Nicolai Hartmann

Nicolai Hartmann (1882 to 1950) was a German philosopher, a key representative of critical realism and one of the most important twentieth-century metaphysicians. Born a Baltic German in Riga, then the capital of the Governorate of Livonia in the Russian Empire, he studied medicine and classical philology before going to Marburg in 1905, where he studied with the neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp and took his doctorate in 1907. He became a professor at Marburg and later taught at Cologne, where he came into contact with Max Scheler, and then at Berlin and Göttingen. His 1926 book Ethik elaborates a material ethics of value in which moral knowledge is achieved through phenomenological investigation of experiences of values. His early work in the philosophy of biology has been cited in modern discussions of genomics and cloning.