Charity No
313712
Leonard Nelson (1882-1927)
'An outstanding personality' - Karl Popper
Leonard
Nelson was an early twentieth century German philosopher and socialist. His
philosophical work addressed two main problems: the laying of a scientific
foundation for philosophy and the systematic development of philosophical ethics
and a "philosophy of right."
He wanted to found a system of philosophy based on rigorous reasoning that would answer Kant's basic questions of existence.
- what can we know? (theoretical),
- what ought we to do ? (practical),
- what may we hope? (judicial)
He had two main influences. Firstly , Jakob Fries a specialist in Kantian ethics and secondly David Hilbert (1862-1943) a proponent of Kantian mathematics and one of the great mathematicians of the twentieth Century. Nelson received his first degree in Berlin, but his controversial views on the "philosophy of right" made him unpopular with the Philosophical Faculty at Gottingen where he studied for his doctorate and in particular incurred the dislike of Husserl, the phenomenologist. Opposed by Husserl his thesis was rejected but with Hilbert's help he finally did become an honorary professor at Gottingen after the first world war.
Later he dedicated to Hilbert the three volumes of his Lectures on the foundations of ethics [Vorlesungen über die Grundlagen der Ethik, which begins with the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, dedicated to Hilbert]--"an attempt to open up for the sovereign domain of exact science a new province." [Hilbert, pp. 144-45.]
Besides his purely philosophical work, Nelson founded the Philosophisch-Politische
Akademie after Plato's Academy. He was a "non-Marxist socialist" and also founded his own political party, the Internationaler
Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK) based at his academy. The Academy was
popular with young people who signed up for Nelson's "philosophy of
right" accepting his proclamation that
"Ethics is there to be applied."
This popularity among the young and his use of the Socratic
Method led some to compare him to a twentieth century Socrates. His
aim was to help his students towards a clarification and a critical examination
of their own convictions. He then required them to carry out in their actions
what they had recognized as just and good.
Despite a tragically short life Leonard Nelson produced a great quantity of work (collected in the nine volumes of the Gesammelte Schriften)
After Nelson's death his work was continued by his students. In Germany, his assistant Grete Henry-Hermann and others in the academy brought to completion the publication of Nelson's works.
In Britain the SFCP published the journal Ratio and the translation of Progress and Regress in Philosophy [Basil Blackwell, 1970]. In the United States, L.H. Grunebaum's "Leonard Nelson Foundation" arranged the translation and publication of both Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy [Yale 1949, Dover 1965] and the System of Ethics [Yale, 1956] (the Critique of Practical Reason, translated but never published, was made available in bound photocopy in 1970).
Find out more about Nelson
Joerg Schroth a German academic interested in Nelson provides the following Nelson bibliographies:-(please note that though these lists do contain some English titles, the site is in German.)
Bibliography in alphabetical order:
http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~sophia/schroth/bnelssek.pdf
Bibliography in chronological order:
http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~sophia/schroth/cnelssek.pdf