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Emil Lask

Emil Lask (; ; 25 September 1875 – 26 May 1915) was a German philosopher specializing in epistemology and the philosophy of law. A student of Heinrich Rickert at Freiburg University and Wilhelm Windelband at Heidelberg University, he was a member of the Baden school of neo-Kantianism.

Biography

Lask was born in Austrian Galicia, as a son of Jewish parents. After completing his philosophical education, he was made a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg in 1905, and he was elected professor there just before the outbreak of World War I.

When war began in 1914, Lask immediately volunteered. Since, as a Heidelberg professor, he would have been regarded as indispensable on the home front, he did not have to enlist. But, conscientious and idealistic, Lask believed that he had an obligation to serve his country. Lask was made a sergeant and sent to Galicia on the Eastern Front, despite a frail constitution and severe myopia—which also meant that he could not shoot, but he still felt obliged to remain at the front. Lask died during the war, not far from the city of his birth, in the Galician Campaign. Wilhelm Windelband had refused to request his return to Heidelberg as indispensable to philosophy.

Lask was an important and original thinker whose rewarding work is little known, due to his early death, but also because of the decline of neo-Kantianism. His published and some unpublished writings were collected in a three-volume edition by his pupil Eugen Herrigel with a notice by Lask's former teacher, Rickert, in 1923 and 1924.

Lask is of interest to philosophers because of his uncompromising attitude and to historians of philosophy because of his influence on György Lukács and the young Martin Heidegger. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger credited Lask with being the only person to have taken up Edmund Husserl's investigations "positively from outside the main stream of phenomenological research", pointing to Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900–1901) as an influence on Lask's Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre (1911) and Die Lehre vom Urteil (1912). Lask's ideas were also influential in Japan, due to Herrigel, who lived and taught there for several years.

His sister was the poet Berta Lask.

Works

  • Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte Tübingen, 1902.
  • Rechtsphilosophie in: Die Philosophie im Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Festschrift für Kuno Fischer edited by Wilhelm Windelband, Heidelberg, 1907.
  • Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1911.
  • Gesammelte Schriften edited by Eugen Herrigel, Tübingen: Mohr, 1923-24 (3 volumes); reprint: Jena, Scheglmann, 2002.

English translations

  • Legal Philosophy in The Legal Philosophies of Lask, Radbruch, and Dabin translated by Kurt Wilk (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard U.P., 1950; 20th Century Legal Philosophy series, vol. IV), pp. 1–42.

French translations

  • La logique de la philosophie et la doctrine des catégories. Étude sur la forme logique et sa souveraineté Paris, Vrin, 2002.

Notes

Citations

References

  • Beiser, Frederick, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) [contains a chapter long introduction and overview of Lask's work]
  • Borda, Mara, Knowledge, Science, Religion: Philosophy as a Critical Alternative to Metaphysics (Würzburg: Konighausen & Neumann, 2006) [contains very extensive discussion of Lask with comparisons to Simmel and Heidegger]

External links