Richard Kroner


Kroner, Richard

 

Born Mar. 8, 1884, in Breslau, presentday Wroclaw, Poland. German idealist philosopher and a leading exponent of neo-Hegelianism.

Kroner was a professor at Freiburg (1919–24), Dresden (from 1924), and Kiel (1929–35). In 1938 he emigrated to England, and from 1941 to 1952 he was a professor at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. In the first stage of his philosophical development, Kroner belonged to the Baden school of neoKantianism. His search for a concrete, “living” philosophy led Kroner to Lebensphilosophie and neo-Hegelianism (From Kant to Hegel, vols. 1–2, 1921–24).

During the 1920’s Kroner worked on problems of the philosophy of culture and modernized the Hegelian philosophy of the spirit by introducing an irrational concept of the “soul” borrowed from Lebensphilosophie. Kroner distinguished four fields of culture—the vital (technology and economics), the rational (science and politics), the intuitive (art and religion), and the reflective (history and philosophy). After Kroner emigrated from Germany, the mystical religious tendencies in his world view grew stronger. He completely subordinated reason to religious faith and speculation to revelation, contrasting Hegel with the religious-oriented philosophers B. Pascal and S. Kierkegaard.

WORKS

Kant’s Weltanschauung. Tübingen, 1914.
Die Selbstverwirklichung des Geistes. Tübingen, 1928.
Kulturphilosophische Grundlegung der Politik. Berlin, 1931.
The Primacy of Faith. New York, 1943.
Culture and Faith. New York, 1951.
Speculation and Revelation in the History of Philosophy, vols. 1–3. Philadelphia, 1957–61.

REFERENCES

Davydov, Iu. N. “Kritika irratsionalisticheskikh osnov gnoseologii neogegel’ianstva.” Sovremennyi ob”ektivnyi idealizm. Moscow, 1963.
Lukacs, G. Die Zerstürung der Vernunft. Berlin, 1955.
Skinner, J. E. Self and World: The Religious Philosophy of R. Kroner. Philadelphia, 1962.

IU. N. DAVYDOV and N. V. MOTROSHILOVA