Leonard Nelson, sometimes spelt Leonhard, was a German mathematician, critical philosopher, and socialist.
19 Facts About Leonard Nelson
2.
Leonard Nelson was part of the neo-Friesian school of neo-Kantianism and a friend of the mathematician David Hilbert.
3.
Leonard Nelson was the son of lawyer Heinrich Nelson and artist Elisabeth Lejeune Dirichlet.
4.
Leonard Nelson's mother was the granddaughter of mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet and descendant of Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.
5.
Leonard Nelson was baptised as a Protestant at the age of five on 13 June 1887.
6.
Leonard Nelson studied at Franzosisches Gymnasium Berlin where mathematics and science were not notable in that school.
7.
Leonard Nelson was therefore privately tutored by mathematician Gerhard Hessenberg, and began reading the works of philosophers Immanuel Kant, Jakob Friedrich Fries, and Ernst Friedrich Apelts, which began to spark his interest in philosophy.
8.
Kant's 1781 book Critique of Pure Reason inspired Leonard Nelson to go down the path of critical philosophy, and later followed the works of post-Kantian philosopher Fries who had followed Kant's work.
9.
Leonard Nelson continued defending Fries' philosophy and ideas by publishing a neue Folge of Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule with Gerhard Hessenberg and mathematician Karl Kaiser.
10.
Ready to form new ideas, Leonard Nelson founded the Neo-Friesian School in 1903, with some well-known members, such as Rudolf Otto, philosopher, Gerhard Hessenberg, mathematician and Otto Meyerhof.
11.
In 1922, Leonard Nelson founded the Philosophisch-Politische Akademie as a "Platonic Academy" and non-profit association, which was abandoned soon after the Nazis banned it, but re-established in 1949.
12.
Leonard Nelson married Elisabeth Schemmann, in 1907, but divorced in 1912 after she baptised their son Gerhard David Wilhelm Leonard Nelson in the Lutheran Church.
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Leonard Nelson even resigned from the Evangelical Church in 1919.
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Leonard Nelson was an early advocate of animal rights and a vegetarian.
15.
Leonard Nelson was an insomniac and died at a young age from pneumonia, and was buried at a Jewish cemetery in Melsungen alongside his father Heinrich.
16.
Leonard Nelson's ideas continued to have an impact upon German socialism and communism in Nazi Germany as the ISK's members became active in the left-wing resistance to Nazism.
17.
Leonard Nelson published numerous books and papers, often with the help of other philosophers and mathematicians.
18.
Leonard Nelson was later critical of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in his work Progress and Regress in Philosophy.
19.
Leonard Nelson is known for defending the idea of animal rights in his work System of Philosophical Ethics and Pedagogy published in 1932, with the help of his assistant Grete Hermann and Minna Specht.