Gerd Buchdahl

Gerd Buchdahl ( born August 12, 1914 in Mainz, † 17 May 2001) was a German - English philosopher of science and historians of science.

Life

Paper Dahls parents were liberal German Jews. His father Moritz book Dahl ( b. 1878 ) was born in Brilon and was in the retail industry, his mother Emmy was born 1881 in Hameln. Because of his Jewish ancestry emigrated Gerd Buchdahl 1933 from the National Socialist Germany to London, after he had until March 1933, attended the grammar school in Mainz.

There visited Buchdahl 1934-1936 the Brixton School of Building and Engineering, from which he graduated with a diploma. In 1936 he became licentiate of the Institute of Builders, from 1938 he was assistant engineer in London. During the Second World War he was interned in June 1940 as an "enemy alien " and deported to the HMT Dunera to Australia.

" On board ship, hey what one of the authors of the ' constitution ', inscribed on a toilet roll, for self -government of the internees. Kept under appalling conditions and surviving a torpedo attack, They reached Australia after fifty-seven days, there to be Placed in a interment camp [ ... ]. "

" On board the ship he was one of the staff at the " constitution " for the self-administration of the internees, written on a toilet roll. Levels higher than living under appalling conditions and a torpedo attack, they reached Australia after 57 days in order to be put into a detention center [ ... ]. "

In the internment camp in Tatura in Victoria taught Buchdahl, which was founded with the participation of "camp university" first philosophy. In November 1941 he was released from internment when he could take a job as a civil engineer in Melbourne, a position he held until 1947.

Besides visited Buchdahl from 1941, the University of Melbourne, where he 1945 Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy acquired with special honors. His Jewish religion he lay, 1944, by joining the Church of England, the following year he became an Australian citizen. From 1947 to 1957 Buchdahl was a member of the faculty of the University of Melbourne and headed soon to the Department of General Science, where he was to students of Humanities close to bring the (natural) sciences. In 1947 he married the Australian Nancy When ( * 1925); from the marriage were born two sons born 1950 and 1951. Also in 1950 migrated Dahl's book parents who were imprisoned in Buchenwald after the November pogroms in 1938 and managed to escape in August 1939 in the UK, to her son in Melbourne.

In Melbourne acquired Buchdahl 1953 and a Master of Arts, while he managed to expand his department to five faculty with its own building and library, and rename first in History and Methods of Science, but finally in History and Philosophy of Science. 1954-1955, he attended the University of Oxford as a lecturer in 1958 and returned back on time to the UK to teach at the University of Cambridge. There, History and Philosophy of Science was among Norwood Russell Hanson, whose succeeded him Buchdahl, been included in the curriculum. First, a lecturer, he was one of the founding members in 1964 of Darwin College, Cambridge, after he had accepted the citizenship of the United Kingdom last year. In 1966 he was appointed professor of History and Philosophy of Science ( reader in history and philosophy of science) and was appointed from its foundation from 1972 to 1974 chairman of the department of the same name. In addition, he was a visiting professor at Stanford, Canada and Texas and visited several times Regensburg and Hannover to lectures in the context of Kant-Studien.

In the years 1979-1981 was Buchdahl president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, in addition also a member of the British Society for the History of Science, of the Aristotelian Society, the Centro Superiore di Logica e Scienze comparate and the Académie International de Philosophie des Sciences.

Work

Buchdahl developed, influenced by Ernst Mach's Mechanics in their development (1883 ), a historical approach to the teaching of science teaching. Hence his efforts resulted in the unification of the history of science with the philosophy of science, to which he made ​​important contributions, not least in 1970 conducted jointly with Larry Laudan Foundation of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, one of the leading journals in their field. As in Melbourne, managed Buchdahl in Cambridge, the Department of History and Philosophy of Science to firmly establish and expand in their field into a center of international standing.

In his major works, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (1969) and Kant and the Dynamics of Reason (1992 ) succeeded Buchdahl in dealing with philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, both the strangeness of their beliefs because of our temporal distance to them, as well as their importance for the philosophy of science with contemporary problems to work out.

Writings

• History and Methods of Science. In: University of Melbourne Gazette 6, 1950, pp. 71f.
• The Image of Newton and Locke in the Age of Reason. Sheed and Ward, London.
• Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science. The Classical Origins. Descartes to Kant, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1969.
• Philosophy of Science. Its Historical Roots. In: Epistemologia 10, 1987, pp. 39-56.
• History and Philosophy of Science. Mostly Anecdotal memories. In: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20, 1989, p 5-8.
• Kant and the Dynamics of Reason. Essays on the Structure of Kant's Philosophy. Blackwell, Oxford / Cambridge 1992, ISBN 0-631-14815-9.
• Modelli di spiegazione. Per una delle lettura neotrascendentale teorie Scientifiche. Universita degli Studi di Pavia, [ Pavia ] In 1995, ISBN 8878302007 ( collection of translated from English essays ).