Franz von Kutschera

Franz von Kutschera (born March 3, 1932 in Hanover) is a German philosopher, initially specializing in logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of science, but who has also written treatises on the fields of philosophy of mind, ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion. He is among the early representatives of analytic philosophy in the German-speaking world, although he did not follow naturalistic and reductionist tendencies.

Biography

Franz von Kutschera studied mathematics, philosophy and physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, among others with the science theorist Wolfgang Stegmüller and the physicist Fritz Bopp. In 1960, he received his doctorate in Munich with a thesis On the problem of the beginning of philosophy in Edmund Husserl's late work. His habilitation also took place in Munich with the paper Die Antinomien der Logik - Semantische Untersuchungen. Subsequently, Kutschera was a private lecturer at the Institute for Logic and Philosophy of Science in Munich. In 1966, he held the substitute chair of Kurt Schütte in Kiel. From 1968 until his retirement in 1998 he held the chair of philosophy at the University of Regensburg.

Like many other younger analytic theorists, Kutschera belongs to a generation that no longer follows authoritative dogmas of analytic schools. For example, early on he presented sympathetic works on problems in the philosophy of religion. In ontology, Kutschera criticizes materialist or naturalist positions that attempt to reduce everything psychological and spiritual to material or natural phenomena. Accordingly, in philosophical anthropology he has developed a bipolar or non-reductionist position, which — similar to Karl Popper in his conception of the three worlds — assumes an ontological autonomy of mental abstracts (numbers, functions, propositions, etc.), so that neither the mental (Geistliches) can be reduced to consciousness (Psychische) nor consciousness (Psychische) to the physical (Physische). The psychological unity of the person is preserved despite a certain dualism or trialism.

According to Kutschera, psychic and mental phenomena such as thinking, feeling and perceiving are not reducible to physical in the broad sense, i.e. not to objective material phenomena. The psychic and mental phenomena of consciousness and spirit are essentially only subjectively accessible phenomena and cannot be comprehended by abstraction from physical or from matter. Consequently, phenomena of consciousness and the mental are also not completely objectifiable, especially since a theory of the mental and psychic is always already something spiritual. According to Kutschera, this ontological and epistemological autonomy of the psychic and mental enables the freedom of the human will and thus both the non-deterministic openness of the world and the normativity of theoretical and practical reason.

In ethics, he takes a value-objectivist view, that there are not only subjective but also objective facts of value that can be recognized and justified. Kutschera takes a similar position in aesthetics, so that some aesthetic judgments about the beautiful and the ugly are not merely subjective in nature, but can be shown to be accurate and justifiable. Thus, in both ethics and aesthetics, he argues against skeptical (or non-cognitivist), subjectivist, and (cultural) relativist positions.

Kutschera received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Leipzig on January 12, 1999. In November 2010, the Munich School of Philosophy awarded him an honorary doctorate. Well-known students are Wolfgang Lenzen, Georg Meggle and Uwe Meixner.

Works

• Über das Problem des Anfangs der Philosophie im Spätwerk Edmund Husserls (1960)
• Die Antinomien der Logik – Semantische Untersuchungen (1964)
• Elementare Logik (1967)
• Sprachphilosophie (1971)
• Einführung in die moderne Logik (1971; with Alfred Breitkopf)
• Wissenschaftstheorie – Grundzüge der allgemeinen Methodologie der empirischen Wissenschaften (1972)
• Einführung in die Logik der Normen, Werte und Entscheidungen (1973)
• Einführung in die intensionale Semantik (1976)
• Grundfragen der Erkenntnistheorie (1981)
• Grundlagen der Ethik (1982)
• Der Satz vom ausgeschlossenen Dritten. Untersuchungen über die Grundlagen der Logik (1985)
• Ästhetik (1988)
• Gottlob Frege – Eine Einführung in sein Werk (1989)
• Vernunft und Glaube (1990)
• Die falsche Objektivität (1993)
• Platons „Parmenides“ (1995)
• Die Teile der Philosophie und das Ganze der Wirklichkeit (1998)
• Die großen Fragen (2000)
• Platons Philosophie (2002)
• Jenseits des Materialismus (2003)
• Die Wege des Idealismus (2006)
• Was vom Christentum bleibt (2008)
• Philosophie des Geistes (2009)
• Wert und Wirklichkeit (2010)

References

• Joachim Jacobi, Der Polare Dualismus nach Franz von Kutschera. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann (2018)
• Wolfgang Lenzen, ed., Das weite Spektrum der Analytischen Philosophie. Festschrift für Franz von Kutschera. Berlin: de Gruyter (1997)

External links

• Works by Franz von Kutschera at German National Library