Nicolai hartmann biography of michaels

Among people deceased inNicolai Hartmann ranks Among people born in LatviaNicolai Hartmann ranks 8 out of Among philosophers born in LatviaNicolai Hartmann ranks 2. Before him are Isaiah Berlin I, Berlin, ; reprinted in Kleinere SchriftenVol. Ibut also because it is that part of Hartmann's philosophy that philosophers of the English tradition should find the most congenial.

Aporetics is the unraveling of problems aporia into their strands; their presentation as clear-cut issues, preferably in the form of antinomies; and the weighing of the pros and cons of apparent solutions. There are some philosophical problems — the metaphysical problems — that will turn out to be in principle insoluble. Yet their unraveling is still useful, for as some part of the issues may turn out to be soluble, their discussion will contribute to the location and diagnosis of the unmanageable remainder.

Aporetics is the central business of philosophy, all too often abandoned in favor of system building. Hartmann did not tire of pointing out that aporetics is what the Platonic dialogues and the best pages of Aristotle exemplify. However, this will hardly suffice in the age of science, when the nature of philosophy and philosophical problems is itself an aporia.

Rather, one would wish to know what, if anything, distinguishes philosophical from logical or scientific problems. One would wish to know, besides, what it is that makes some philosophical issues insoluble and what the criteria are in terms of which some answers are solutions and some are not. Hartmann saw philosophical nicolai hartmann biographies of michaels as arising from what he took to be the facts and from the contradictions they appear to harbor.

His philosophical method, then, consisted really of two parts, a phenomenological presentation of the facts and an aporetic discussion of their implicit contradictions. No merely descriptive account of experience can plausibly deny that the objects known by a consciousness are experienced as existing independently of their being known.

This fact, however, harbors in itself riddles in the form of flagrant contradictions: Consciousness, in knowing an object, transcends itself, yet anything known to consciousness is thereby a content of consciousness — that is, is immanent — and consciousness never transcends itself. The same riddle, but formulated from the side of the object, concerns the influence of the object on the subject.

On the one hand, the object must break into a consciousness and produce an image of itself; on the other, the object must remain outside the subject, for it is, as object, something transcendent and indifferent to its being known by a subject. Hartmann neither questioned the nature of the facts he supposed himself to be describing nor entertained any suspicion that the antinomies he found in those facts might be due to the sort of language he used in describing them.

Instead, he proceeded from knowing to being. The epistemic aporias are essentially ontic aporias, for both the object and the subject are beings Ansichseiendes. The object is not exhausted in its being an object of a subject. Like a nocturnal thief caught in a sudden glare of light, it emerges out of an unredeemably transobjective and metarational background, a background that is in part beyond any human cognition, even beyond any possible sort of cognition.

In knowing an object the subject knows "a thing that is," a being. In turn, the consciousness that knows the object is itself something not exhausted by its being a subject. It emerges out of a transsubjective and metarational medium; it is itself "a thing that is, a mode of Being. As beings, both subject and object are ontologically homogeneous and are members of a context of Being Seinszusammenhang.

Within this context their relationship, so puzzling when taken in epistemological abstraction, becomes conceptually manageable, though an insoluble, and hence metaphysical, problem remains. This problem, however, concerns not the fact thatbut rather how, subject and object stand in relation to each other. In short, by seeing both subject and object as AnsichseiendesHartmann believed himself to have discovered that they are ultimately members of one matrix and context of Being.

This is supposed to explain that they are related, though the how of their relation remains mysterious. Thus, the Hartmannian turn from epistemology to ontology looks suspiciously like a piece of verbal magic, as if a biologist, puzzled by the relation between males and females, proposed to solve the puzzle by calling both males and females "sexuals" and hence members of the sex context, thus "explaining" that they have sexual relations, though still wondering how they have them.

Hartmann's reduction of epistemology to ontology is a piece of philosophical verbal magic if "subject" and "object" have empirical meaning, as "male" and "female" do. But if "subject" and "object" have no empirical meaning, what sort of meaning do they have? This basic question is unasked, and one cannot help wondering if the main use of the terms is not to engender the antinomies without which epistemologists would be out of work.

In sum, Hartmann's phenomenological emphasis on descriptive facts seems to bring philosophical problems closer to empirical ones, whereas his aporetic emphasis on antinomies seems to bring them closer to logical ones. It is this basic ambivalence in his conception of philosophical method that cannot but be reflected in his conception of ontology.

If there was anything twentieth- and twenty-first-century ontologists have had in common it is their unquestioning belief that the term Being is the name of something or other. What is debated is rather what Being is a name of: a quality or feature shared by all beings and if so, whether this class, as summum genusis distinguished from other classes merely by its higher degree of universality ; some relation that any xin order "to be a being," must have to be a subject, or man, or God; or an individual being who is the ground of all beings.

Since they have not questioned that "Being" is a name, these ontologists, like their predecessors, have a problem concerning the unity of Being. Protons and principles, nations and numbers, salads and sentences are all said to have some sort of Being, and yet, because they are so differently, the ontologist is compelled to admit different kinds of Being.

But this would make Being itself the genus of these kinds, just another class concept, albeit more abstract or universal, depriving ontology, in the process, of its metaphysical weight and attraction. In this predicament ontologists have chosen a linguistic escape. Instead of talking of kinds of Being, they prefer to talk of modes of Being.

They thus believe themselves to be preserving the unity of Being in the variety of beings without prostituting Being to a mere class name — and a name, of course, it must be. To a degree, Hartmann shared with the most outspoken ontologists of the mid-twentieth century, the existentialists, both the referential use of "Being" and the preservation of the unity of Being via modes.

However, he was at once simpler and more confused than they. Heidegger, for example, made the most of the distinction between Being and beings, between das Sein and das Seiendeand, correspondingly, between ontological and ontic investigations. This makes the concept of ontology simpler, as it keeps the white whale of Being from perturbing the Ahab of beings, but it also makes the concept more confused, as one is now at a loss to distinguish between ontology and science, both of which have to do with beings.

Hartmann distinguished between two basic modes of Being Seinsweisenvery much as the American new realists distinguished between existence and subsistence twenty years before him. One mode of Being consists of particulars, localizable in time and space, the other of universals — for example, essences, values, numbers. The former are real, the latter ideal; both are equally objective and independent of the subject.

The ideals are logically prior to the reals, for a real is what it is only by virtue of an essence present in it or valuable only by virtue of a value present in it. This apriority of ideal entities, however, does not exclude their being possible objects of experience, ideals being given in intuition just as reals are in perception.

Here "perception" and, it nicolai hartmann biography of michaels seem, "intuition" must be used generously enough to include the emotional, for, following Max SchelerHartmann asserted valuables, if not values themselves, to be experienced emotionally rather than cognitionally. Nor does the apriority of ideal entities exclude the possibility that the intuitional acts in which they are experienced are, in ordo essendigrounded on the perceptual acts in which reals are experienced.

As in Husserl, then, the a priori is not opposed to, but is rather part of, the empirical. Within each of the two basic modes of Being, Hartmann distinguished between several strata of Being Seinsschichten. The strata of reality correspond to the distinctions between inorganic nature, organic nature, consciousness, and superindividual culture Geist — all of them reals, but the last two also agents and carriers of ideals.

Each stratum has basic, so-called categorial features, which it is the task of regional ontologies to lay bare. The strata form a hierarchy in which one stratum's dependence on the existence of another and partial freedom autonomy from the other's laws mark the higher from the lower. The working out of these regional ontologies through categorial analyses was one of Hartmann's central preoccupations, especially in Der Aufbau der realen Welt.

The distinctions between the two modes of Being and between the several strata within each mode were related by Hartmann to the traditional three modalities of possibility, reality, and necessity. Only derivatively are they distinctions concerning validity or certainty of knowledge. A being is primarily understood as that which is an sich in itselfand this an sichthe traditional substance of ontology, is defined epistemologically as that which is indifferent to its being known by a subject.

He died of a stroke in In the year of his death, there appeared his Philosophie der Natur Philosophy of Nature. He is regarded as an important representative of critical realism and as one of the major metaphysicians of the twentieth century. He is the modern discoverer of emergence — originally called by him categorial novum. His early work in the philosophy of biology has been cited in modern discussions of genomics and cloningand his views on consciousness and free will are currently [ when?

Nicolai Hartmann equates ontology with Aristotle 's science of being qua being. The existence of an entity constitutes the fact that this entity is there, that it exists. Essenceon the other hand, constitutes what this entity is like, what its characteristics are. Every entity has both of these modes of being. For example, the existence of a leaf belongs to the essence of the tree while the existence of the tree belongs to the essence of the forest.

Reality and ideality are two disjunctive categories: every entity is either real or ideal. Ideal entities are universal, returnable and always existing while real entities are individual, unique and destructible. Reality is obtrusive, it is often experienced as a form of resistance in contrast to ideality. The modalities of being are divided into the absolute modalities actuality and non-actuality and the relative modalities possibility, impossibility and necessity.

The relative modalities are relative in the sense that they depend on the absolute modalities: something is possible, impossible or necessary because something else is actual. Hartmann analyzes modality in the real sphere in terms of necessary conditions.

Nicolai hartmann biography of michaels

If all these factors obtain, it is necessary that the entity exists. But as long as one of its factors is missing, it can't become actual, it is impossible. This has the consequence that all positive and all the negative modalities fall together: whatever is possible is both actual and necessary, whatever is not necessary is both non-actual and impossible.

The central concept of Hartmann's ethical theory is that of a value. Hartmann's book, Ethik, elaborates a material ethics of value according to which moral knowledge is achieved through phenomenological investigation into our experiences of values. Moral phenomena are understood by Hartmann to be experiences of a realm of being which is distinct from that of material things, namely, the realm of values.

The values inhabiting this realm are unchanging, super-temporal, and super-historical, though human consciousness of them shifts in focus over time. Borrowing a style of phrase from Kant, 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.

Our knowledge of the goodness or badness of situations is derived from our emotional experiences of them, experiences which are made possible by an a priori capacity for the appreciation of value. Nicol, Helen Lyster — Nicol, Donald MacGillivray. Nicol, D onald M acGillivray Nicodemus the Hagiorite. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, the Hagiorite.

Nicodemus of Mammola, St. Nicodemus National Historical Site. Nicobar Islands. Nico — Niclaes, Hendrik. Nicolai, Carl Otto Ehrenfried. Nicolai, Christian Friedrich — Nicolai, Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, David Traugott. Nicolai, Friedrich Bernhard Gottfried. Nicolai, Philipp. Nicolaides, Steve. Nicolaisen, Agnes Ida Benedicte. Nicolantonio, Mariano da Roccacasale, Bl.

Nicolas Baudin. Nicolas Chuquet. Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc. Nicolas Desmarest. Nicolas Lemery.