Raymond Klibansky

Raymond Klibansky, CC (born 15 October 1905 Paris, † August 5, 2005 in Montreal ) was a European- Canadian philosopher. Klibansky was known for his editions and research on Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa.

Together with Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl 1964, he published the standard work Saturn and melancholy. Until his death was Klibansky Frothingham Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at McGill University in Montreal.

Life

Raymond Klibansky was born in Paris in 1905 in the family of Rosa Scheidt and Hermann Klibansky, a German, Orthodox Jewish wine merchant. The family settled after the outbreak of the First World War to Frankfurt on Main. Together with the children of Thomas Mann and Max Weber, he visited the school and developed friendships between families in Frankfurt. He also visited the Odenwald School in Ober-Hambach. He studied philosophy and philology at the universities of Kiel ( especially with Ferdinand Tönnies ), Hamburg and Heidelberg at Ernst Cassirer and Karl Jaspers. He kept in close contact with the art historian Aby Warburg and Ernst Robert Curtius Romanists.

Klibanskys first publication, the edition of the liber de sapiente of the French philosopher Carolus Bovillus, appeared in 1927 as an annex to Ernst Cassirer's study the individual and the cosmos in Renaissance philosophy. In 1929 she received her doctorate, 1931, the Habilitation at the University of Heidelberg, then a lectureship. Klibansky, who discovered in 1927 the medieval commentary of Nicolaus Cusanus to Proclus on Plato's Parmenides comment font in the library in Bernkastel -Kues could, with his Heidelberg teacher Ernst Hoffmann publish the writings of Cusanus.

In April 1933, he was dismissed from the university service and emigrated three months later, in July 1933, to London. This is followed by professorships at Oxford and Montreal. At McGill University in Montreal takes Klibansky 1946 John Frothingham Chair of Logic and Metaphysics.

Klibansky created for himself with his scientific arguments about the Christian philosopher Nicholas of Cusa and the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart an internationally acclaimed reputation. In collaboration with Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, he worked the history of the concept of melancholy from antiquity up to the Renaissance. Klibansky is the author of numerous publications on the work of Plato and the Platonic tradition in the Middle Ages. Great recognition was given to him because he embodied the philosophy at the UN Educational Organization UNESCO.

In addition to his professorship at McGill was Raymond Klibansky visiting professor in the world, including already in the 70s in Tehran and Tokyo. Since 1957 Klibansky was also Professor decommissioned at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Heidelberg. In 1970 he became Professor Emeritus in 1986 and appointed honorary senator of the University. In 1993 he received the Lessing Prize of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.

Klibansky lived in Montreal and Oxford. Two months before his 100th birthday, he died in August 2005 in Montréal.

Works

Recently published:

  • Memories of a century. Conversations with Georges Leroux, 2001. Drafted as a conversation with a student autobiography is something like " a small amount of the twentieth century" ( Kurt Flasch in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 13, 2001).
674137
de