Harry Austryn Wolfson

Harry Austryn Wolfson ( born November 2, 1887 in Astryna / Yiddish Ostrin in the government of Vilna, Russian Empire, † 20 September 1974 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American historian of philosophy. He taught at Harvard University, where he founded the Department of Jewish Studies - the first of its kind in the U.S., the representative may apply to the success of the designed in the 19th century program of a science of Judaism. Wolfson emerged especially with the much discussed, always a strong systematization very peripheral material enterprising studies of Philo of Alexandria, Hasdai Crescas, Spinoza, the Arabic Kalam, the philosophy of the Church Fathers and numerous Jewish philosophers.

Life

Wolfson was born Zvi Hershel ( Hirsch) ben Mendel Wolfson and changed its name in 1912 then an Anglicized form ( Harry) with the origin ( Austryn ) as a middle name. He studied at the Yeshiva under Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Slabodka Epstein. In September 1908, he came to Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Harvard University, he earned his bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees. With the exception of the years 1912-14 he spent his entire academic career at Harvard; a biography must therefore bear the true title Wolfson of Harvard ( Leo W. Schwarz ). Wolfson was a pupil and friend of George Santayana and George Foot Moore. Ten different universities conferred honorary doctorates Wolfson. Wolfson was a founding member and president of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

Works

Wolfson's overall project was a history of philosophy from Philo to Spinoza - an era that he as a unified basically system of religious philosophy reconstructed, its possibilities were realized in the religious philosophies of Jewish, Muslim and Christian thinkers in different ways and that was only given a decisive Spinoza. The implementation of this project was applied to numerous volumes, of which about half were published, some posthumously; other components of the overall plan exist in the form of individual publications through essays or in unpublished manuscript form.

At Wolfson's main publications include:

• Crescas ' Critique of Aristotle: Problems of Aristotle's Physics in Jewish and Arabic philosophy (1929 )
• The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning, Harvard University Press (1934/1962)
• Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Harvard University Press ( 1947)
• The Philosophy of the Church Fathers: Volume I Faith Trinity, Incarnation, Harvard University Press ( 1956)
• The Philosophy of the Kalam, Harvard University Press ( 1976)
• Repercussions of the Kalam in Jewish philosophy, Harvard University Press ( 1979)
• The meaning of "Ex Nihilo " in the Church Fathers, Arabic and Hebrew philosophy, and St. Thomas (1948 )
• The internal senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophical texts ( 1935)
• The amphibolous terms in Aristotle, Arabic philosophy, and Maimonides (1938 )
• Solomon Pappenheim on time and space and his relation to Locke and Kant, pp. 426-440 in Jewish studies in memory of Israel Abrahams, Press of the Jewish Institute of Religion ( 1927)

A more complete list of publications can be found in black.