Biography
Hartmann was born of German descent in Riga, which was then the capital of the Russian province of Livonia, and which is now in Latvia. He studied Medicine at the University of Tartu (then Jurjev), then Philosophy in St. Petersburg and at the University of Marburg in Germany, where he took his Ph.D. and Habilitation. He was professor of philosophy in Marburg (1922–25), Cologne (1925–31), Berlin (1931–45) and Göttingen (1945–50), where he died. Originally a Marburg neo-Kantian, studying under Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, Hartmann developed his own philosophy which has been described as a variety of existentialism or critical realism. Among Hartmann's many students were Boris Pasternak, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Émil Cioran, Jakob Klein, Delfim Santos and Max Wehrli. He is the modern discoverer of emergence — originally called by him categorial novum. His encyclopedic work is basically forgotten today, although famous during his lifetime. His early work in the philosophy of biology has been cited in modern discussions of genomics and cloning, and his views on consciousness and free will are currently in vogue among contributors to the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Read more about this topic: Nicolai Hartmann
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