescue of Refugees" ( Social Research 62:1)
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2000: "Zeit und Sein in Heideggers Sein und Zeit" ( Sats: Nordic Journal of Philosophy 1.1)
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2003: Egozentrizität und Mystik. Eine anthropologische Studie. C. H. Beck.
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2007: Anthropologie statt Metaphysik. C. H. Beck.
Further reading
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Bowie, Andrew. "Ernst Tugendhat, Philosophische Aufsätze" ( European Journal of Philosophy 2/3 (1994), pp 345–351)
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External links
