Nicolai Hartmann is regarded as a key representative of critical realism and as one of the most important twentieth-century metaphysicians.
11 Facts About Nicolai Hartmann
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Nicolai Hartmann attended from 1897 the German-language high school in Saint Petersburg.
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In 1911, Nicolai Hartmann married Alice Stepanitz, with whom he had a daughter, Dagmar, in 1912.
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In 1929 Nicolai Hartmann married Frida Rosenfeld, with whom he had a son, Olaf, and a daughter, Lise.
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In 1942, Nicolai Hartmann edited a volume entitled Systematische Philosophie, in which he contributed the essay Neue Wege der Ontologie, which summarizes his work in ontology.
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Nicolai Hartmann is regarded as an important representative of critical realism and as one of the major metaphysicians of the twentieth century.
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Nicolai Hartmann equates ontology with Aristotle's science of being qua being.
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Moral phenomena are understood by Nicolai Hartmann to be experiences of a realm of being which is distinct from that of material things, namely, the realm of values.
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Borrowing a style of phrase from Kant, Nicolai Hartmann characterizes values as conditions of the possibility of goods; in other words, values are what make it possible for situations in the world to be good.
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For Nicolai Hartmann, this means that our awareness of the value of a state of affairs is not arrived at through a process of reasoning, but rather, by way of an experience of feeling, which he calls valuational consciousness.
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If, then, ethics is the study of what one ought to do, or what states of affairs one ought to bring about, such studies, according to Nicolai Hartmann, must be carried out by paying close attention to our emotional capacities to discern what is valuable in the world.