The Notes of Hartmann’s Disputations 1920–1950: A Finding in Philosophical History

Abstract

Every semester from 1920 to 1950, Nicolai Hartmann organized at his different universities (Marburg, Köln, Berlin, Göttingen) disputations with selected students and doctoral candidates. This series of discussions covered a variety of different topics, questions, and disciplines. All these dialogues were carefully recorded (handwritten or typewritten) by selected participants of the discussions and collected by Hartmann. These so-called “Circle-Protocols” (Cirkel-Protokolle) are an important finding in German history of philosophy because Hartmann (as well as a group of young intellectuals working under his guidance) followed a dialogical principle from the twenties (the Weimar republic) throughout the thirties and forties (the Third Reich) up to 1950 (the postwar era). He stuck to this principle when dealing with topics in epistemology, ethics, philosophy of nature, philosophy of history, social philosophy, aesthetics, metaphysics etc. This paper examines these debates. Though Hartmann’s discussions are already mentioned here and there in the memories of some participants (always remembering their importance for Hartmann himself), this collection as a whole was discovered only when German Hartmann researchers convinced the Hartmann family to entrust the unpublished papers of Hartmann to the German Literature Archive at Marbach. According to Frieda Hartmann, Hartmann’s deep interest in such discussions and the experience with such formats of knowledge stem already from his academic life when he studied philosophy and classical philology at Saint Petersburg Imperial University. It has been decided that these unique (from the viewpoint of the history of German philosophy) papers documenting those discussions would be published in an open access edition and separately as a selected book-edition in order to present Hartmann’s discussions to the scientific public. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has acknowledged the disputation-corpus as an important finding of modern intellectual history and supported the edition. This testimony of an ongoing philosophical debate seems to be a treasure in the philosophical history of the first half of 20th century. The reasons for this are four-fold: a) since the papers cover an enormous range of philosophical topics and disciplines: from epistemology to ethics, from philosophy of language to philosophy of religion, from philosophical anthropology to social philosophy; b) due to the principle of dialogue put in practice in the first half of the twentieth century; c) because they are relevant for writing the history of philosophy; there seems to be no other such document of German history of philosophy of this epoch; d) owing to the inspiring role of these discussions for Hartman’s later works (Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, Ethik, Der Aufbau der realen Welt, Probleme des geistigen Seins, Philosophie der Natur, and Ästhetik).