Ernst Tugendhat

Ernst Tugendhat (born March 8, 1930) is a Czech-born German philosopher.

Life and career

He was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, to a wealthy Jewish family that commissioned Mies van der Rohe with the Villa Tugendhat in Brno. In 1938 the family emigrated from Czechoslovakia to St. Gallen, Switzerland, and in 1941 travelled on to settle in Caracas, Venezuela.

Tugendhat studied classics at Stanford from 1944 to 1949, and went on to do graduate work in philosophy and classics at the University of Freiburg, receiving his doctorate with a work on Aristotle in 1956. During the years 1956−1958 he did post-doctoral research at the University of Münster. From then until 1964 he was an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tübingen, where, after spending 1965 lecturing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, he gained his Habilitation in 1966 analyzing the concept of truth in Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.

Tugendhat became a professor at the University of Heidelberg (1966−1975). During the 1960s and 1970s, Heidelberg developed into one of the main scenes of the left-wing student protests in Germany. 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 was at the time. In 1980 he moved to Berlin, becoming, like his friend Michael Theunissen, a Professor of Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. He was invited to give the 1988–89 John Locke lectures at the University of Oxford, but had to withdraw because of ill health.

Tugendhat retired in 1992, but was a visiting professor in philosophy at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago (1992−1996), a researcher at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna (1996), and visiting professor at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic (1997−1998).

Bibliography of major publications

By Tugendhat

• 1958: Ti kata tinos. Karl Alber, Freiburg. ISBN 3-495-48080-3
• 1967: Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger. de Gruyter, Berlin. ISBN 978-3-11-010289-5
• 1970: "The Meaning of 'Bedeutung' in Frege" (Analysis 30, pp 177–189)
• 1975: Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. ISBN 3-518-27645-X, In English: Traditional and analytical philosophy. Lectures on the philosophy of language. Transl. by P.A. Gorner. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1982.
• 1979: Selbstbewußtsein und Selbstbestimmung. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. ISBN 3-518-27821-5, In English: Self-consciousness and self-determination. Transl. by Paul Stern. Cambridge, Mass./ London: MIT Press, 1986. (= Studies in contemporary German social thought.)
• 1984: Probleme der Ethik. Reclam, Stuttgart. ISBN 3-15-008250-1
• 1992: Philosophische Aufsätze. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. ISBN 3-518-28617-X
• 1992: Ethics and Politics
• 1993: Vorlesungen über Ethik. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. ISBN 3-518-28700-1
• 1995: "The Moral Dilemma in the Rescue of Refugees" (Social research 62:1)
• 2000: "Zeit und Sein in Heideggers Sein und Zeit" (Sats: Nordic Journal of Philosophy 1.1)
• 2003: Egozentrizität und Mystik. Eine anthropologische Studie. C. H. Beck. ISBN 978-3-406-51049-6
• 2007: Anthropologie statt Metaphysik. C. H. Beck. ISBN 978-3-406-55678-4

About Tugendhat

• Barth, Hans-Martin. "Egozentrizität, Mystik und christlicher Glaube: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Ernst Tugendhat" (Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 46:4 (2004), pp 467–482)
• Bowie, Andrew. "Ernst Tugendhat, Philosophische Aufsätze" (European Journal of Philosophy 2/3 (1994), pp 345–351)
• Zabala, Santiago, [1] The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy. A Study of Ernst Tugendhat, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

External links

• picture of Ernst Tugendhat at ksta.de (Kölner Stadtanzeiger, Newspaper in Cologne)
• 2007 interview in Sign and Sight
• Discussion of Tugendhat by Zabala