Liebert, Arthur

Liebert, Arthur 

Born Nov. 10, 1878, in Berlin; died there Nov. 5, 1946. German neo-Kantian philosopher.

From 1910 to 1933, Liebert directed the activities of the Kantian Society. Between 1918 and 1933 he was one of the publishers of the journal Kant-Studien. He was professor at the University of Berlin from 1928 to 1933 and again in 1946; he taught at the University of Belgrade from 1934 to 1939. Between 1939 and 1946, Liebert lived in Birmingham, England.

As a representative of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, Liebert tried to combine Kantian critical philosophy with neo-Hegelian dialectic in his system of critical metaphysics. He contrasted the latter to dogmatic metaphysics in his book Geist und Welt der Dialektik (1929). Liebert criticized contemporary culture and saw the seeds of the “spiritual crisis of the modern world” in the transition from the normative thinking of Kant and Hegel to the relativism and historicism, as these had come up, according to him, in Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Dilthey. Liebert upheld the principles of bourgeois liberalism in a number of works written during the 1930’s and 1940’s.

WORKS

Das Problem der Geltung, 2nd ed. Leipzig, 1920.
Wie ist kritische Philosophieüberhaupt möglich?, 2nd ed. Leipzig, 1923.
Die geistige Krisis der Gegenwart, 3rd ed. Berlin, 1925.
Erkenntnistheorie, vols. 1–2. Berlin, 1932.
Die Krise des Idealismus. Zurich-Leipzig, 1936.
Der Liberalismus als Forderung: Gesinnung und Weltanschauung. Zurich, 1938.
Der universale Humanismus. Zurich, 1946.

IU. N. POPOV