LIEBMANN, OTTO

LIEBMANN, OTTO (1840–1912), German philosopher. Liebmann, who was born in Loewenberg, Silesia, was appointed lecturer at Tuebingen in 1865, in 1872 professor at Strasbourg, and in 1882 professor at Jena. In 1870–71 he was in the Prussian army at the siege of Paris, and published a patriotic memoir, Monate vor Paris (1871). Liebmann was one of the founders of neo-Kantianism. His Kant und die Epigonen (1865) attacked post-Kantian metaphysical theories and advocated a return to Kant's philosophy. For Liebmann, Kant's transcendental idealism, the recognition of the intimate and necessary correlation of the subjective and objective, of empirical reality and transcendental ideality, sufficed to explain the world. He opposed metaphysical theories about the "thing-in-itself" as well as empirical, positivistic, and materialistic views. In his later works, he tried to develop his neo-Kantianism with regard to metaphysics, experience, science, psychology, and ethics and aesthetics. His chief works were Ueber den individuellen Beweis fuer die Freiheit des Willens (1866), Ueber den objektiven Anblick (1869), Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit (1876), Die Klimax der Theorien (1884), Gedanken und Tatsachen (2 vols., 1882–1904), and Immanuel Kant (Ger., 1904). He also wrote poetry, collected in Weltwanderung (1889).

bibliography:

Kantstudien, 15 (1910), 1–151, contains a festschrift in Liebmann's honor; Campo, in: Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 4 (1967), 466–7; Rossi, in: Enciclopedia Filosofica, 3 (It., 1957), 50.

[Richard H. Popkin]