Max Ferdinand Scheler was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology.
29 Facts About Max Scheler
2.
Max Scheler was born in Munich, Germany, on 22 August 1874, to a well-respected orthodox Jewish family.
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Max Scheler began his university studies as a medical student at the University of Munich; he then transferred to the University of Berlin where he abandoned medicine in favor of philosophy and sociology, studying under Wilhelm Dilthey, Carl Stumpf and Georg Simmel.
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Max Scheler moved to the University of Jena in 1896 where he studied under Rudolf Eucken, at that time a very popular philosopher who went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1908.
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Max Scheler earned his habilitation in 1899 with a thesis entitled Die transzendentale und die psychologische Methode directed by Eucken.
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Max Scheler became a lecturer at the University of Jena in 1901.
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Max Scheler taught at Jena from 1901 until 1906, then returned to the University of Munich where he taught from 1907 to 1910.
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At Munich, Husserl's own teacher Franz Brentano was still lecturing, and Scheler joined the Phenomenological Circle in Munich, centred around M Beck, Th.
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Max Scheler was never a direct student of Husserl's, and in fact, their relationship was somewhat strained.
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In later years Max Scheler was rather critical of Husserl's Logical Investigations and Ideas I, and he was to harbor reservations about Being and Time by Martin Heidegger.
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At Munich Max Scheler was caught up in the conflict between the predominantly Catholic university and the local Socialist media, which led to the loss of his Munich teaching position in 1910.
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When his first marriage, to Amalie von Dewitz, ended in divorce, Max Scheler married Marit Furtwangler in 1912, who was the sister of the noted conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler.
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Max Scheler was passionately devoted to the defence of both the war and Germany's cause during the conflict.
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In 1919 Max Scheler became professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Cologne.
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Max Scheler met the Russian existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev in Berlin in 1923.
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Max Scheler argued that capitalism is not so much an economic system as a calculating, globally growing 'mind-set'.
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Max Scheler called instead for a new era of culture and values, which he called 'The World-Era of Adjustment'.
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Max Scheler advocated an international university to be set up in Switzerland and was at that time supportive of programs such as 'continuing education' and of what he seems to have been the first to call a 'United States of Europe'.
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Max Scheler deplored the gap existing in Germany between power and mind, a gap which he regarded as the very source of an impending dictatorship and the greatest obstacle to the establishment of German democracy.
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Max Scheler had developed the habit of smoking between sixty and eighty cigarettes a day which contributed to a series of heart attacks throughout 1928, forcing him to cancel any travel plans.
21.
The movement and act of love is important for philosophy for two reasons: If philosophy, as Max Scheler describes it, hearkening back to the Platonic tradition, is a participation in a "primal essence of all essences", it follows that for this participation to be achieved one must incorporate within oneself the content or essential characteristic of the primal essence.
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Max Scheler, therefore calls love and hate, "spiritual feelings," and are the basis for an "emotive a priori" insofar as values, through love, are given in the same manner as are essences, through cognition.
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Max Scheler argued that most of the older ethical systems fall into axiological error by emphasizing one value-rank to the exclusion of the others.
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Max Scheler extended the phenomenological method to include a reduction of the scientific method too, thus questioning the idea of Husserl that phenomenological philosophy should be pursued as a rigorous science.
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Natural and scientific attitudes are both phenomenologically counterpositive and hence must be sublated in the advancement of the real phenomenological reduction which, in the eyes of Max Scheler, has more the shapes of an allround ascesis rather than a mere logical procedure of suspending the existential judgments.
26.
Max Scheler planned to publish his major work in Anthropology in 1929, but the completion of such a project was curtailed by his premature death in 1928.
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In 1924, Man and History, Max Scheler gave some preliminary statements on the range and goal of philosophical anthropology.
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Max Scheler argues that it is not enough just to reject such traditions, as did Nietzsche with the Judeo-Christian religion by saying that "God is dead"; these traditions have impregnated all parts of our culture, and therefore still determine a great deal of the way of thinking even of those that don't believe in the Christian God.
29.
Max Scheler says that philosophical anthropology must address the totality of man, while it must be informed by the specialized sciences like biology, psychology, sociology, etc.